My setup for building HISE plugins with AI (YMMV)

[iamlamprey]

@Christoph-Hart Nah, I did look at it among some other ones and settled on hermes before rolling my own. embedding use-cases like that sound very useful though

[dannytaurus]

@Christoph-Hart said:

I would add the Pi agent as a viable harness option

I've tried a handful of other harnesses but ended up feeling most comfortable in Claude Code.

The beauty for CC for me is the subscription. The amount of token usage I get compared to paying API pricing in other harnesses is substantial.

I do want to try some of the cheaper models in another harness though, to check what the quality is like compared to Fable. I'll check out Pi, looks cool.

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus Thanks for the detailed post. I'm setting up herdr now, looks like Christoph was right about Pi, you pay extra to access Claude through third-parties.

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey Yep, the Claude subscription is a blessing and a curse.

The blessing is you get a ton of usage for a fixed monthly fee.

The curse is that you can only use your subscription allowance through Claude surfaces (Claude Code, Chat, Cowork, Design).

[dannytaurus]

@iamlamprey Quick test with DeepSeek Flash in Claude Code.

Asked it to find a bug a propose a fix. Took 14m and found a really nice bug that Claude missed.

Fix took about 6m and the total token usage is shown below.

That cache hit rate is impressive! That seems to be DeepSeek's secret weapon at the moment. One of the pieces they haven't open-sourced, and worth going direct through them to get those sweet, sweet KV hits.

Keep in mind I'm noticing anything like Headroom, Ponytail or Caveman right now, so the input tokens are coming straight from Claude.

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey said in My setup for building HISE plugins with AI (YMMV):

I'm setting up herdr now

I highly recommend the herd-sidebar plugin. It shows the file tree and git view next to your session pane.

The main herdr sidebar shows your projects at the top and the active agents at the bottom, so you can quickly click to them.

The herd-sidebar sits in the left side of the main pane here, showing the git view.

In this herd session, I've got 11 projects going, most just on main branch but one with 2 other worktrees. Each project has multiple tabs across the top, for each coding session/feature/bug/chat.

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus Thanks, I'll get that. I'm already down a rabbit hole, setting up a proxmox vm to run my agents.

[Lindon]

@dannytaurus

Thanks Danny for a really useful post - this is exactly the sort of thing I was asking for. Looks like Im off to get a Claude Pro license....

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus Really enjoying the workflow with herdr, thanks for putting me on to that. I'm using the mattpocock skills which help greatly with guiding Claude and keeping the architecture nice and clean.

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey Excellent! Glad you're enjoying it.

Yeah, Matt Pocock exploded on the scene with his skills. I've tried a couple, /grill-me and /to-spec mostly, but I forget to use them most of the time

A few other things you can look at to improve token usage and get better code:

Headroom - proxy that intelligently compresses the input context to save input tokens
Caveman - tells the model to send less verbose replies to save output tokens
Ponytail - nudges the model towards writing terser, more pragmatic code