ZHAO YIHENG / 2026

Building agents — and everything else — with AI.

From rough ideas to running agents, to methodology and shipped work — what I build together with AI.

04

AI Coding Tools & Dev Habits

How I actually use AI in the terminal — the tools, the plans, and my current setup

I work in the terminal. All my AI coding agents live in the same terminal, and I orchestrate them with one self-contained toolchain.

Open-source tools I use

Terminal multiplexer

herdr

An agent-aware terminal multiplexer: run multiple coding agents side by side with live blocked / working / done status, so I know in one glance which one is waiting for me. Sessions detach/reattach, so nothing is lost on disconnect. One agent per pane, scheduled by status lights instead of polling.

Agent framework + TUI

dsh · DeepSeek Harness / dsh-billing-tui

DeepSeek's official Agent Harness — everything is a plugin. I mainly drive DeepSeek models through its TUI, and I wrote a dsh-billing-tui: it computes real-time token cost with peak/off-peak metering and shows it in the status bar.

Main agent

Codex CLI

OpenAI's terminal coding agent. I use it as the main agent / decision-maker: making plans, breaking down tasks, and doing acceptance. Pure terminal, supports AGENTS.md, sandboxing and approval policies — good for a "think first, then act" role.

Sub agent / exploration

Claude Code

Anthropic's terminal coding agent. Mature Skills, CLAUDE.md and subagent ecosystem — I use it for exploration and for design-sensitive work like de-AI-ifying the frontend, or for cross-review with Codex.

Browser automation

ego lite

Lets agents drive a browser that reuses my logged-in state, running automation in their own Space without fighting me for tabs. I use it for real navigation, screenshots and form-filling when verifying UI.

Coding plans I've tried

I've used the higher-end Claude 20x and GPT 20x tiers — powerful, but at a price that's hard to justify. On a budget, my stable setup is two $20 tiers: ChatGPT Plus + the Ollama Pro coding plan.

My current setup

When a single plan's quota isn't enough, I split "strong reasoning" from "cheap execution":

  • Heavy lifting: in one herdr pane, dsh-tui calls Ollama Cloud's DeepSeek V4 (official) for the bulk work — writing code, batch processing — low cost, fine to run long.
  • Decisions & acceptance: another pane in the same herdr session runs Codex as the main agent — deciding, decomposing, reviewing and accepting. I only spend the expensive quota at the key checkpoints.
  • Execution sub-agents: DeepSeek V4 Flash (official) acts as sub-agents for the small tasks I hand it, reporting back to Codex for acceptance.

In short: the terminal is home base, herdr is the control room, expensive models are the brain, and DeepSeek's cheap models are the hands — a tight budget pushed me into a cleaner "who thinks, who does" split.

05

About

Hi, I'm Yiheng Zhao — an MS student in Electronic Information at Xiamen University, researching LLM / RAG / Agent. I build agents with AI, and everything else with AI, distilling both the methodology and the shipped work here.

Education

  • Xiamen University · Electronic Information · MS (985) — LLM / RAG / Agent, 2024–2027
  • China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) · Automation · BS (211), 2020–2024

Research interests

LLMRAGAgentSafety reasoningNeuro-symbolic retrievalLow-altitude QA

Selected outputs

Survey

A Survey of LLM Technologies for Low-Altitude Operation Safety

Accepted at SESC 2026 · recommended to Systems Engineering — Theory & Practice

Accepted
Software copyright

Low-Altitude Economy Insight Platform · Industry-Policy Intelligent Analysis System V1.0

Software copyright registration

Reg. 2026SR0424325
Paper · under review

Constraint-Guided Neuro-Symbolic Causal Evidence Subgraph Retrieval for Safety Knowledge Reasoning

A constraint-guided neuro-symbolic method for causal evidence subgraph retrieval

Under review

Where my next paper is headed

For safety knowledge reasoning, a constraint-guided neuro-symbolic approach to causal evidence subgraph retrieval — retrieving, from a knowledge graph, only the causal evidence chains that actually support a conclusion, prioritizing explainability and evidence reliability over plain semantic recall. It follows the same principle I hold in agents: answering without sufficient evidence is a failure.

Stack

Languages / Platforms

PythonSwift 6GoTypeScriptReact

Agent / RAG

Tool CallingMemoryMCPSkillsEino ADKLangChainFAISSQuery RewriteHybrid retrieval

Evals / Observability

Benchmark evalsLLM-as-JudgeHITLOTelPhoenix

For my full background, see the résumé PDF.