Goal: Agentic

I’ve decided to develop an application hosted on Azure. Developed, or should I say, co-developed with an AI agent and featuring some form of agentic processing.

The application is an expenses tracker. Something which has become slightly more pertinent given recent events.

My goal is to develop the application, and also to develop the processes via which I will employ the AI agent to help me code.

Coding Agent Harness: pi.dev

At work I was using Copilot installed into Rider for .NET development.

Reviewing the outcome and upon researching what is available, it has become apparent that a more simple tool is needed. Less clutter. Something in a terminal, something full screen. Focusing on the task in hand - agent work vs output review.

This is provided by pi.dev

Coding Agent: DeepSeek

pi.dev integrates simply with DeepSeek, just an environment variable with the DeepSeek API key It seems pretty good so let’s start there.

What have i got so far

The deployed Expense Tracker

I’ve been working on the code for a week. At this point I have a working expense tracker that runs an agentic loop with a register set of tools (mcp) that Add and edit expenses and income. The storage is implemented in a CosmosDB with an Event Sourcing design (which I will talk about later) which makes perfect sense for an auditable transaction record. There is a Github Action to deploy to an Azure Container App. OAuth users are provided by an Auth0 IDP.

AI Agent Costs

DeepSeek is really cheap compared to the others. I’m impressed. My total spend over this period is about $1.30. I did try Kimi K3 for one small task - adding keycloak as the dev IDP in docker compose. After $2.50 it still hadn’t worked through the problems so I stopped pi.dev (simply type in a new prompt to “stop what you are doing”) and changed back to DeepSeek which proceeded to finish it off with a tiny cost.