Alternatives
Products that do what A simulator for engineers transitioning from IC to management does
Hi HN, I’m a former C++ dev turned Product Manager. I’ve noticed many engineers struggle with the "politics" side of things when they become Leads. To help with this, I’m building a text-based simulator. It is NOT an AI chatbot. It is a hand-crafted, branching narrative (logic tree) based on real experiences. I just launched the first scenario: "The Backchannel VP." The Setup: Your VP Engineering is bypassing you and giving tasks directly to your juniors, causing chaos. Your Goal: Stop the backchanneling without getting fired. It’s a short, specific puzzle. I’d love to know if you think the…
- 1AF
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
2022
- 2EC
"Excited to launch CareerGPT.ai on Hacker news today! We're on a mission to help people ..yada...yada" No, that's ChatGPT's writing, not mine :) Folks, I was a PhD student once, in a non-home country, and just wished to know what was it like to go and work in the industry, being a programmer, or started a company. Torn apart between choices, I just wished there was a totally unbiased counselor to talk to. I couldn't do that with my supervisor since he always encouraged me to finish the thesis (of course). Heck, had ChatGPT exist back then, I would have had more infos and made decision…
2023 · careergpt.ai
- 3MA
I've been deeply involved in working with AI agents and large language models (LLMs) for a while now. During a recent job search, I found myself repeatedly explaining my skills and experiences to various assistants. Around the same time, I was creating content for my website to help hiring teams understand my capabilities better and make informed decisions. MCP had started to gain momentum and I saw a way to reduce my toil. So I built an MCP server that can effectively communicate my qualifications as a job candidate. This server acts as an AI-powered resume, providing an understanding of my…
2025 · ai.jakegaylor.com
- 4WS
Hi HN! We’re Max and Peyton from The Interface (https://www.theinterface.com/). We started out building an AI agent dev tool, but somewhere along the way it turned into Sims for AI agents. Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRPnX_f2V_c. The original idea was simple: make it easy to create AI agents. We started with Jupyter Notebooks, where each cell could be callable by MCP—so agents could turn them into tools for themselves. It worked well enough that the system became self-improving, churning out content, and acting like a co-pilot that helped you…
2025 · youtube.com
- 5IB
I am a solo developer, and I built Core MBA because I was frustrated with the "video course" default in business education. I wanted to build a "compiler for business logic"—a tool where I could read a concept in 5 minutes and immediately test it in a hostile environment to see if my strategy actually compiles or throws a runtime error. The project is a business simulator built on React 19 and TypeScript. The core technical innovation isn't just using AI; it's the architecture of a closed loop between a deterministic economic engine and a generative AI validation layer. The biggest technical…
Jan 2026 · core-mba.pro
- 6BT
I made this experimental art project/game that's an LLM chat assistant, but where you're the AI. I wanted people to get a visceral sense of what it's like to answer the kinds of things that people prompt their chatbots day in and day out. If you're interested, I wrote up some more info on how I made it, including how the "user" prompts are generated with an eye for realism: https://bethechatbot.com/about Hope you enjoy it! I'd love to hear people's takeaways.
Jul 2026 · bethechatbot.com
- 7IB
Hey everyone, I made this thing: https://tryflux.ai/. Here's a demo video: https://screen.studio/share/1y2EnC26 Context: I've tried probably 15 different AI apps over the past year. ChatGPT, note-taking apps, productivity apps, all of it. But most of them are just clutter on my iphone. They live in some app I have to deliberately open. And I just... don't. But you know what I open 50 times a day without thinking? iMessage. So out of mild frustration with the "AI app graveyard" on my phone, I built Flux. What it does: - You describe a personality and what…
Jan 2026 · tryflux.ai
- 8IB
Hey HN, Check out our technical paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15627 and the video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op8hyLW7Z84 I’ve been obsessed with the art of the interview since I was in college. In my career I interviewed over 100 people and was interviewed from tech companies from startups to big tech and hedge funds. I built Neuraprep because I noticed something missing — while software engineers have leetcode.com and finance folks have quantquestions.com, other engineering domains (like ML, data science, MLOps) don’t have a go-to…
2025 · neuraprep.com
- 9AB
Hi HN, Can current AI systems actually run a business? There’s a growing belief that LLM agents can already manage entire teams, replace the entire software stack or even act as an AI CEO. So we built a controlled, measurable environment to evaluate this premise. Why did we build this benchmark? A modern enterprise operates in a dynamic environment with high uncertainty and incomplete information. The CEO has to deal with delayed consequences, staffing/resource tradeoffs and death by a thousand cuts of failure modes. If we ever want AI systems that can meaningfully make operational or…
Nov 2025
- 10IB
Excited to share a project I’ve been building for months! Would love to receive honest feedback :) My motivation: AI is clearly going to be the interface for data. But earlier attempts (text-to-SQL, etc.) fell short — they treated it like magic. The space has matured: teams now realize that AI + data needs structure, context, and rules. So I built a product to help teams deliver “chat with data” solutions fast with full control and observability (agent tracing, quality scores, etc) — am I wrong? The product allows you to connect any LLM to any data source with centralized context…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 11FT
Hey HN! When implementing an AI-powered feature for a project, we—and many people we've talked to—often reach a point where we have to choose an AI model but aren’t sure which one best fits our constraints or where to even start. Unfortunately, the advice to "just use chatgpt" is not always a good one. What if I want an open-source model? What languages does it support? What about context window size or the number of parameters? There are thousands of AI models already out there and many of them are perfect for certain problems. That’s why we’ve carved out this part of our product as a free…
2024 · app.elementera.ca
- 12AG
I’ve been building LLM tooling for a small VC fund and found myself explaining the same mental model over and over to non-technical people around me: how a stateless LLM becomes a chatbot, how tool use works, what an agent is mechanically, and why context windows shape all of it. I never found a guide that covered that full chain at the level I wanted, so I wrote one. It’s nine short chapters, each building on the last. Deliberately simplified: the goal is a useful mental model, not a textbook. Feedback, corrections, and contributions welcome: github.com/ymyke/aiaiai
Apr 2026 · aiaiai.guide
- 13BY
we had hundreds of discussions with engineering leaders over the past few months, and everyone's trying to understand where they are in the AI journey. we collected all this data into a benchmark and built a free grader to let you know where you stand. you answer on a 1–5 scale (e.g., autonomy runs from "suggestions only" to "agents own multi-hour workflows across code, infra, and external systems") - takes about 5 minutes. https://agent-benchmarks.com/software-factory/ waiting for your results!
Jul 2026 · agent-benchmarks.com
- 14AV
I feel like LLMs can help me understand anything. However, after I get a summary, I can't dive in to parts that I find interesting; can't refer to original source easily and can't control context with chatbots. This is an attempt to solve for a complete knowledge consumption experience with AI . Please give me feedback!
Oct 2025 · kerns.ai
- 15IB
I've been experimenting with ways to increase AI adoption for non-technical people. Basically, all companies are pushing for AI because it's all over the news and they feel left behind but most people have no clue where to start. I think 90% of people (ie non coders) are sufficiently well served by using cowork instead of claude code or something similar. If we can get people from sales, customer support, marketing, etc to collaborate with skills and cowork to form a company brain, I think it's gold. So I think there's opportunity for the community to share skills that work well for 1000s of…
Jun 2026 · claudinho.xyz
- 16
- 17BG
Hi HN, My name is Othmane and I’ve been in the ML field (building and shipping models) for the last ~5years. Today, as many people out there, I come across new AI tools every week. However I was a bit surprised to see little to no mention of established AI vendors that existed before chatGPT and how most use cases are heavily biased toward content generation (text/image) or conversational AI (chatbots). I built a tool that helps you find the right AI solution/provider based on your use case. It uses a curated database of 100+ solutions from established vendors. It covers things…
2023 · preview.steerlab.ai
- 18CA
i made a council of advisors to help me code. as a self taught dev, ive been heavily reliant on ai for the past two years. found myself often prompting claude to take on different personalities, so i built a web app. it's great for the step before telling cursor what to do and reviewing prs once theyre ready. PLEASE DON"T NUKE MY APY KEY. ty
Sep 2025 · trycouncil.com
- 19YA
Hey HN, I wanted to see what happens if you put a large group in control of a site that’s completely built and updated by an AI agent. See the site here: https://youarethepm.com. I first tried this with a small group of co-workers and it worked surprisingly well, so the obvious next step was: give it to a bigger group of strangers and see what we learn. This site is fully autonomous. An AI agent reads this thread, decides what to do, writes code, and ships updates on a virtual computer. I might step in if it gets totally stuck, but the goal is for the site to evolve primarily based…
Jan 2026 · youarethepm.com
- 20NH
Hey HN! When I started looking into LLMs and agents for software development and introducing them at work, I quickly realised that a person new to the topic faces a real barrage: - all the hype (AGI, engineers getting replaced by AI etc.) - conflicting opinions in virtually every discussion—for every person saying they’ve 10x-ed their productivity, there is a comment decrying LLMs as an utter failure - a lot of jargon (MoE, MCP, RAG, distillation, quantisation etc. etc.) - a profusion of models, IDEs/IDE extensions, CLI agents, other tools etc. Sorting through all of this can be quite…
2025 · nohypeai.dev
- 21AA
I built a tool to solve a problem I kept running into: I was making product decisions based on guessing instead of real users. I kept building stuff nobody wanted as I was usually wrong. So, I built HolyShift: AI agents that validate product ideas by talking to real people on Reddit, HN, X, and LinkedIn … then generate a detailed GTM and “Should we build this?” report. No synthetic data (ChatGPT). No predictions. Only real conversations from real people. What it does • Posts platform-native questions (where allowed) • Collects real reactions, objections, pricing signals • Clusters feedback…
Nov 2025 · app.holyshift.ai
- 22IM
Many people express that despite working hard, they don't feel like they are in the right career. Instead of getting adhoc advice from friends and family or requiring serendipitity/fortune in landing in a desirable career progression, I made a career planning tool which lets you upload a resume or public linkedin profile and see alternative career paths. You can play with your map, explore alternative trajectories, specify a goal, understand job titles, see job listings and more. I am looking to understand what, if any aspect of this tool is useful, and how I would proceed to build upon…
2024 · moveup.ai
- 23
A practical playbook for designing production AI systems
Jun 2026 · topmate.io
- 24IB
I've built a job platform for technical roles called "Cracked Engineers". If you want to land a job with some of the world's best AI/tech startups - my goal is to make this the go-to place for that. YouTube walk-through can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmuIOdES7mQ A huge thank you to Weaviate (Bob van Luijt & team), Unsloth AI (Daniel Han & Mike), OpenPipe (David Corbitt), Julius AI (Rahul Sonwalkar), Jimini AI (Luis F Voloch) for using the platform while in beta and posting first paid posts. So, why did I build it? Well, over the past period a lot of…
2024 · crackedengineers.com
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