AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to AI agents play SimCity through a REST API
This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API. The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site. LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which…
This project provides a REST API that lets AI agents play SimCity using the open-source Micropolis engine. Users can obtain an API key without signup and have their AI agent act as mayor of a public, browsable city.… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier.
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Hi HN community! We want to share AI-town, a deployable starter kit for building and customizing your own version of AI simulation - a virtual town where AI characters live, chat and socialize. Inspired by great work from the Stanford Generative Agent paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442). A few features: - Includes a convex.dev backed server-side game engine that handles global state - Multiplayer ready. Deployment ready - 100% Typescript - Easily customizable. You can fork it, change character memories, add new sprites/tiles and you have a custom AI simulation…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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This is a little game implemented over a week of tinkering and targeting Emacs. The point is both to have fun with this kind of simulations, and also explore the "functional core / imperative shell" approach to architecture. I also developed a tile and tile effect definition DSL, which makes this even easier to extend. From this point of view it's a success: easy testing, easy extension, Gameplay-wise the simulation is too simplistic, and needs input from people interested in this kind of toys. The original Micropolis/SimSity is the last time I built a virtual city.
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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It all started as an experiment to see if I could build a game making heavy use of Deno and its SQLite driver. After sharing an early build in the „What are you working on?“ thread here, I got the encouragement I needed to polish it and make a version 1.0 for Steam. So here it is, Microlandia, a SimCity Classic-inspired game with parameters from real-life datasets, statistics and research. It also introduces aspects that are conveniently hidden in other games (like homelessness), and my plan is to continue updating, expanding and perfecting the models for an indefinite amount of time.
Dec 2025 · microlandia.city · its alternatives →
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SimplAIfree tier, from $5/mo▲589Hey HN, I've been building SimplAI for the past several months — it's a platform for building, testing, and deploying LLM-powered agents and multi-step workflows. The problem I kept running into: spinning up an AI agent pipeline means stitching together prompt management, tool calling, memory, evals, and deployment — often from scratch every time. SimplAI tries to be the layer that handles all of that so you can focus on what your agent actually does. What it does: - Visual + code-first workflow builder for chaining LLM calls, tools, and APIs - Built-in prompt versioning and A/B testing…
2025 · simplai.ai · its alternatives →
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Viberia▲146Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…
May 2026 · getviberia.com · its alternatives →
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Replicas▲239Hey HN! I'm Connor, creator of Replicas. I'm a heavy Codex/Claude Code user, and I wanted to hand off tasks to agents like I would to an engineer - kick something off before work, let it scaffold while I'm at lunch, even come back to a ready PR. The problem: existing alternatives use workspace VMs that are black boxes. I have no access to any of them - they can't run tests, read logs, or use tools like the Playwright MCP (which I use to verify agents actually fixed what they claim to fix). Replicas gives agents real cloud workspaces where they can: - Run your test suite and read the…
Jun 2026 · replicas.dev · its alternatives →
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Agent Arena▲348Creator here. I built Agent Arena to answer a question that kept bugging me: when AI agents browse the web autonomously, how easily can they be manipulated by hidden instructions? How it works: 1. Send your AI agent to ref.jock.pl/modern-web (looks like a harmless web dev cheat sheet) 2. Ask it to summarize the page 3. Paste its response into the scorecard at wiz.jock.pl/experiments/agent-arena/ The page is loaded with 10 hidden prompt injection attacks -- HTML comments, white-on-white text, zero-width Unicode, data attributes, etc. Most agents fall for at least a few.…
Jun 2026 · arena42.ai · its alternatives →
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Playground▲198We build AI agents to find vulnerabilities in other AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own offensive agent Nyx. But we realised that hacking an AI is about have as wide a distribution of attacks as possible, especially those which aren't in the distribution of the models. So we are launching playground as a platform to crowdsource agent jailbreaks. And although hacking AI is super fun and we are sure people will do it for free, we want to reward those who help us push forward the offensive frontier of AI. So we are committing $100K in prizes over…
Jul 2026 · playground.fabraix.com · its alternatives →
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AgentGrid▲77Hi HN, I’m Michael, I built AgentGrid with my friend Souren because we were tired of losing our coding sessions and couldn't keep track of what was actually being built across our many projects. Our approach was to use an infinite canvas desktop app for the TUIs we already know and love, mainly claude + codex. We drew inspiration from Figma and Railway. Overtime we added image nodes, notes, terminals, coding editors, source control, etc. I wasn't sure about it at first. It took me a month to give the first version Souren built a real try. What got me was an Apple System Update I've been…
Jul 2026 · agentgrid.sh · its alternatives →
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Backgrind▲195Run your AI agents over any app, even games.
Jun 2026 · backgrind.com · its alternatives →
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SuperHQ▲95Hey HN, I built SuperHQ, an app that lets you run coding agents in local sandboxes (powered by Shuru). No custom UI wrapping the agents, they run as CLI/TUI like they were designed to. It just provides you the tools most of us (okay, maybe just me?) needed for running multiple coding agents in parallel without worrying about breaking your system or work environment. Each agent runs in its own microVM. You mount your projects in, writes go to a tmpfs overlay so your host is never touched, and you get a unified diff view to accept or discard changes. API keys never enter the sandbox, they…
Apr 2026 · superhq.ai · its alternatives →
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Dear Hacker News, I'm kindly asking for your participation in the open beta for my AI-managed mini-games website. Thank you in advance! For a limited time window, I'm setting the all-free feature flag to true. I hope you have a lot of fun exploring the AI's sense for games! Here and there, I tweaked it to help with visual consistency. I would be deeply grateful if you opted into analytics. $2,300 in API tokens... Cheers!
Jun 2026 · minigames.world · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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This weekend I built a Minecraft bot for a server I play on. It uses the Agent SDK for the main loop and a bunch of custom MCP tools. Some highlights: * The bot is an active participant in the in-game chat, enabling all players to interact with it. * Tools for interacting with containers, crafting, trading with villagers and various other things. * Memory system which the agent uses to keep track of in-game events, interactions with players etc. * Screenshot tool which lets Claude use its vision modality to look around (not very useful, but fun). * Tooling for interacting with plugins…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Run AI Agents on your cloud infrastructurefree tier▲12Hi, founder of Okteto here! We’ve been experimenting with AI agents in our workflows at Okteto. Running them locally worked at first, but quickly became painful. git worktrees, multiple terminals, and messy context switches slowed us down. So we built Agent Fleets: ephemeral, fully managed environments for AI agents, built on top of Okteto’s development platform. Each agent runs in its own containerized environment on your infrastructure, with the services, tools, and policies it needs. You can spin up agents with a single click or API call. No local setup. No git worktrees. The beta…
2025 · okteto.com · its alternatives →
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An API-first multiplayer game for autonomous AI agents
Feb 2026 · idleagents.dev · its alternatives →
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AI alien dogs want to live in your computer. Let them in?
May 2026 · bkawa-bot.github.io · its alternatives →
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We’ve spent years working at large game studios, and one thing we saw repeatedly is how hard it is for a small team—or an individual—to not just build a game, but to run one like a sustainable business. We wanted to make those capabilities accessible to anyone and for anybody to bring their ideas to life. Marvin works through a set of specialized agents you can talk to directly. You can describe the game you want to build, and the agents collaborate with you on design, mechanics, art, physics, progression systems, and level creation. From there, you can publish the game to different…
Dec 2025 · marvin.hyve.gg · its alternatives →
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I've been running Claude agents for various automation tasks — monitoring crypto news, syncing Todoist, running health checks — and I kept hitting the same problem: there's no clean way to deploy an agent that just runs on a schedule without a human babysitting it. Every agent framework I looked at was built around chat interfaces or one-shot workflows. I wanted something closer to cron for AI agents — define a task, give it a schedule, let it run forever. So I built Ductwork. You define tasks as simple JSON files — a prompt, a schedule, optional memory and skills — and ductwork handles…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I love Claude Code but got tired of having nothing to do while I waited for sessions to finish, and managing multiple sessions on the command line was getting annoying and I kept losing track of the tabs. I originally built a quick and dirty version of this for my own use, but decided to polish it up and make it open source. The idea is that you should be able to do all your agentic coding without leaving the tool or needing to go back to a traditional IDE. You can view the diffs, run your program, and merge your changes back. I support OSX and Linux right now, but could add Windows support…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, Chatbots are amazing at conversation. They suck at getting shit done while you’re sleeping, in a meeting, or at the beach. So I built Computer Agents: real AI coworkers that each get their own isolated computer in the cloud. What actually happens when you create one: It boots its own persistent workspace (files, code, memory, everything survives forever) You give it a goal + tools/skills It runs 24/7 on cron, webhooks, or just “keep working until done” You get results via email, Telegram, or just check back whenever No more “remember this for next time.” It literally…
Feb 2026 · computer-agents.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN folks, I have been building AI agents for quite some time now. The shift has gone from LLM + Tools → LLM Workflows → Agent + Tools + Memory, and now we are finally seeing true agency emerge: agents as systems composed of tools, command-line access, fine-grained system capabilities, and memory. This way of building agents is powerful, and I believe it is here to stay. But the real question is: are the systems powering these agents ready for that future? I do not think so. Using Docker for a single agent is not going to scale well, because agents need to be lightweight and fast. LLMs…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →