Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

1. 1AF
   A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released▲1,157

   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 · its alternatives →

2. 2
   Freeciv-Web▲212

   Indoslot303 adalah platform yang memberikan kemenangan nyata dengan dukungan dari berbagai fitur serta promo gede-gedean yang selalu memanjakan member setianya.

   2019 · freecivweb.org · its alternatives →

3. 3
   Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends▲88

   Contribute to ndroo/freeciv.andrewmcgrath.info development by creating an account on GitHub.

   Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

4. 4
   Full Freeciv client running on WebAssembly▲97

   Play Freeciv online! Freeciv is an empire-building strategy game starting at the dawn of time. Can you survive to dominate a modern world?

   2022 · freecivweb.com · its alternatives →

5. 5
   Play the front page of Hacker News as interactive text games▲109

   Hey HN, I hacked together this fun project that lets you play any article on the front page of Hacker News as an interactive text game. You can create a game about anything by going to infinityarcade.com/ You can also use a URL, which is what this page uses. The whole thing is open source: https://github.com/themaximal1st/InfinityArcade

   2023 · infinityarcade.com · its alternatives →

6. 6
   FreeCiv▲68

   Open source empire-building game inspired by Civilization

   2015 · its alternatives →

7. 7F3
   Freeciv 3D WebGL version available for testing▲29

   2016 · play.freeciv.org · its alternatives →

8. 8
   A)I updated my vimrc▲5

   I have been a devoted vim user for almost 3 decades and frankly it has served me well! Yes I do get tempted to try out the next best thing (though Zed has some serious names so am even more tempted). But frankly something about staying in the terminal that I am just too used to and dont want to change. Though I never bothered updating the vimrc often (did 4 "major" updates in those years) I found myself wanting to update my vimrc for vimspector. This time instead of again trying to understand vimscript and reading the various docs, I let claude code on it and dang it has been a fun journey…

   Oct 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

9. 9FW
   Freeciv-web HTML5 strategy game updated today▲21

   2014 · play.freeciv.org · its alternatives →

10. 10ET
    E2E testing is a chore. We taught an AI to do it instead▲6

    Hey Hacker News, For the last 2 months, I've been working on a testing agent to free developers from the endless maintenance of end-to-end tests. You just push up a PR, and our agent analyzes the code changes and automatically visits the preview to test things out like a real human! We also support describing tests in English (or even in the PR description), and we'll go through your site whenever you want via a GitHub action to test and make sure various core flows continue to work as expected. We are looking for early testers and are giving out a generous free tier! Just sign up on the…

    2025 · playmatic.ai · its alternatives →

11. 11LU
    lowercase updates (a simple way to take and share notes)▲6

    hello! After receiving some great traction here a few weeks back (65.03k unique visitors/ 539.22k total requests/ +11x user sign ups), Stephen and I rolled up our sleeves and made some improvements based on the feedback y'all had. → Migrated the entire infrastructure from Heroku to DigitalOcean w/ Docker → Added functionality for data exports to markdown (take your data anywhere) → Added in a sustainability model with Lemon Squeezy subscription payments → Migrated to a Vite-based build system → Migrated from vuex to pinia for Vue.js state management → Made improvements to the…

    2024 · its alternatives →

12. 12OC
    our Co-op onboarding project▲8

    Hi Hacker News! My Co Co-op Matt and I are on a work term and were given the task of building a webapp that could make $20 in four weeks as our onboarding challenge. We're in the final stretch here and would sure appreciate HN's thoughts (we realize we kind of did this backwards, building something first before talking to people who might use it, but hey! We're leaning.). So basically, we tried to apply game dynamics to retaining visitors to websites by offering a reward (ie. discount coupon / premium content, etc.) for meeting various 'objectives' (ie. pages to visit). We call it ScavSite…

    2011 · its alternatives →

13. 13CP
    ca.pitali.st, not a weekend, but afternoon project▲5

    Hi hackers, long time reader, first time "real" submitter. This is by no means a revolutionary idea, or even execution, but rather something I've always wanted to do, just to see if I could write a good implementation of it. So without further adieu: http://ca.pitali.st/ Yes, it's just an URL shortener. Please check out the API and if there anything you like about it, please share, so I can take this feedback with me to my future projects. If there's something you REALLY hate, that's feedback too. Don't be afraid to hurt my feelings; this was put together in less than 4 hours to see if I…

    2011 · ca.pitali.st · its alternatives →

14. 14
    AttackerView▲13

    Last week I wrote about building a scanner that writes its own exploits. A cron job runs Claude Code every night, it reads new CVEs, writes proof-of-concept checks, tests them against vulnerable and patched Docker instances, and opens PRs. I review and merge in the morning. That post was about how t

    Feb 2026 · attackerview.com · its alternatives →

15. 15IM
    I Made an AI Software Engineer with Google Gemini 1.5 Flash▲6

    Hey HN! Thank you for all the support and feedback on my original submission 2 months ago. I've been improving the backend using a MCTS/AlphaZero approach and it's currently producing much better results. My long term goal is to allow users to manage multiple projects, deployed autonomously, both from scratch and by making continual updates all prompted with natural language. The cost of each project has been lowered to $9 as performance with smaller models has improved (I migrated from Claude-3-Opus to gemini-1.5-flash). Thanks for checking it out!

    2024 · saas-quick.com · its alternatives →

16. 16VI
    Vaxiin – IPMI/iDRAC/OOB software stack▲8

    This was submitted before but it didn't seem to get much attention because I don't think the title was very descriptive and the submitter was brand new. I almost didn't click it but once I did I thought the project was pretty awesome and had a lot of promise. Hope this doesn't violate the rules, I have no horse in the game, but the creator is here on the site so hopefully he'll be able to answer your questions.

    2022 · docs.vaxiin.io · its alternatives →

17. 17IM
    I'm learning VIM and making a game out of it▲9

    So, I'm learning VIM and made this yesterday, I pretend to increment it as I learn new stuff. You move with HJKL and that's it for now. Don't let the sublimes consume you. http://worms.io/vimwarrior/

    2016 · its alternatives →

18. 18
    Enable Claude to interactively debug your code▲7

    I participated in the Nvidia + Vercel 2 hour hackathon in SF tonight, and built something I've wanted, but hadn't tried building. I implemented an MCP Server and VS Code extension to allow Claude Desktop to place breakpoints, step through code, and execute expressions (assuming language support). So you can ask it a question that requires actually stepping through the code and now it can actually do that - check values for you, etc. It's _definitely_ not perfect. Have improvements? Please make a PR!

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

19. 19
    I built an open-source alternative to the "brainrot IDE" that YC funded▲6

    VSCode extension with games (Snake, Plinko, slots), HN/LessWrong reader, and Pomodoro timer for AI coding wait times. Fake currency only. Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TouchGra... Built in a week with Claude Code after seeing Chad IDE get ratio'd for integrating real gambling. Happy to answer questions or get roasted on the code.

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

20. 20
    I made an open-source Replit▲9

    I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

21. 21
    arXiv-news▲11

    Hey HN! I built arXiv News (https://arxiv-news.com) – a discussion space for research papers. The problem: I browse arXiv constantly for new papers, but there's nowhere good to discuss them. Twitter is chaotic, Reddit is fragmented, and arXiv itself has no comments. So I cloned HN's design (using https://github.com/clintonwoo/hackernews-react-graphql) and applied it to arXiv. Upvote papers, comment, sort by hot/new/discussed, filter by category, post ideas/papers you've found. A daily scraper pulls all new papers automatically. I'd love to hear…

    2025 · arxiv-news.com · its alternatives →

22. 22FN
    Freecivx.net – Freeciv 3D Web▲6

    Game Strategi dan Sejarah dalam Genggaman

    2024 · freecivx.net · its alternatives →

23. 23YA
    Yet another "my first open-source project" thread. Feedback, please?▲7

    I must say I was encouraged to post my project here when I saw the positive response to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3780731 Before you make any comments, please keep in mind that the project is written for fun. I'm not forcing anyone to use it. In fact, nobody should use the current unstable version in a serious project. Here is the link: http://github.com/bsg/libserv Please share your thoughts. All criticisms are welcome, even the harsh ones. p.s. The project is still a work-in-progress.

    2012 · its alternatives →

24. 24
    We built an AI Website builder with better output▲8

    Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…

    2024 · dorik.com · its alternatives →

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 →