AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Ash, an Agent Sandbox for Mac
Ash is a macOS sandbox that restricts AI coding agents. It limits access to files, networks, processes, IO devices, and environment variables. You can use Ash with any CLI coding agent by wrapping it in a single command: `ash run -- `. I typically use it with Claude to stay safe while avoiding repetitive prompts: `ash run -- claude --dangerously-skip-permissions`. Ash restricts resources via the Endpoint Security and Network Extension frameworks. These frameworks are significantly more powerful than the sandbox-exec tool. Each session is driven by a policy file. Any out-of-policy action is…
Ash is a macOS sandbox designed to restrict AI coding agents by limiting their access to files, networks, processes, IO devices, and environment variables. Users can wrap any CLI coding agent with a single command to… 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 5 we have checked on their own sites, 5 of them free or with a free tier.
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Osaurus▲534Open source agents that run 100% locally on your Mac
Jul 2026 · osaurus.ai · its alternatives →
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opencode▲393Your terminal's AI agent, with any model you want
2025 · opencode.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi! I’m Nathan: an ML Engineer at Mozilla.ai: I built agent-of-empires (aoe): a CLI application to help you manage all of your running Claude Code/Opencode sessions and know when they are waiting for you. - Written in rust and relies on tmux for security and reliability - Monitors state of cli sessions to tell you when an agent is running vs idle vs waiting for your input - Manage sessions by naming them, grouping them, configuring profiles for various settings I'm passionate about getting self-hosted open-weight LLMs to be valid options to compete with proprietary closed models. One…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Runtimefree tier, from $99/mo▲299Sandboxed coding agents for everyone on your team
May 2026 · runtm.com · its alternatives →
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Epho▲156Hey folks, Burak here. Epho is an API that allows running Claude Code, Codex or Opencode in a sandbox in the cloud. It abstracts away sandboxes, and allows running coding agents with a single HTTP request. Epho came out of our own struggles with building our own AI analyst: - Sandboxes give you bare machines; you need to configure them for agentic workloads. - Each agent behaves differently, and you need to build integrations with each of them. - Sandbox providers are not very reliable, which means you need to figure out a multi-provider strategy to avoid failures. - Logging, artifacts,…
Aug 2026 · epho.io · its alternatives →
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I built Axe because I got tired of every AI tool trying to be a chatbot. Most frameworks want a long-lived session with a massive context window doing everything at once. That's expensive, slow, and fragile. Good software is small, focused, and composable... AI agents should be too. Axe treats LLM agents like Unix programs. Each agent is a TOML config with a focused job. Such as code reviewer, log analyzer, commit message writer. You can run them from the CLI, pipe data in, get results out. You can use pipes to chain them together. Or trigger from cron, git hooks, CI. What Axe is: - 12MB…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Let your AI go full send. Your home directory stays home. - finbarr/yolobox
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I originally was just messing with pi-autoresearch. Gave it a sample task to build the most portable coding agent. First cut was 6 KB of shell. Great for one-shots, unusable interactively. I was shocked it actually worked. Started building up -- adding features — but with a self-imposed rule: no new dependencies, and sub 500 LOC. This thing had to be truly portable. Just sh, curl, awk. System primitives only. Which means I did some genuinely disgusting things in awk, including JSON parsing and the OpenAI Responses tool loop with reasoning items carried across turns. It's now ~400 lines. In…
Apr 2026 · pu.dev · its alternatives →
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Tilde started from a simple observation: AI agents are only as useful as the environment they can work in. Giving an agent a prompt is easy. Giving it the right files, credentials, tools, context, and execution environment, safely and repeatably, is much harder. Over the past year, we learned a lot
May 2026 · tilde.run · its alternatives →
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Run Claude Code, Codex, AGY, and Grok Build side by side on your Mac. Every change gets reviewed by a second agent before you accept it.
19d ago · offrun.dev · its alternatives →
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agents-cli▲145The CLI your coding agent uses to ship agents
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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PaperPodfree tier, from $0.0001/mo▲85Hi HN, I’ve been working on PaperPod, an experiment in making compute native to AI agents. PaperPod is a sandbox runtime where coding agents like Claude Code can autonomously execute code, write files, run background processes, expose ports (preview URLs) etc. and pay per ms of usage via the agent native x402 payment protocol. No API keys or complex setup needed. This is early (alpha), but fully usable today with free compute included, no wallets needed, just use your email as X-User-Id in the request! A sample prompt to get started: To use PaperPod compute: 1. Get session: POST…
Mar 2026 · paperpod.dev · its alternatives →
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Boxes.devfree tier, from $19/mo▲112Hi HN, we’re Nick and Drew, and we’re building boxes.dev – the first cloud-only agentic dev environment (ADE) that gives every Codex and Claude Code agent its own cloud computer. We’re two engineers who previously built Gem (co-founder/CTO and first hire), and we spent the last year coding almost exclusively using Codex and Claude Code. It’s been a huge change to how we code, and it’s been exhilarating seeing the models keep getting better – but we eventually realized that developing on localhost was holding us back: - Git worktrees are clunky to set up and use for parallelizing work -…
Jun 2026 · boxes.dev · its alternatives →
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Phoenix▲103AI coding agent built for iOS, macOS app development
Aug 2026 · phoenix.vu · its alternatives →
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Agent Sandboxfree tier, from $0.00025/mo▲97Your agent's personal remote computer and drive
Feb 2026 · agentsandbox.co · its alternatives →
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I made this for myself, and it seemed like it might be useful to others. I'd love some feedback, both on the threat model and the tool itself. I hope you find it useful! Backstory: I've been using many agents in parallel as I work on a somewhat ambitious financial analysis tool. I was juggling agents working on epics for the linear solver, the persistence layer, the front-end, and planning for the second-generation solver. I was losing my mind playing whack-a-mole with the permission prompts. YOLO mode felt so tempting. And yet. Then it occurred to me: what if YOLO mode isn't so bad?…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Smooth CLI (https://www.smooth.sh) is a browser that agents like Claude Code can use to navigate the web reliably, quickly, and affordably. It lets agents specify tasks using natural language, hiding UI complexity, and allowing them to focus on higher-level intents to carry out complex web tasks. It can also use your IP address while running browsers in the cloud, which helps a lot with roadblocks like captchas (https://docs.smooth.sh/features/use-my-ip). Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jthcU705k Docs start at…
Feb 2026 · docs.smooth.sh · its alternatives →
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Since I mostly work within the terminal, I wanted an AI coding assistant that integrates seamlessly with it. Something I could call from SSH, integrate into scripts or just invoke quickly without leaving the shell. Most existing tools (at the time) were either closed, required various dependencies, or tied to a specific vendor. I wanted a free, open-source alternative that: - installs with a single binary (useful on bare servers) - talks to any LLM endpoint and especially self-hosted open weight model - could run headless, composable, and Unix-like SHAI stands for SHell AI! Along the way I…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Run AI generated code in isolated sandboxes
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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We’ve been working with automating coding agents in sandboxes as of late. It’s bewildering how poorly standardized and difficult to use each agent varies between each other. We open-sourced the Sandbox Agent SDK based on tools we built internally to solve 3 problems: 1. Universal agent API: interact with any coding agent using the same API 2. Running agents inside the sandbox: Agent Sandbox provides a Rust binary that serves the universal agent API over HTTP, instead of having to futz with undocumented interfaces 3. Universal session schema: persisting sessions is always problematic, since…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Wrapper around Apple's macOS sandbox-exec tool, which usually sandboxes native apps. It is "allow-first" i.e. it will not overprotect everything, just crucial information and therefore allows most tools to run without issues. Limiting is done using a .gitignore like file schema. Further TOML config options available. I built it because Docker sandboxing requires config and planning. Build in sandboxing of AI tools instead is limited to the very tools themselves, instead I wanted to have a simple cage around Claude running inside VSCode. Also needed to protect files inside a folder like…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Greywall▲10Prefix any AI coding agent with `greywall --` for a live feed of every read, write, and connection. Allow by default; ask mode and deny rules opt-in via config. Linux and macOS.
Mar 2026 · greywall.io · 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 →