Alternatives
Products that do what Automation the KISS way. No YAML involved does
Hello HN, I like Ansible as a tool for automation to perform tasks on multiple remote hosts. But like many of you, I'm sick of the custom YAML DSL that many of this kind of tools provide. How many times have we said "just give me a true scripting language!" ? That's why I started this project `tricorder` (as in Star Trek's tricorder, a simple device to do pretty much anything required by the plot). For now, it's only a tool to execute a command on multiple hosts (like ansible, but without the YAML) and returning the outputs as JSON so you can query it with other tools like `jq` in your bash…
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Happy new year folks! This tool was born out of a situation where I had 'inherited' a bunch of servers that were not under any form of config management. Oh, the horror... Enroll 'harvests' system information such as what packages are installed, what services are running, what files have 'differed' from their out-of-the-box defaults, and what other custom snowflake data might exist. The harvest state data can be kept as its own sort of SBOM, but also can be converted in a mere second or two into fully-functional Ansible roles/playbooks/inventory. It can be run remotely over SSH or…
Jan 2026 · enroll.sh
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2017 · github.com
- 3HA
2018 · gitlab.com
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2018 · github.com
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2020 · github.com
- 6UW
What if Dependabot and Ansible had a child? Well for me that could be Updatecli. Updatecli is a project that I started to help maintain the infrastructure of the Jenkins project. I needed something flexible enough to update YAML with whatever information needed. Because let’s say it, everybody loves YAML. YAML is everywhere. Run it from everywhere… Updatecli is a command-line tool written in Golang and available for Windows, Linux, MacOSx, amd64, arm64, thank you Goreleaser All of that to say that it runs from wherever CI or laptop we need. As of today, Updatecli opened over 3000 Pull…
2022
- 7AK
2018 · github.com
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2024 · github.com
- 9DA
2020 · starsheep.io
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We’re Robin, Louis, and Thomas. Pipelex is a DSL and a Python runtime for repeatable AI workflows. Think Dockerfile/SQL for multi-step LLM pipelines: you declare steps and interfaces; any model/provider can fill them. Why this instead of yet another workflow builder? - Declarative, not glue code: you state what to do; the runtime figures out how. - Agent-first: each step carries natural-language context (purpose, inputs/outputs with meaning) so LLMs can follow, audit, and optimize. Our MCP server enables agents to run pipelines but also to build new pipelines on demand. - Open…
Oct 2025 · github.com
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Hey HN, long time lurker here. I humbly present ara which is a project I created back at Red Hat in 2016 (before AWX was open source) to make my life easier working with distributed and large scale Ansible playbooks. It is designed to be simple and compatible with however you're already running Ansible today without needing to change much of your existing workflows. My time and skills are limited but I have learned a lot and I am happy with how the project has steadily improved over the years with the much appreciated help of contributors. If you'd like to read more about the project, the…
2023 · github.com
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Hi friends, I'm really excited to introduce KSON, which just entered public beta! Anywhere a human is reading or editing YAML/JSON/TOML, KSON may be used as a more effective interface on that data. If you are such a human, we invite you to participate in this beta. tl;dr Check out the website [1], play with the online playground [2], install the library for your programming language [3], edit in your favorite editor [4], discuss and give feedback [5], contribute to the project [6]. (A personal note about this project: I love software. Machines made of words! Such a wonder. KSON…
Sep 2025 · kson.org
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I just released the first stable version of a new tool called "Spot" (also known as simplotask). As someone who has had to deal with the frustration of broken Ansible dependencies and the endless googling required to add even the most trivial elements to playbooks, I decided to create a tool that simplifies these tasks. That's how Spot was born - a simple yet flexible tool for automating deployment tasks.
2023 · simplotask.com
- 16OA
Hey HN, we're Jon and Kristiane, and we're building Orloj (https://orloj.dev), an open-source orchestration runtime for multi-agent AI systems. You define agents, tools, policies, and workflows in declarative YAML manifests, and Orloj handles scheduling, execution, governance, and reliability. Over the past year we tried to use many different platforms/frameworks to build out agent systems and while building we hit some sort of problem with all of them, so we decided to have a go at it. Jon has worked with kubernettes and terraform for years and always liked the declarative…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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2017 · play.ansible.online
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Hey HN, About a year ago I shared a first MVP of a visual node-based system for CI/CD pipelines that I've been very passionate about. I've been building on it since, and it's now live. I've always liked building pipelines and workflows, but I've never liked writing YAML for anything more than simple linear tasks. Branching, conditions, loops, or trying to just run certain things in parallel always gets messy. So I built Actionforge, a visual node system to tackle some of these pain points. Instead of writing YAML yourself, you build workflows as graphs. While Actionforge still uses YAML…
Feb 2026 · actionforge.dev
- 20IB
As a software engineer, my reflex has always been to script everything I can. Scripting is easy, but everything around it is tricky: scripts have to run somewhere, they need access to credentials, they need to be monitored. None of it is simple. No-code automation platforms such as Zapier or IFTTT are too restrictive for technical tasks; CI/CD platforms make it easy to script tasks related to a repository, but are limited when trying to do anything else. I wanted the low level control you have when writing scripts while retaining the comfort of a platform managing execution for me. So I…
2022 · exograd.com
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Hi HN. This is a script I have been using for some time for coding tasks, which I have polished a bit and published. The motivation behind this script was to have an agent with persistent session which I can use from the shell like a regular command. It _can_ also be scripted, although I don't use it in such a way. The script uses a minimal prompt, which just tells it to use standard unix tools to do everything. I was surprised at how well it worked, when using a good model. Qwen3-coder is on openrouter, and it works well with the minimal instructions. I also tested qwen2.5-coder with ollama…
2025 · github.com
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This tiny command line tool was created mainly because I have several apps that I run on my server and finding the right set of commands for deploying an app is a hassle. So this basically documents the set of commands for each of my projects, as well as gives me quick access to them. Just wanted to share it here in case anyone else might find it useful.
2022 · github.com
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Hello everyone! I am Jan, CTO and one of the creators of Pathway, the real-time data processing framework. I’m excited to share Pathway’s ready-to-use AI Pipelines, configurable with just YAML! These frameworks offer out-of-the-box solutions for AI search, RAG, and more—optimized for real-time indexing and in-memory processing. What makes it simple? YAML templates! The pipeline templates are fully customizable using YAMLs to fit your needs, from changing the data sources to the choice of the LLM model, all without touching Pathway’s Python code. Thanks to the Pathway data processing engine,…
2024 · pathway.com
- 24IB
I wanted a file management tool that actually understands what my files are about. Previous projects like LlamaFS (https://github.com/iyaja/llama-fs) aren't 100% local and require an AI API. So, I created a Python script that leverages AI to organize local files, running entirely on your device for complete privacy. It uses Google Gemma2 2B and llava-v1.6-vicuna-7b models for processing. Note: You won't need any API key and internet connection to run this project, it runs models entirely on your device. What it does: - Scans a specified input directory for files -…
2024 · github.com
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