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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Boxes.dev

Hi 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 -…

Boxes.dev is a cloud-based development environment designed for AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex. It provides each agent with its own dedicated cloud computer, eliminating the need for local development… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Last week's post from Thariq "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML" went viral in X. He made a good point about HTML being the more expressive and human friendly alternative to markdown files. I completely buy in where he's coming from, I've been asking Claude Code to create me HTML files to better understand what we're planning and building together. What Thariq didn't address was the part of sharing and collaborating on these HTML artifacts (he proposed uploading to S3). While I've been heavy user of HTML artifacts to share quarterly plans, implementation specs, technical guides and…

    May 2026 · display.dev · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Replicas▲239

    Hey 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 →

  3. 3
    Clears▲376

    Move beyond AI coding to Agentic Software Delivery

    Aug 2026 · clears.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    The CLI your coding agent uses to ship agents

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 51D

    We just open-sourced the internal system we built at Assembled for running coding agents as a team. Coding agents worked well for individual engineers, but the surrounding workflow was a bit of a mess. We generally found that many engineers had different MCP connections and context for their agents, personal automations running that other people couldn’t access, and very little introspection for what a human’s input into the coding agent looked like. So we built an internal system that converted coding agents into shared team infrastructure. The system runs Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and…

    Jun 2026 · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    I've been working on CloudRouter, a skill + CLI that gives coding agents like Claude Code and Codex the ability to start cloud VMs and GPUs. When an agent writes code, it usually needs to start a dev server, run tests, open a browser to verify its work. Today that all happens on your local machine. This works fine for a single task, but the agent is sharing your computer: your ports, RAM, screen. If you run multiple agents in parallel, it gets a bit chaotic. Docker helps with isolation, but it still uses your machine's resources, and doesn't give the agent a browser, a desktop, or a GPU to…

    Feb 2026 · cloudrouter.dev · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    devpit▲117

    A native control room for your Claude Code agents

    19d ago · devpit.app · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Agen▲138

    AI changed the way we code, but we're still using the old processes, and we've become the bottleneck, the AI is waiting for us - to reply, to open our laptops, to review the code, and so on. We're building the future of AI software development. The agents are autonomous, they run in sandboxes, automatically fix the pipelines, and deliver you the final, working code. You can use live preview to see the changes they made. Working across multiple repositories, all within the same session. This is the future - you don't need an IDE, and you don't have to run anything locally.

    Mar 2026 · agenhq.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    Leap▲112

    We just launched Leap, an AI developer agent that helps you build and deploy apps with real backends to your own AWS or GCP cloud. We built it because every AI app builder we tried fell short. They were fine for prototypes, but not for real systems. No support for proper backend infra, no isolated test environments, and sometimes shockingly no way to own your code. We build Leap to be more appropriate for developers: - Connect GitHub to put your code in a repo you control - Work with code generation using pull request–style revisions with diffs - Get Architecture diagrams and API docs for…

    2025 · leap.new · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Epho▲156

    Hey 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 →

  11. 11

    Instant recall for coding agents. Search the history already on your machine. Git blame, but for agent sessions.

    Apr 2026 · ctx.rs · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    Aether▲26

    Since coding agents like Claude Code and Codex came out, I've been pretty obsessed with them. It's hard not to when you're getting a 20x discount on inference. I've also been frustrated by them a lot. I hated walking around with my laptop lid open while connected to a hotspot on my phone, having to tediously accept commands so I don't lose my root directory, and running out of RAM when running multiple agents that were spinning up dev servers in different worktrees at once. A lot of people would say existing cloud agents are the solution to this, as none of the above problems apply to any…

    Jul 2026 · runaether.dev · its alternatives →

  13. 13
    Anvil▲175

    Run a fleet of parallel Claude Codes

    Mar 2026 · anvil.fm · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    An infinite 2D canvas where every AI coding agent, terminal, repo and machine you own lives side by side. Open source, self-hostable.

    Sep 2026 · 49agents.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hi 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 →

  16. 16

    Hey HN. We're Mus and Isaac - creators of LightLayer. We've been outputting a ton more code since using agentic dev tools. It's been great. But we're starting to see a new bottleneck emerge that's no longer writing the actual code: reviewing code. We’d love to hear from folks here if they’re feeling the inertia of code reviews a lot more these days with the surge in development velocity. For us, it was the reason we decided to pivot what we were working on before, and go full-time on building a workspace aimed at bringing the code review experience up to speed for the AI era. To be clear:…

    2025 · lightlayer.dev · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Claude Code as a Tech Lead with parallel Worker Agents

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.

    2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    When we asked developers from large engineering teams, almost everyone is using Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot. But adoption is still inconsistent. Some of us would have 15 agents running in Claude Code at the same time; some would still refuse to use any of them and write code manually. There's a fragmented AI development problem: - Five developers building similar features, and all of them start from scratch - No way to share "here's how we prompt AI to follow our architecture" - No trail of how the AI changes were generated - People leave the company, so does the their knowledge Aviator…

    2025 · aviator.co · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    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 →

  21. 21
  22. 22

    I’ve been tinkering with what a “multi-agent IDE” should look like if your day-to-day workflow is mostly in terminal (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, etc.). The more I played with it, the more it collapsed into three fundamentals: * A good TUI: Terminal is the center stage, with other stuff (CodeEdit, Diff, Review) baked on the side. I don’t like piping Agent’s output through some electron wrapper, here you get to run CC/Codex/Droid/Amp/etc directly. * Isolation: agents shouldn’t step on each other’s toes. The simplest primitive I’ve found is Git worktrees. It is not as…

    Jan 2026 · agentastic.dev · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Contribute to vrn21/bouvet.com development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Agentic coding IDE for Mac

    Jun 2026 · builderstudio.dev · its alternatives →

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