AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Building a full agentic harness around a 4B model is hard
Around 3 months ago, we were thinking why none of the iPhone apps running an LLM are built as a full harness (as in inference + agentic loop + context management + tools + MCP servers and etc.). It became more interesting when we noticed even the new Siri is not fully on device (and not available in EU for that matter). Having built a few agentic products around a custom harness in the past, we thought this shouldn't be that hard. well, we underestimated how "dumb" a 4B model can be, especially when it comes to tool calling. :D We tried 8 different models and we settled on Qwen 3.5 4B and we…
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.
- 1IB
I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works reasonably well on recent-ish (~3 year old) iPhones, iPads and Macs. It was launched on the App Store yesterday[1] and Product Hunt today[2]. It seems to be reasonably ok at natural language interactions, but given its size, does pretty badly at coding and reasoning. Also, it…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 2
Harness by Autonomousfree tier, from $149/mo▲295Every coding agent, every machine, one command center.
8d ago · autonomous.ai · its alternatives →
- 3
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 →
- 4
We built SwiftAI, an open-source Swift library that lets you use Apple’s on-device LLMs when available (Apple opened access in June), and fall back to a cloud model when they aren’t available — all without duplicating code. SwiftAI gives you: - A single, model-agnostic API - An agent/tool loop - Strongly-typed structured outputs - Optional chat state Backstory: We started experimenting with Apple’s local models because they’re free (no API calls), private, and work offline. The problem: not all devices support them (older iPhones, Apple Intelligence disabled, low battery, etc.). That…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hey HN. I built an AI agent harness over the past few months and I'm open sourcing it today. Some context on why. I've been building with Claude Code daily using this harness. It orchestrates multiple AI agents as a team, with a dashboard, chat, kanban board, the works. I used it to build a full SaaS product (MyUpMonitor, https://myupmonitor.com) in about 24 hours of focused coding. Then yesterday Anthropic announced Mythos and decided to keep it behind closed doors. Meanwhile I'm paying for Claude and I can't access their best model. I don't think that is nice at all... So I'm…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6TF
I’d originally launched my app: Private LLM[1][2] on HN around 10 months ago, with a single RedPajama Chat 3B model. The app has come a long way since then. About a month ago, I added support for 4-bit OmniQuant quantized Mixtral 8x7B Instruct model, and it seems to outperform Q4 models at inference speed and Q8 models at text generation quality, while consuming only about 24GB of RAM[3] at 8k context length. The trick is: a) to use a better quantization algorithm and b) to use unquantized embeddings and the MoE gates (the overhead is quite small). Other notable features include many more…
2024 · its alternatives →
- 7
hi everybody, I’ve been working on this harness that is all native Swift for macOS. It’s fully featured with every feature i could find in cline, codex, and claude code. There is all swift command line too It’s taking me a long, long time, a few months to build this, and it’s fully open source Apache 2 licensed. Hoping people fork this and make many branches I’m looking for people who want to work on something that has much lower memory usage and much more potential to be just more efficient. Every other single harness has is written in using electron, so this harness is really unique in…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh · its alternatives →
- 9
PAI▲9Hi HN! I've been spending the past month on PAI, a Linux-esque harness for a personal assistant AI for your Mac. Instead of giving a chatbot a bunch of tools, I wanted to just drop the LLM into a terminal and see how it'd fare. I've been using it to manage my calendar, 5+ email accounts, and engaging with / responding to people in a timely manner (casus belli for this entire project). After seeing how other always-on assistants were designed, I thought the Unix / Linux philosophy of system design could be applied to AI harnesses, and I wanted to experiment with how it'd hold up…
Jul 2026 · whitematterlabs.ai · its alternatives →
- 10
PD founder here. Building integrations with all of your customer's systems is a core challenge for every company building agentic AI solutions. Connect is the easiest way for your users to connect to over 2,400+ APIs and get access to 10,000+ tools, right in your product or AI agent. You can build in-app messaging, CRM syncs, vertical agents, and much more, all in a few minutes. Demo app - https://pipedream-connect-demo.vercel.app/ Quickstart - https://pipedream.com/docs/connect/quickstart You have full, code-level control over how these integrations…
2025 · pipedream.com · its alternatives →
- 11
I’ve been building LLM tooling for a small VC fund and found myself explaining the same mental model over and over to non-technical people around me: how a stateless LLM becomes a chatbot, how tool use works, what an agent is mechanically, and why context windows shape all of it. I never found a guide that covered that full chain at the level I wanted, so I wrote one. It’s nine short chapters, each building on the last. Deliberately simplified: the goal is a useful mental model, not a textbook. Feedback, corrections, and contributions welcome: github.com/ymyke/aiaiai
Apr 2026 · aiaiai.guide · its alternatives →
- 12
I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
I trained the 65b model on my texts so I can talk to myself. It's pretty useless as an assistant, and will only do stuff you convince it to, but I guess it's technically uncensored? I'll leave it up for a bit if you want to chat with it. I posted this to Reddit and had several hundred people talking to it. Salient points from that discussion: LLAMA 1 65b Rank 128 5 epochs Batch size 1, 256 cutoff Trained in the Oobabooga suite using bitsandbytes 4-bit quantization for the lora Loss around 1.5 seems to give the most coherent results Trained on raw text dumps that is then parsed by a crappy…
2023 · airic.serveo.net · its alternatives →
- 14
Hi HN, I built VAEN (an open source CLI) because I kept running into a boring problem with AI coding-agent workflows: the setup becomes useful, but then it is hard to move. A good, useful agentic harness consists of more than just instructions: skills, mcp servers and more. There should be a better way to share those than just .MD files, and that is why I created VAEN. What works: create a yaml, run the CLI commands as per the repo, and get a .agent file that you can share and extract. Think of how awesome it could be if anyone could use a very useful agentic harness, and share it with one…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
None of the on-device LLMs I tried on iPhone felt close to Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude, so I built one that runs locally and aims for that kind of UX. The local LLM runs Qwen, Gemma, and other small models on your iPhone without an account. Chats stay on device. Download a model f
2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hi there, looking for feedback on my new project "Featherless.AI" The idea is to allow users to run all the models on hugging face instantly. Via the OpenAI API compatible endpoint. Why? Because its a real chore to download models and spin up GPUs, especially if you want to test multiple models. Not to mention GPUs cost multiple dollars an hour to rent. And if we want more people to use open source AI, we got to make it easier for them to try and play with all of them. So what if instead of spinning up dedicated GPUs per model (which is what every provider is doing) We can startup a LLM…
2024 · featherless.ai · its alternatives →
- 18
Built this because I was tired of every AI tool shipping my data to someone else server n0x runs the full stack LLM inference via WebGPU, autonomous ReAct agents, RAG over your own docs, sandboxed Python execution via Pyodide all inside a single browser tab. No account No keys No backend Models download once, cache in IndexedDB permanently. Biggest challenge was context window budgeting for the agent loop and making the WASM vector search non-blocking. Happy to talk architecture. GitHub: https://github.com/ixchio/n0x | Live demo: https://n0x-three.vercel.app
Mar 2026 · n0xth.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 19
Hey HN! I built AgentMGMT.dev today to keep track of all those agent orchestration tools that keep popping up. I've tried a few and landed on Superset, which I'm extremely happy (and productive!) with - but I think this category of tools will be extremely important and interesting in the next couple years, so it's worth keeping an eye on all available tools and how they evolve. I will keep the site up-to-date, please help me by submitting new tools that are not yet in the list, or add any details that might help folks who are out shopping for their first/next agent orchestrator!
May 2026 · agentmgmt.dev · its alternatives →
- 20
Hey HN! We are building HarnessRouter, a canonical API for running Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, and other managed agent harnesses as your product backend. Before building HarnessRouter, I used to build our own agent harness for our products. I tried LangGraph, agent SDKs from different vendors, pydantic, LLM tool use / function call, and so on. It's a very heavy lifting engineering effort, and I am disappointed about the agent deliveries compared to what Codex, CC can deliver. That changed my mindset. The frontier labs and famous open source communities are already putting so much…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21IM
As a handsome local AI enjoyer™ you’ve probably noticed one of the big flaws with LLMs: It lies. Confidently. ALL THE TIME. I’m autistic and extremely allergic to vibes-based tooling, so … I built a thing. Maybe it’s useful to you too. The thing: llama-conductor llama-conductor is a router that sits between your frontend (eg: OWUI) & backend (llama.cpp + llama-swap). Local-first but it should talk to anything OpenAI-compatible if you point it there (note: experimental so YMMV). LC is a glass-box that makes the stack behave like a deterministic system, instead of a drunk telling a story about…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 22
At testup.io we have been working for a while to bring artificial intelligence to the field of test automation. Just a few years ago, the primary challenge laid in accurately identifying UI elements following minor structural changes, such as updates to IDs or paths. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) raised the bar for what it meant to be smart. Now, we anticipate the robot to do lots of things autonomously, such as retry in cases of unresponsiveness or handle minor error reports. A more challenging, but soon expected feature, would involve the test robot navigating your web shop…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 24
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 →
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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 →