Alternatives
Products that do what Castra – Strip orchestration rights from your LLMs does
I got tired of AI agents forgetting what they were doing the moment their context window filled. The current industry solution is to write massively bloated agent harnesses full of defensive spaghetti just to stop models from drifting. The problem is treating chat history as project state. A conversation is not a ledger. Castra is a compiled Go binary that strips orchestration rights from the LLM. State lives in an encrypted, local SQLite database (castra.db). The LLM is just a stateless executor — it reads the DB, executes a highly constrained task, and the result is written back subject to…
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- 2CO
I keep running in the same problem of each AI app “remembers” me in its own silo. ChatGPT knows my project details, Cursor forgets them, Claude starts from zero… so I end up re-explaining myself dozens of times a day across these apps. The deeper problem 1. Not portable – context is vendor-locked; nothing travels across tools. 2. Not relational – most memory systems store only the latest fact (“sticky notes”) with no history or provenance. 3. Not yours – your AI memory is sensitive first-party data, yet you have no control over where it lives or how it’s queried. Demo video:…
2025 · github.com
- 3AK
I shipped a wiki layer for AI agents that uses markdown + git as the source of truth, with a bleve (BM25) + SQLite index on top. No vector or graph db yet. It runs locally in ~/.wuphf/wiki/ and you can git clone it out if you want to take your knowledge with you. The shape is the one Karpathy has been circling for a while: an LLM-native knowledge substrate that agents both read from and write into, so context compounds across sessions rather than getting re-pasted every morning. Most implementations of that idea land on Postgres, pgvector, Neo4j, Kafka, and a dashboard. I…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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Deep Work Plan▲114Models matter. Context matters more. Give your agent a plan.
Jun 2026 · deepworkplan.com
- 5IM
It’s written in Python and I call it GoalChain. It lets you build a conversation flow graph that the user traverses. When there’s enough input it spits out a dictionary with the defined fields. Otherwise it will jump state to state as led by the user. It was fun to write, and it’s surprisingly effective if you keep in mind you’re prompt-engineering every string and field name. README.md has a mini-tutorial. Would be cool to get some ideas for how to build it further and what improvements I could make.
2024 · github.com
- 6PE
Hey HN — I’m Adil from Katanemo (with Salman, Shuguang, and Meiyu) We previously shared an early version of this project as ArchGW. Based on customer feedback, the scope expanded from “LLM routing and model access” into something broader: delivery infrastructure for agentic applications. We renamed it to Plano and reworked the architecture accordingly. The problem On-the-ground AI practitioners will tell you that calling an LLM is not the hard part. The really hard part is delivering agentic applications to production quickly and reliably, then iterating without rewriting system code every…
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 7IB
Excited to share a project I’ve been building for months! Would love to receive honest feedback :) My motivation: AI is clearly going to be the interface for data. But earlier attempts (text-to-SQL, etc.) fell short — they treated it like magic. The space has matured: teams now realize that AI + data needs structure, context, and rules. So I built a product to help teams deliver “chat with data” solutions fast with full control and observability (agent tracing, quality scores, etc) — am I wrong? The product allows you to connect any LLM to any data source with centralized context…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 8IB
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
- 9CR
hi everyone. how does moving llm call prompts and output structure definitions away from code into configuration land sound? would you use something like this if it was stable and well documented enough? please don't hold back the criticism. i appreciate all feedback (constructive & otherwise).
2024 · github.com
- 10MA
Hi HN, TL;DR Mirror AI is a cross-platform desktop action oriented LLM. Instead of just replying with text, it can run terminal commands, move files, hit APIs, send email/messages, schedule calendar events, query databases etc. - and chain those steps in one request. Why I built it Chatbots are great for answers but stop at the “OK, now go do it” moment. I was copy-pasting between ChatGPT and my shell/IDE/Gmail far too often, so on red-eye flights I hacked a bridge that lets an LLM execute tasks under a permission layer. Friends asked for it, feature-creep happened, and here…
2025 · themirrorai.com
- 11CA
Hi HN, I've been working with LLMs in production for a while both as a solo dev building apps for clients and working at an AI startup. The one thing that always was a pain was to pay OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic a few dollars a month just for me to say "test" or have a CI runner validate some UI code. So I built this server called ChunkBack, that mocks the popular llm provider's functionality but allows you to type in a deterministic language: `SAY "cheese"` or `TOOLCALL "tool_name" {} "tool response"` I've had to work in some test environments and give good results for experimenting…
Nov 2025 · github.com
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- 13LP
I was not getting good cache utilization when including dynamic context in agent threads. After a lot of experimentation, I found a good pattern that minimizes how often long lived conversation history gets modified while still supporting dynamic context. It has flexible hooks for doing things like truncating or summarizing tool outputs when transitioning messages to the long term history. And I'm seeing >>90% of tokens hitting the cache for my agents despite including a lot of dynamic user context. There are a wide range of agent prompting strategies so I'd love to hear where this library…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 14CM
Hey HN, I've been building AutoAgents, an AI agent framework in Rust. Today I'm sharing a feature I haven't seen done well elsewhere: composable middleware layers for LLM inference pipelines. The problem Every agent framework lets you swap LLM providers. Almost none of them give you a structured way to enforce safety, caching, or data sanitization in the inference path itself. You end up with guardrails as application-level if-statements, caching bolted on as a separate service, and PII handling as a "we'll add it later" TODO that never ships. This gets worse with local models. Cloud APIs…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 15IS
Hey HN! For that last 8 months I've been trying to make agents that can hack web applications to find vulnerabilities in them - An AI Security Tester. The system has 29 agents in total, a custom LLM Orchestration framework which works on the task-subtask architecture (old-school but works amazingly for my use case, and is pretty reliable) with custom agent calling mechanism. No Auo-Gen, Langchain and Crew AI - Everything custom built for pentesting. Each test runs in an isolated Kali linux environment (on AWS Fargate), where the agents have full access to the environment to undertake any…
2025
- 16RM
I was tired of asking my claude code to reference my codex chats to get references to what decisions it made and why ; so I built Reference MCP It, whenever prompted establishes sessions to get direct access - been using it on my system for a bit and was super helpful so I made a repo :) Would love feedback!
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 17OS
Hello HN, I’ve been building AI agents lately and ran into a common "Context Bloat" problem. When an agent has 20+ skills, stuffing every system prompt, reference doc, and tool definition into a single request quickly hits token limits and degrades model performance (the "lost in the middle" problem). To solve this, I built OpenSkills, an open-source SDK that implements a Progressive Disclosure Architecture for agent skills. The Core Concept: Instead of loading everything upfront, OpenSkills splits a skill into three layers: Layer 1 (Metadata): Light-weight tags and triggers (always loaded…
Jan 2026
- 18AC
Hi HN, I’m the author of agent-contracts, a Python library that explores a contract-based approach to structuring LangGraph agents. When building larger LangGraph-based systems, I kept running into the same issues: - node responsibilities becoming implicit - state dependencies spreading across the graph - routing logic getting harder to reason about - refactoring feeling increasingly risky agent-contracts is an attempt to make these boundaries explicit. Each node declares a contract that describes: - which parts of the state it reads and writes - what external services it depends on - when…
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 19TF
i built TXTOS because my models kept forgetting and bluffing. i wanted a portable fix that works across providers without code or setup. TXTOS is a single .txt you paste into any LLM chat. it boots a small reasoning OS that gives you two things by default: a semantic tree memory that survives long threads, and a knowledge boundary guard that pushes back when the model is out of scope. what it is plain text. no scripts, no trackers, no api calls. MIT. the file encodes a protocol for reasoning, memory, and safety. you can diff it and fork it. it is not “a clever prompt”. it behaves like a tiny…
2025 · github.com
- 20MA
Hi HN, A couple weeks ago I shared an early version of a side project I’ve been tinkering with called Persistent Mind Model. I built it at home on an i7-10700K / 32GB RAM / RTX 3080 because I was curious whether an AI could keep a stable “mind” over time, that could "think" about it's own identity as an LLM, instead of resetting every session. After a lot more tinkering, I think the architecture is finally in a solid place. Basically, it saves everything the AI does, thoughts, decisions, updates as a chain of events in a local SQLite database. Because the “identity” is stored in…
Nov 2025 · github.com
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- 22HH
I found myself building a bunch of LLM-backed features that needed to use tool calling, and some of those tools involved doing things that were somewhat high stakes - communicating on my behalf or modifying shared / production data. one example - I wanted to replace a marketing website with a chatbot + vector DB loaded with the previous content, docs, and blog posts. Between hallucinations, missing knowledge base info, and the LLM generally writing like an psuedo-intellectual high schooler, I realized I couldn't trust it to communicate unsupervised with my website visitors. I needed a…
2024 · github.com
- 23EO
Like many of you, we've spent the last two years dealing with requests to sprinkle LLM-powered features everywhere. One recurring problem we faced in almost every project was related to data governance. In most cases, it was extremely hard to implement the needed granular control over the retrieved data. We developed custom solutions each time, but when we realized most of the solutions could be reused in subsequent projects, we started thinking about creating a modular framework. Today we're releasing that framework! We've already built some modules using open-source solutions such as…
2024 · github.com
- 24AP
We’ve been power users of AI tools for the past year, and we kept running into three constant frustrations: 1. Too many subscriptions – Paying separately for OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and others quickly adds up. 2. Losing memory & context – Switching between models or platforms means you start over each time. 3. Privacy concerns – With most closed-source models, your data may be stored or used for training. That’s not acceptable for sensitive or professional use cases. So we built AgentSea: a private and safer chat interface where you can access the latest models, agents, and tools in…
2025 · agentsea.com
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