Alternatives
Products that do what Code Mode does
Slash MCP token usage by 68%
- 1IB
Read this article by Cloudflare this morning https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ the main argument being that LLMs are much better at writing typescript code than tool calls because they've seen typescript code many more times. HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45386248 Deno provides a great sandbox environment for Typescript code execution because of its permissions system which made it easy to spin up code that only has access to fetch and network calls. Stick an MCP proxy…
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 2WW
I spent a few hours last weekend testing whether AI can replace code by executing directly. Built a contact manager where every HTTP request goes to an LLM with three tools: database (SQLite), webResponse (HTML/JSON/JS), and updateMemory (feedback). No routes, no controllers, no business logic. The AI designs schemas on first request, generates UIs from paths alone, and evolves based on natural language feedback. It works—forms submit, data persists, APIs return JSON—but it's catastrophically slow (30-60s per request), absurdly expensive ($0.05/request), and has zero UI…
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 3MO
Every MCP server injects its full tool schemas into context on every turn — 30 tools costs ~3,600 tokens/turn whether the model uses them or not. Over 25 turns with 120 tools, that's 362,000 tokens just for schemas. mcp2cli turns any MCP server or OpenAPI spec into a CLI at runtime. The LLM discovers tools on demand: mcp2cli --mcp https://mcp.example.com/sse --list # ~16 tokens/tool mcp2cli --mcp https://mcp.example.com/sse create-task --help # ~120 tokens, once mcp2cli --mcp https://mcp.example.com/sse create-task --title "Fix bug" No…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 4CA
Built this after realizing I was spending ~$1400/week on Claude Code with almost no visibility into what was actually consuming tokens. Tools like ccusage give a cost breakdown per model and per day, but I wanted to understand usage at the task level. CodeBurn reads the JSONL session transcripts that Claude Code stores locally (~/.claude/projects/) and classifies each turn into 13 categories based on tool usage patterns (no LLM calls involved). One surprising result: about 56% of my spend was on conversation turns with no tool usage. Actual coding (edits/writes) was…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 5
- 6
- 7PS
I got tired of playwright-mcp eating through Claude's 200K token limit, so I built this using the new Claude Skills system. Built it with Claude Code itself. Instead of sending accessibility tree snapshots on every action, Claude just writes Playwright code and runs it. You get back screenshots and console output. That's it. 314 lines of instructions vs a persistent MCP server. Full API docs only load if Claude needs them. Same browser automation, way less overhead. Works as a Claude Code plugin or manual install. Token limit issue:…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 8CM
Every MCP tool call dumps raw data into Claude Code's 200K context window. A Playwright snapshot costs 56 KB, 20 GitHub issues cost 59 KB. After 30 minutes, 40% of your context is gone. I built an MCP server that sits between Claude Code and these outputs. It processes them in sandboxes and only returns summaries. 315 KB becomes 5.4 KB. It supports 10 language runtimes, SQLite FTS5 with BM25 ranking for search, and batch execution. Session time before slowdown goes from ~30 min to ~3 hours. MIT licensed, single command install: /plugin marketplace add mksglu/claude-context-mode…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 9IW
Hey HN, I made Browser-Use, an open-source tool that lets (all Langchain supported) LLMs execute tasks directly in the browser just with function calling. It allows you to build agents that interact with web elements using natural language prompts. We created a layer that simplifies website interaction for LLMs by extracting xPaths and interactive elements like buttons and input fields (and other fancy things). This enables you to design custom web automation and scraping functions without manual inspection through DevTools. Hasn't this been done a lot of times? Good question, as a general…
2024 · github.com
- 10BT
Small codebases were always a good thing. With coding agents, there's now a huge advantage to having a codebase small enough that an agent can hold the full thing in context. Repo Tokens is a GitHub Action that counts your codebase's size in tokens (using tiktoken) and updates a badge in your README. The badge color reflects what percentage of an LLM's context window the codebase fills: green for under 30%, yellow for 50-70%, red for 70%+. Context window size is configurable and defaults to 200k (size of Claude models). It's a composite action. Installs tiktoken, runs ~60 lines of inline…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 11SC
Hey HN. I built this because my Anthropic API bills were getting out of hand (spoiler: they remain high even with this, batch is not a magic bullet). I use Claude Code daily for software design and infra work (terraform, code reviews, docs). Many Terminal tabs, many questions. I realised some questions are ok to wait on and with that comes some cost savings. So here is a small MCP that lets you send work directly to Anthropic's Batch API from inside Claude Code, for the same quality responses just 50% cheaper, results come back in ~30min-1hr. How it works: you type /batch review this…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 12
- 13MM
I built MCPlexor to solve a token waste problem I kept running into with MCP-based agents. The Problem: MCP (Model Context Protocol) is great for giving LLMs access to external tools. But if you connect multiple servers (GitHub, Linear, Postgres, Slack), you end up with 40-50k tokens of tool definitions injected into every request – before the agent even does anything. On a 200k context model, that's 25% gone. On smaller models, it's worse. And most runs only use 1-2 tools. The Solution: MCPlexor sits between your agent and your MCP servers. Instead of loading all tool definitions upfront:…
Feb 2026 · mcplexor.com
- 14S8
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 15
Hi HN, Luigi here. We maintain mcp-use an open-source TypeScript framework for building MCP servers and MCP Apps: https://github.com/mcp-use/mcp-use MCP is now (finally) stateless so we rewrote mcp-use v2 from scratch for the 2026-07-28 MCP spec revision: https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2026-07-28/ Thanks to the rebuild: - Throughput: +27% → from 8,615 to 10,982 median ops/sec - Cold launch: 2.2x faster → from 151.6 ms to 68.1 ms - Clean install: 82% smaller → from 404.6 MiB to 74.4 MiB Benchmark with methodology here:…
Aug 2026 · manufact.com
- 16CA
A recent HackerNews comment - “For one programmer's hourly cost, you could run 4000 CPU cores continuously. Can there really be no practical way to apply thousands of cores to boosting the programmer's productivity?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19339467 This is what we have come up with. The current productivity tools - Slack, Asana, Trello, Facebook Workplace, etc. - are great, but lack direct access to your code. Building a tool directly around the code makes it more powerful for software developers: CoDiff. https://codiff.com The foundation of CoDiff is a…
2019
- 17AC
We built a reference MCP server that lets your editor/agent learn a codebase directly from source (signatures, types, AST, comments). Docs are optional. The reference impl runs on our open-source project’s codebase. Why we built it Docs are important, but they add another abstraction layer between your code and your users. Keeping them at the right quality is hard (especially at a startup), and LLM-generated docs are often mediocre until you invest real polish. Exposing code to the model in a structured way keeps answers grounded and current, and it’s always available. You can even…
Sep 2025 · github.com
- 18KL
LLM agents often place raw JSON tool outputs directly in the prompt. After a few tool calls, earlier results get compacted or truncated and answers become incorrect or inconsistent. I built Sift, a drop-in MCP gateway that stores tool outputs as local artifacts (filesystem blobs indexed in SQLite) and returns an `artifact_id` plus compact schema hints when responses are large or paginated. Instead of reasoning over full JSON in the prompt, the model runs a small Python query: def run(data, schema, params): return max(data, key=lambda x: x["magnitude"])["place"] Query code runs in a…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 19MM
Hey HN! I’m Gui from deco (decocms.com). We’ve been using this tool internally as the foundation for a few customer AI platforms, and today we’re open-sourcing it as MCP Mesh. MCP is quickly becoming the standard for agentic systems, but… once you go past a couple servers it turns into the same problems for every team: - M×N config sprawl (every client wired to every server, each with its own JSON + ports + retries) - Token + tool bloat (dumping tool definitions into every prompt doesn’t scale) - Credentials + blast radius (tokens scattered across clients, hard to audit, hard to revoke) - No…
Dec 2025 · github.com
- 20LC
Hi HN, I'm building Librarian (https://uselibrarian.dev/), an open-source (MIT) context management tool that stops AI agents from burning tokens by blindly re-reading their entire conversation history on every turn. The Problem: If you're building agentic loops in frameworks like LangGraph or OpenClaw, you hit two walls fast: Financial Cost: Token usage scales quadratically over long conversations. Passing the whole history every time gets incredibly expensive. Context Rot: As the context window fills up, the LLM suffers from the "Lost in the Middle" effect. Response latency…
Feb 2026 · uselibrarian.dev
- 21
- 22LF
We built a no/low-code tool that lets you spin up MCPs from a single prompt. MCPs give LLMs access to tools, data, and actions—but they’re hard to build and deploy. Our tool abstracts that: describe what you want, and it auto-generates and hosts the necessary components. No UI flows, no manual chaining—just prompt and go. Examples: • Pull email, parse a DocSend, check Reddit, draft reply • Extract data from a niche site + send a Slack alert • Combine tools without writing glue code Live demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCiaQrgfoE Built over a weekend after getting…
2025 · generatemcp.com
- 23
Token-efficiency linter for LLM prompts and payloads - ritenv/tokensift
9d ago · github.com
- 24
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →