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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Colin, a context engine for keeping agent skills fresh

Hi HN — I'm the creator of FastMCP and wanted to share a new project we've open-sourced called Colin. I obviously love MCP, but I also use skills extremely heavily in my day-to-day work. Being exposed to both has made me very aware of a tension: - Anything with dynamic information, I ship over MCP. This takes work to set up and requires conversational boilerplate to refresh in every conversation. - Anything behavioral, I put in skills. They're lightweight, used automatically, and feel great. But I would never put dynamic information in a skill because keeping it up to date is a pain. And yet…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1MA

    I've been deeply involved in working with AI agents and large language models (LLMs) for a while now. During a recent job search, I found myself repeatedly explaining my skills and experiences to various assistants. Around the same time, I was creating content for my website to help hiring teams understand my capabilities better and make informed decisions. MCP had started to gain momentum and I saw a way to reduce my toil. So I built an MCP server that can effectively communicate my qualifications as a job candidate. This server acts as an AI-powered resume, providing an understanding of my…

    2025 · ai.jakegaylor.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Agent 37▲401

    Hey HN, I noticed there are 1,000+ MCP skills on GitHub with zero way for creators to charge for them. So I built Agent37. Selling Claude skills today means asking customers to download your skill, set up Claude Code on their laptops, configure MCP servers, and pray it works. No trial, no updates, often you're just handing over the source. Agent37 lets creators upload a skill, share a link, and anyone can try it instantly (no Claude account needed). Built-in Stripe, creators keep 80%. Looking for feedback on the approach. Would you use something like this?

    Mar 2026 · agent37.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Skillkit▲252

    It's an open-source project that lets you create, translate, and work with multiple agents at the same time, and more.

    Feb 2026 · agenstskills.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Glue▲291

    Glue is team chat optimized for AI. Today we're releasing support for MCP tools right in your Glue team conversations. Just like MCP in Cursor or Windsurf, you can now use any tool in a private AI chat or any Glue team thread while pulling in its full context to help. Using team chat context for MCP is kind of game-changing, letting you do anything from creating a calendar event or Linear issue to looking up data from an internal system. Our team has been using MCP tools as part of core team workflows for a few weeks now, and it's fantastic. We're particularly fans of remote-hosted MCP…

    2025 · glue.ai · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    Skilldocs▲192

    I got fed up with Notion, so I built my dream document editor. It's all markdowned so it's easy to view skills or other agent-related documents. It's got the collaboration features I love from Figma (shared cursory and the ability to follow) and Google Docs (comments, realtime editing). Then you can export the diff and comments to an agent. I've been really liking it for talking over skill documents live on a call. I'm curious if this resonates with other people. More generally, I feel like notion is less and less relevant in an age where documents have a very different purpose and Markdown…

    Aug 2026 · skilldocs.dev · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    The fast, Pythonic way to build MCP servers and clients

    Jan 2026 · gofastmcp.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Your context, available to every agent.

    Jul 2026 · in-parallel.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hey HN, I spent my xmas break building an agent framework called mcp-agent [1](https://github.com/lastmile-ai/mcp-agent) for Model Context Protocol [2]. It makes it easy to build AI apps with MCP servers, and implements every pattern from the popular Building Effective Agents blog [3] as well as OpenAI’s Swarm [4]. I’m sharing it early to get community feedback on where to take it from here, and to ask for contributions. For those who aren’t familiar with MCP, I think of it as a standardized interface to let AI communicate with software via tool calls, resources and…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Persistent memory for AI coding agents

    Apr 2026 · contextpool.io · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Pensieve▲133

    Full company context for every AI agent

    Mar 2026 · pensieve.uk · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hello, HN. I've created fast-agent to make building my own products easier - and remove the friction between defining Prompts, MCP Servers and their composition. It uses a simple, declarative style that's easy to work with and source control - with inbuilt support for the patterns in the Building Effective Agents paper. Because you can "warm-up" and interact with Agents before, during or after the workflows, it's easy to diagnose and tune Agent prompts and behaviour for later runs. Being able to set these workflows up makes LLM Context Management and Tool Selection a lot easier and can…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    AI Skill & MCP server management for teams & enterprises

    Jul 2026 · localskills.sh · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    The memory layer for AI agents

    Jul 2026 · kitforai.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi HN! We’re Theodore and Louis, founders of Armature (YC P26). We reconstruct the entire session behind the MCP tool calls you receive, including what the user asked their agent to do and what the agent thought. You wrap your MCP in 3 lines of code (our SDK is available in Typescript, Python and Go) and start seeing in your dashboard: - All sessions reconstructed: it’s like reading the real conversation the user had inside Claude or ChatGPT! - A ranking of your MCP most popular use cases, built from sessions clustering - The most frequent issues your users’ agents encounter so you can fix…

    Aug 2026 · armature.tech · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    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 · its alternatives →

  16. 16OS

    Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, but they’re limited by fixed context windows and outdated knowledge. What if your AI could access live search, structured data extraction, OCR, and more—all through a standardized interface? We built the JigsawStack MCP Server, an open-source implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that lets any AI model call external tools effortlessly. Here’s what it unlocks: - Web Search & Scraping: Fetch live information and extract structured data from web pages. - OCR & Structured Data Extraction: Process images, receipts, invoices, and handwritten…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Today we're releasing Nanobot an open-source framework for building AI agents on top of the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP servers are a great way to expose structured tools, but they’re usually just that—collections of functions. Nanobot makes it simple to wrap any MCP server with reasoning, a system prompt, and orchestration so it behaves like a real agent. Even better, Nanobot fully supports MCP-UI, so agents can pass rich interactive components (forms, dashboards, even mini-apps) directly into chat. A simple example: if you had a Blackjack MCP server with tools like deal, bet, and…

    2025 · nanobot.ai · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a new open standard that gives AI agents a universal interface to external tools and data. Discover how MCP empowers more powerful, autonomous AI assistants to perform real-world tasks seamlessly.

    2024 · agnt.one · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN — I'm Scott. Skillscript is a small language I built to write what I want my local agent to actually do, in a form I can read and version, instead of hoping the model gets it right each time. The itch started with something small. I wanted my NanoClaw agent to run my morning brief the same way every day. Check overnight tickets, summarize the deploy pipeline, flag anything urgent. Every session, it would re-figure out how to do this from scratch, drift a little, and cost tokens for what's basically a fixed procedure. I could put it in a system prompt or an MD skill file, but those are…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    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…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21LF

    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 · its alternatives →

  22. 22WB

    Computer Use Agents like Claude in Chrome or ChatGPT relearn every site on every run. With Reduck MCP, they learn a site once, then reuse it for 2.5x faster browsing.

    23d ago · blog.reduck.ai · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hi HN, I wrote a book on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) – the open standard from Anthropic that lets AI agents connect to external tools and data sources. I'm an RPA/automation practitioner (CEO of Niuexa, LinkedIn Learning instructor) and I noticed there was no comprehensive resource covering MCP architecture, security patterns, and enterprise deployment strategy. So I wrote one. The book covers: - MCP architecture deep dive (servers, clients, hosts, transport layers) - 20-point security checklist for MCP deployments - EU AI Act compliance for agentic systems - Real-world breach…

    Nov 2025 · blueprint-mcp.railsblueprint.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24IM

    Recently, I was exploring the OpenAI Agents SDK and building MCP agents and agentic Workflows. To implement my learnings, I thought, why not solve a real, common problem? So I built this multi-agent job search workflow that takes a LinkedIn profile as input and finds personalized job opportunities based on your experience, skills, and interests. I used: - OpenAI Agents SDK to orchestrate the multi-agent workflow - Bright Data MCP server for scraping LinkedIn profiles & YC jobs. - Nebius AI models for fast + cheap inference - Streamlit for UI (The project isn't that complex - I kept it…

    2025 · its alternatives →

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