Alternatives
Products that do what Cortex – OS-wide AI with instant context input does
Hey HN! I’m Andrew, and I’ve been building Cortex (https://cortexdesktop.com/) for the last few weeks. Cortex is my attempt to reimagine how we interact with computers - starting with a simple interface, but aiming for something deeper: an AI layer over your OS that understands what you’re doing, remembers it, and helps you dynamically. Right now, Cortex is just a floating overlay you can summon anywhere on your Mac. It works like an inline ChatGPT, but it lets you instantly send that context into the chat by highlighting text - so you don’t have to explain what you’re doing.…
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The memory layer that decides what's worth remembering
13d ago · skynetlab-cortex.com
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2025 · contextch.at
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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
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Cortex▲2Persistent memory layer for AI coding tools (Claude, Cursor)
Jun 2026 · cortex-vercel-omega.vercel.app
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I made this experimental art project/game that's an LLM chat assistant, but where you're the AI. I wanted people to get a visceral sense of what it's like to answer the kinds of things that people prompt their chatbots day in and day out. If you're interested, I wrote up some more info on how I made it, including how the "user" prompts are generated with an eye for realism: https://bethechatbot.com/about Hope you enjoy it! I'd love to hear people's takeaways.
Jul 2026 · bethechatbot.com
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Hi HN — I’m Prateek Rao. My cofounders and I built Cortexa, which we describe as a Bloomberg terminal for agentic memory. A pattern I keep seeing: when agents misbehave, most teams iterate on prompts and then “fix” it by plugging in a memory layer (vector DB + RAG). That helps sometimes — but it doesn’t guarantee correctness. In practice it often introduces a new failure mode: the agent retrieves something dubious, writes it back to memory as if it’s truth, and that mistake becomes sticky. Over time you get memory pollution, circular hallucination loops, and debugging turns into log…
Mar 2026 · cortexa.ink
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AI coding IDE. Ship faster. Reduce context switching.
Jul 2026 · cortex-ide.app
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Hi HN friends, we're Nima (nimabanai) and Craig (cbschind) from Assemble Labs (https://assemblelabs.co) building the hardware context layer for AI to help you write better firmware faster. We’ve built an MCP server that plugs into any AI tool you’re using (Cursor, Claude Code, Gemini, etc.) and brings complete hardware context (schematics, datasheets, etc.) to your existing environment (new app fatigue is real...) with accuracy and in real time. Our goal is to make writing and debugging firmware on custom hardware faster and easier. Try out the free beta release:…
Oct 2025
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Hello there! I hope you're doing well today! I wanted to share something with you. Recently I was on the hunt for the best way to journal daily. Well, I had this idea - what if I could feed all my daily entries to an AI (ChatGPT), and create a friendly, supportive character like Socrates or Simon Sinek? This way, I could ask any questions about my life and mental health, and get some amazing advice on how to improve myself! The results have been absolutely mind-blowing ! I even made a short GIF to show you how it works - check it out! - https://gifyu.com/image/SdHLH I've…
2023
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I'm a Machine Learning engineer. Struggled with consistency for months on my goals, life etc, so I built something to help myself (zropi.com) but that surprised me or shocked me literally. It’s an AI companion that feels alive: chats like a person. Pauses, emotions, personality. Sends voice notes when it's excited about something or whenever it wants (has its like own mind). Shares photos of itself. But the memory It remembers EVERYTHING. Not just facts context, preferences, random things I mentioned. Last week I asked "how's that thing I told you about going?" and it knew exactly what I…
Jan 2026 · zropi.com
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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
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I'm building out Kerns, as an AI environment for research. You can seed a space with a topic and multiple source documents, and complete your research completely in one space. There's interactive mindmaps for exploration, podcast mode, powerful source readers with original plus chapter level summaries that let you zoom into source on demand, a powerful chat agent that lets you control context and cite refs, and AI assisted note taking. My goal is to have one place to do research on any topic which minimizes manual context engineering, and jumping around between chat/notes/readers.…
Nov 2025 · kerns.ai
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Hey HN! We're Vasilije, Laszlo and Lazar, the authors of a new paper and part of https://www.cognee.ai. cognee let’s you build memory layers for AI applications and agents, allowing them to personalize results, connect various data sources, and add custom rules. This enables AI apps to deliver increasingly accurate responses, we reached almost 90% on standard industry benchmarks as you can see here https://github.com/topoteretes/cognee/tree/main/evals and our paper can be accessed at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24478 and collab…
2025 · github.com
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I really struggle to keep my notes organised, and often can't make any sense of hand written notes after meetings. I did some experiments with Claude and ChatGPT where I blast random thoughts at them during a meeting or brainstorming session and then have them output a nice document that pulls it all together at the end. It worked incredibly well but it was a bit cumbersome to keep sending messages to the chat and telling the ai each time what to do. So I took the idea and built a tool, it makes it easy to throw random notes and voice recordings (images and document support on the way) and…
2025 · scatternote.com
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