Alternatives
Products that do what Dockerized VS Code with Goose Coding Agent does
I was tired of setting up my coding environment from scratch whenever I switched machines, and I wanted easy access to Goose AI (an OpenAI-powered coding assistant) without complex configuration. So this weekend I hacked together Goosecode Server - a dockerized VS Code that runs in the browser with the Goose AI agent pre-installed and configured. It's nothing fancy, just combining existing tools in a useful way. What's interesting is that beyond personal use, it can be integrated as a tool call for AI agents people are building. Since it's containerized with a standard interface, you can…
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- 5RA
Hi HN folks, I have been building AI agents for quite some time now. The shift has gone from LLM + Tools → LLM Workflows → Agent + Tools + Memory, and now we are finally seeing true agency emerge: agents as systems composed of tools, command-line access, fine-grained system capabilities, and memory. This way of building agents is powerful, and I believe it is here to stay. But the real question is: are the systems powering these agents ready for that future? I do not think so. Using Docker for a single agent is not going to scale well, because agents need to be lightweight and fast. LLMs…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 6FB
TLDR: made the first background coding agent that has an isolated workspace and runs locally Howdy - I’m Kevin, co-founder of Firebender, and we built the first background coding agent in android studio / Jetbrains! Why not just use Cursor background agents or OpenAI Codex? Both of these require setting up a cloud container and cloning your existing developer environment, and maintaining it. Then when you want to iterate on changes as AI inevitably makes a mistake, you either throw away the work, or have to pull down the branch and clean it up. This feels really clunky. With Firebender,…
2025 · youtube.com
- 7AB
Hi HN, Zidan here. I’ve been experimenting with AI-assisted debugging and noticed a recurring gap: most tools optimize for agent-led exploration (ex: giving claude code a browser to click around and try to reproduce an issue). But in many cases, I've already found the bug myself. What I actually want is a way to hand the agent the exact context I just saw - without retyping steps, copying logs, or hoping it can reproduce the behavior. So we built FlowLens, an open-source MCP server + Chrome extension that captures browser context and lets coding agents inspect it as structured, queryable…
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 8SR
Hello all, I'm a software developer. Over the last few months more and more of my work has turned into using coding agents instead of typing the whole code myself. Usually a few claude sessions at once, sometimes codex, one per feature or per revealed bug. I ran them in a split terminal for a few weeks, and quickly spotted two main problems. The first is that I couldn't easily tell which agent was stuck waiting on me and which was still working, so I'd cycle through sessions and checking on them. The second one: agents sharing a single branch step on each other. Two of them could be editing…
Jul 2026 · shikigami.dev
- 9UA
Three months ago, we started developing an open source agent framework. We previously tried existing frameworks in our enterprise product but faced challenges in certain areas. Problems we experienced: * We risked our stateless architecture when we wanted to add an agented feature to our existing system. Current frameworks lack server-client architecture, requiring significant effort to maintain statelessness when adding an agent framework to your application. * Scaling problem - needed to write Docker configurations as existing frameworks lack official Docker support. Each agent in my…
2025 · github.com
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Hi HN, my name is Maria, and I’m a co-founder of Maritime. We started Maritime at MIT to build infrastructure for companies that need to run thousands of isolated AI agents for their customers. Imagine you set up an agent like OpenClaw, or a personal assistant agent with a custom framework, and want to give a separate version of it to every customer/friend. Each customer needs their own agent running in an isolated microVM, with persistent state, secrets, triggers, and sleep/wake behavior. Building such scalable and secure infra will take you months and will cost hundreds of…
18d ago · maritime.sh
- 11AT
Hi HN. This is a script I have been using for some time for coding tasks, which I have polished a bit and published. The motivation behind this script was to have an agent with persistent session which I can use from the shell like a regular command. It _can_ also be scripted, although I don't use it in such a way. The script uses a minimal prompt, which just tells it to use standard unix tools to do everything. I was surprised at how well it worked, when using a good model. Qwen3-coder is on openrouter, and it works well with the minimal instructions. I also tested qwen2.5-coder with ollama…
2025 · github.com
- 12AR
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
- 13MA
This weekend I built a multi-agent coding system which, quite unexpectedly, beat Claude Code on Stanford's Terminal Bench! The architecture is straightforward, consisting of an orchestrator agent that deploys explorer & coder subagents to complete complex terminal based tasks, utilising an intelligent context sharing mechanism along the way which makes it all work. The repo has a lot of technical details, and all the code and prompts for you to play around with if you'd like! I had a lot of fun making this, I hope you have fun reading the README, using it yourself, or even extending it! As…
2025 · github.com
- 14MO
Hey everyone, We're excited to introduce MarinaBox, an open-source toolkit for creating isolated desktop/browser sandboxes tailored for AI agents. Over the past few months, we've worked on various projects involving: 1. AI agents interacting with computers (think Claude computer-use scenarios). 2. Browser automation for AI agents using tools like Playwright and Selenium. 3. Applications that need a live-session view to monitor AI agents' actions, with the ability for human-in-the-loop intervention. What we learned: All these scenarios share a common need for robust infrastructure. So,…
2024 · github.com
- 15OA
Hi HN, I’m Mike, the founder of OpenRig. I built this because my Claude Code + Codex setup kept forming little "topologies" of long-lived agents that worked well together, but the terminal sprawl was intense. So I built a primitive the agents could intuitively reach for to save and recreate these setups on the fly. This then led to more agent-first primitives like coordination, declarative workflow patterns, workspaces, etc. Several months in and these "rigs" I manage with openrig require a lot less babysitting and I can manage more projects at once without getting overwhelmed. The short…
May 2026 · openrig.dev
- 16CP
Hi HN! I've never posted anything on here before, but this project was too fun to pass up. I've been learning a lot about agents lately, and wanted to see if I could replicate some of the results of Windsurf and Cursor. Generally I love these tools, but when you're stuck behind an "enterprise" firewall, they don't work as well. This sad state of affairs motivated me to understand SWE agents more. Does it work? Yes. Is it as good as Cursor and Windsurf? Not quite, but it's pretty darn close, depending on the model you use. I'm lacking a few features like semantic indexing, MCP support, but…
2025 · github.com
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Hi HN, I'm one of the creators of Nanobrowser, an open-source Chrome extension that lets you automate web tasks using AI agents. We were inspired by the potential of tools like OpenAI's Operator, but we wanted something that was: -Open-Source:You can see the code, modify it, and contribute to the project. -Browser-Based:No complex setups or server deployments. It runs directly in your browser. -Customizable:You can tailor the agent's behavior to your specific needs. -BYO LLM:Bring your own large language model API key (OpenAI, Anthropic,or even local models), No vendor lock-in. -Privacy…
2025 · github.com
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Hi HN, we just released InsForge: an open-source, agent-native alternative to Supabase/Firebase designed from the ground up for AI coding agents like Cline, Cursor, and Claude Code. We're building Supabase's features in an AI-native way, enabling agents to build and manage full-stack applications autonomously. (GitHub: https://github.com/InsForge/InsForge) With coding agents, coding is actually the easy part now. You can build a working prototype for your idea in a few hours and run it locally. But to make it production-ready, you still have a long list of things to…
2025 · github.com
- 19RA
May 2026 · github.com
- 20IB
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
- 21GF
I've been a big fan of fly.io with it’s devx, but cold starts and pricing have been a consistent problem. Even for side projects it's painful if they take 30s to load, it just kills the whole experience. With coding agents becoming good, there were a lot more things I started building, and I just wanted to run all of those things! GCI was built to solve this. It’s just a CLI, just uses ssh to interact with your target machine, and relies on docker swarm to get your services running (docker swarm is IMO underrated, providing benefits even with a single node). It can deploy on any machine that…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 22RA
Hi HN! Sean from MindStudio here. I wanted to share something we've been working on that I think introduces some new ideas into the "AI coding agent" space. Remy is an AI agent that builds full-stack TypeScript apps from a spec written in a new flavor of annotated markdown. The spec has two layers: prose describing what the app does, and annotations that carry the technical precision (data types, edge cases, validation rules, code snippets). The agent then "compiles" this into code: backend methods, typed schemas, frontends, test scenarios, and everything else are derived artifacts of the…
Apr 2026 · remy.msagent.ai
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We are a small group of undergrads interested in building human in the loop coding agents. We dream of a world where building complex agent workflows feels as simple and creative as playing with legos. When we were building stuff we needed a tool that made it easy to try out different code embedding models so that we could see which ones worked best in different scenarios and understand their strengths and weaknesses. So to speed that process up we made PurpleSearch an 'instant' search engine for your local codebases. This tool lets you quickly deploy any open source embedding model on…
2025
- 24IB
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
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