Alternatives
Products that do what Exo – the electron app that’s helping to build itself does
Hi HN folks! I’m the creator of Exo and wanted to share my progress with the HN community. Exo is an electron app that uses a chat interface and open Ai to write code directly to your file system/repos. Exo is a work in progress - its very new and has many rough edges. I was hoping to get some early feedback from HN folks and hopefully some early users. Once you create an account the universal electron installer link is on the dashboard. Here is a quick explainer video: https://www.loom.com/share/5f34499ccfb54bfdae32ee50f454b365 Exo started as a thin wrapper around…
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eno [1] - A modern plaintext language w/ libraries [2] for JavaScript, Python, Ruby & soon more! We migrated a big relational research database to a file-based solution - requirements were: - Super fast and easy editability for users - Highest performance for parsing/validating >10K documents on every user change. Our trials with YAML/TOML showed us that we wanted something both faster [3][4] and easier [4], something tailored for file-based content management ... and after months of research & development it's now publicly available (under MIT license) for everyone! Last but…
2018
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- 4HS
Hi everyone, I'm working for a startup called BugFree Software and would love to hear your feedback on a new product we are launching today. Helium is a library that wraps around Selenium to simplify web automation. It does away with many of the technicalities involved with web scripting. For example: Here is a Selenium script. Can you guess what it does? >>> ff = Firefox() ... >>> text_area = ff.find_element_by_id("u_0_1q") >>> text_area.send_keys("Hello World!") >>> button = ff.find_element_by_class_name("_42g-") >>> button.click() Here is the same script rewritten using Helium: >>>…
2013 · heliumhq.com
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2016 · github.com
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Another HN Desktop client: https://github.com/spennihana/HackerDesktop Last weekend user westoncb posted[1] an app built in kotlin/swing[2]. A comment there mentioned that an electron app might be an interesting alternative, and here is the result of this last week's hackings. It uses the firebase API underneath and elm/electron to interact with kotlin via the spark-kotlin micro rest framework. The icns were made with Adobe Illustrator. The dmg unpacks to a whopping 250MB (since it packages the JRE in addition to all of the usual electron junk). video link:…
2017
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2017 · xel-toolkit.org
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Hey everyone! My name is Will. I’ve been leading engineering teams for over two decades. Also, first time HN user here! One of the common pains I’d encounter in nearly every product I managed was alerting end users to infrequent events like outages, global announcements, beta launches, planned maintenance, etc. We’d always need to deploy custom, one-off modals or other alerts and then have to remember to revert them later. It was always a time sink for a developer to put aside what they were working on to make this happen. This Is Not A Drill! is a simple-to-install JS SDK that makes it…
2024
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Hi HN! We’re excited to share with you the public beta launch of our startup, HiDimensional (www.hidimensional.com). We are a platform consisting of senior engineering leaders who interview candidates and provide recommendations of the best candidates and their strengths. We then use the recommendations to refer these candidates to founders of startups that match their strengths and interests. The recommendation serves as a personal referral from the interviewer, so for candidates, it amplifies their application and fast-tracks them through the process. And for companies, they are receiving…
2017
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2016 · github.com
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Hey everyone, we built a local-first, open-source framework to allows you to export and build applications with your personal data. This August, we built a digital footprint exporter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41325719) that allowed people to get back their personal data, but there was no way to interact with it. So we added a python package, improved the reliability of the exporting, and implemented a unified JSON structure across platforms. How it works: - Electron’s built-in webview element is used to navigate to the platform’s website and the user can connect…
2024 · docs.surferprotocol.org
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Hello HN! I've been working on http://underthesite.com for the last month and now think it is ready for some full strength HN feedback. What do you guys think? It crawls up to 10 pages of a given site while you wait, looking for community-provided CSS / XPath selectors and regular expressions. Additionally, I'd like to appeal to you to submit matchers for technologies that you care about. Technologies are easy to add, so add your favorite jQuery plugins, analytics tools, client-side node.js wrappers, what have you. I'm going to be running a large crawl in the next few days and want to make…
2011
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Hi, i was wondering what the HN community thinks of this email tone check application? Do you think this can be done better with open-source? Disclaimer: I am neither a founder or an employee at the company. Just someone who had a similar idea.
2011 · tonecheck.com
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Hi HN! I'm building Ano because I was tired of Slack's bloat and sluggishness, and never got any value out of their agent implementation. Ano is built local-first for speed (using Rocicorp Zero), focused on communication, and lets you use your own code agent as an assistant (Claude in my case, but it works with Codex too). I use the code agent to summarize anything unread (linking back to what matters), respond with context, and share data to and from connected tools (GitHub, Posthog, Attio, etc). Using your code agent for this might sound counter-intuitive, but to me it's the most powerful…
Jun 2026 · ano.chat
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Hey Hacker News, For the last 2 months, I've been working on a testing agent to free developers from the endless maintenance of end-to-end tests. You just push up a PR, and our agent analyzes the code changes and automatically visits the preview to test things out like a real human! We also support describing tests in English (or even in the PR description), and we'll go through your site whenever you want via a GitHub action to test and make sure various core flows continue to work as expected. We are looking for early testers and are giving out a generous free tier! Just sign up on the…
2025 · playmatic.ai
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Hey HN! Today we’re launching Fabi 2.0 For the past year we’ve been working with a number of product, eng, marketing and data teams, and the common issue we’ve been seeing with all these teams, especially small and growing teams, is that getting basic answers from their data requires jumping between a bunch of different tools/copy-pasting data and spreadsheets, or building out a full BI stack. With our latest release, users can not only connect Fabi to databases and data warehouses, but also to applications like HubSpot, Stripe, Shopify etc. We offer hundreds of connectors, and the AI…
Jan 2026
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Hey HN! I really like local apps for their simplicity and privacy and hate paying Saas bills and I wanted a way to start automating my life with AI so I started building Anything. Anything is built on Tauri so the front end is React and the "backend" is Rust. It's 100% local & 100% doesn't ask you to spin up docker to use. Another core goal of the app is to get away from "package bloat" you see in other general purpose AI oss projects where they have a package.json that is 300 lines long ( more on that later. ) Oh btw I suck at Rust! I learned Rust while building this so the code is _not…
2024 · github.com
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Hey everybody, sharing Ami on HN today. Ami is an open source, local-first agent harness that acts as your shadow worker and copilot chat. It ships with a graph memory. Here's what Ami does on its own - - connects to apps, data, repositories, tools with your personal tokens - Learns how you do tasks (execution style, decisions, anti-patterns) - Learns how you communicate (external and internal) - maintains a universal to-do list Here's how you use Ami - 1. You can execute busywork. It fetches and executes tasks autonomously in your style, asks approval before risky actions, gives…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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Hello everyone, I’ve been building Seisin, a desktop app for keeping an entire job search in one place. I was planning on posting this back at v1.0, but held on to see a bit more of what HN was like before posting here. I kept building in the meantime, so what’s here now is v1.1. It tracks applications, interviews, offers, resumes, contacts and notes, then turns all of that into analytics automatically. Some of what’s in it now: - Analytics (response rate by source, response time, weekly activity & trends, and more) - A resume builder with five templates, import and export as PDF or Word,…
25d ago · getseisin.com
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Hello HN community! We’re excited to announce that today, we are coming out of Beta with the launch of neverinstall 2.0. Over the past year we’ve been testing and developing the platform, adding new features and functionalities and listening to what you said. What is neverinstall? neverinstall is a cloud platform that allows you to run any application from the browser without installing it on your device. It is an alternative to traditional desktop application usage and enables people to stream applications over the web. Here’s what’s new at neverinstall: No time restrictions We’ve updated…
2022 · neverinstall.com
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Hi HF, I'm Terrell, and we built an open-source app that lets developers create their own Operator with a Next.js/React front-end and a flask back-end. The purpose is to simplify spinning up virtual desktops (Xfce, VNC) and automate desktop-based interactions using computer use models like OpenAI’s There are already various cool tools out there that allow you to build your own operator-like experience but they usually only automate web browser actions, or aren’t open sourced/cost a lot to get started. Spongecake allows you to automate desktop-based interactions, and is fully open…
2025 · github.com
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Hey HN, Over the past 10 months I've been using Claude Code heavily, and one limitation kept coming up: you can really only run one coding agent at a time. While one agent is refactoring something, the rest of the repo is basically blocked unless you start manually juggling branches and working directories. The core issue is that AI coding agents operate directly in your filesystem. If two agents run in the same working directory they quickly start stepping on each other’s changes. Git worktrees turned out to be a surprisingly good primitive for solving this. So I built ChatML, a Desktop app…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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A little toy HN client for the desktop that I've been playing around with this week.
2022 · github.com
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Hi all, Sharing a repo I was working on for a while. It’s open-source and includes many different strategies for RAG (currently 17), including tutorials, and visualizations. This is great learning and reference material. Open issues, suggest more strategies, and use as needed. Enjoy!
2024 · github.com
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