AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Fixing AI Tool Calling Context Bloat
LLM agents rely on tool calls — but tool responses are huge. Gmail, CRMs, and APIs return bloated JSON LLMs choke on large responses You only need 2–3 fields, but frameworks give you zero control Toolflow is an AI-native framework to fix this: * Filter tool responses before they hit the LLM * Context modes: `minimal`, `full`, `custom`, or `ai` * Composable TypeScript tool registry GitHub: [https://github.com/dksingh1997/toolflow](https://github.com/dksingh1997/toolflow) Would love feedback — especially from those building with LLMs in production.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Code Mode▲144I’ve been testing a simple idea inspired by Apple/Cloudflare/Anthropic: LLMs are far better at writing a small program than coordinating multiple tool calls. So instead of giving the model 10+ tools, I exposed one: a TypeScript sandbox with access to the same interfaces. The model writes a script → it runs once → done. What changed - +68% reduction in token use - No multi-step drift or retries - Local models (Llama 3.1 8B / Phi-3) became much more reliable Repo: https://github.com/universal-tool-calling-protocol/code-mode Curious whether others have seen…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Context Gateway▲220We built an open-source proxy that sits between coding agents (Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) and the LLM, compressing tool outputs before they enter the context window. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFZ6MPrwjw#t=9s. Motivation: Agents are terrible at managing context. A single file read or grep can dump thousands of tokens into the window, most of it noise. This isn't just expensive — it actively degrades quality. Long-context benchmarks consistently show steep accuracy drops as context grows (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 eval goes from 97.2% at 32k to 36.6% at 1M…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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LLMWare▲358Dev tool to make AI apps to deploy privately or locally
2024 · llmware.ai · its alternatives →
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So, it feels like this should exist. But I couldn't find it. So I tried to build it. Agentflow lets you run complex LLM workflows from a simple JSON file. This can be as little as a list of tasks. Tasks can include variables, so you can reuse workflows for different outputs by providing different variable values. They can also include custom functions, so you can go beyond text generation to do anything you want to write a function for. Someone might say: "Why not just use ChatGPT?" Among other reasons, I'd say that you can't template a workflow with ChatGPT, trigger it with different…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, we’re building an open specification that lets agents discover and invoke APIs with natural language, built on the OpenAPI standard. agents.json clearly defines the contract between LLMs and API as a standard that's open, observable, and replicable. Here’s a walkthrough of how it works: https://youtu.be/kby2Wdt2Dtk?si=59xGCDy48Zzwr7ND. There’s 2 parts to this: 1. An agents.json file describes how to link API calls together into outcome-based tools for LLMs. This file sits alongside an OpenAPI file. 2. The agents.json SDK loads agents.json files as tools for an LLM that…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! We launched bloop 10 weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35236275) and received a huge amount of feedback (both positive + constructive). We've undertaken a rewrite of the core search framework, which now acts as an LLM agent, significantly improving the number of queries that can be successfully answered. There's a bunch of hype surrounding LLM agents, but we're positive this is one of the first implementations of an agent that can deliver immediate value for engineers working on existing projects, especially larger ones. We'll do a full write up of how the…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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YourGPT 2.0▲215Today we are launching YourGPT 2.0, an update focused on making support, sales, and operational workflows work together more smoothly in one system. This release improves how workflows are built, how the platform connects to external tools, and how context is maintained across long, multi-channel interactions. AI Studio now makes it much easier to create and refine workflows. You can describe the process you want in natural language and the system generates the full workflow for you. It can also help debug issues by showing what happened at each step and explaining where things went off…
Nov 2025 · yourgpt.ai · its alternatives →
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Hey HN – Gregor & Magnus here again. A few months ago, we launched Browser Use (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43173378), which let LLMs perform tasks in the browser using natural language prompts. It was great for one-off tasks like booking flights or finding products—but we soon realized enterprises have somewhat different needs: They typically have one workflow with dynamic variables (e.g., filling out a form and downloading a PDF) that they want to reliably run a million times without breaking. Pure LLM agents were slow, expensive, and unpredictable for these…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Gapflow.io▲141Spam filter, autoreply & forwarding for Webflow native Forms
2025 · gapflow.io · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
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Heym▲83Self-hosted AI workflow automation with agents, RAG, and MCP
Apr 2026 · heym.run · its alternatives →
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Hello HN, I’ve been building AI agents lately and ran into a common "Context Bloat" problem. When an agent has 20+ skills, stuffing every system prompt, reference doc, and tool definition into a single request quickly hits token limits and degrades model performance (the "lost in the middle" problem). To solve this, I built OpenSkills, an open-source SDK that implements a Progressive Disclosure Architecture for agent skills. The Core Concept: Instead of loading everything upfront, OpenSkills splits a skill into three layers: Layer 1 (Metadata): Light-weight tags and triggers (always loaded…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! We just released a new library for building LLM-powered applications: @axflow/models. It is part of a larger suite of libraries we're developing for TypeScript developers working with generative AI. This library provides the simplest APIs for 1) invoking the most popular LLM and embedding models (openai, anthropic, cohere, huggingface, etc.) 2) streaming LLM responses to clients, including augmenting the streams with additional arbitrary data and 3) building client-side applications with React hooks. @axflow/models has zero dependencies and is built using only the…
2023 · docs.axflow.dev · its alternatives →
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I recently built a small open-source tool to benchmark different LLM API endpoints — including OpenAI, Claude, and self-hosted models (like llama.cpp). It runs a configurable number of test requests and reports two key metrics: • First-token latency (ms): How long it takes for the first token to appear • Output speed (tokens/sec): Overall output fluency Demo: https://llmapitest.com/ Code: https://github.com/qjr87/llm-api-test The goal is to provide a simple, visual, and reproducible way to evaluate performance across different LLM providers, including…
2025 · llmapitest.com · its alternatives →
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Henry, Matt and James here – we’re building an open source toolkit that makes it easy to integrate an LLM-powered copilot that talks to your API into software products. It works by calling API endpoints which you choose to expose to it. This lets the chatbot complete tasks within your software in response to natural language queries. It’s also open source, so you don’t have to send user data to another 3rd party. We support Llama 2, but we haven’t fine-tuned Llama 2 yet (coming soon) so highest accuracy is seen with GPT-4 or fine-tuned GPT-3.5 (much faster). We started working together 2…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! I’m excited to share ControlFlow, our new open-source framework for building agentic workflows. ControlFlow is built around a core opinion that LLMs perform really well on small, well-defined tasks and run off the rails otherwise. I know that may seem obvious, but the key insight is that if you compose enough of these small tasks into a structured workflow, you can recover the kind of complex behaviors we associate with autonomous AIs, without sacrificing control or observability at each step. It ends up feeling a lot like writing a traditional software workflow. With ControlFlow you:…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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The context manager and skills library for marketing teams
Apr 2026 · promptr.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Run it: OPENROUTER_API_KEY="sk" npx bff-eval --demo We built a tool to help people take LLM outputs and easily grade them / eval them to know how good an assistant response is. We've built a number of LLM apps, and while we could ship decent tech demos, we were disappointed with how they'd perform over time. We worked with a few companies who had the same problem, and found out scientifically building prompts and evals is far from a solved problem... writing these things feels more like directing a play than coding. Inspired by Anthropic's constitutional ai concepts, and amazing…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Recently featured in a LangChain blog https://blog.langchain.dev/empowering-development-with-flowt... , use LLMs to construct an API first runnable workflow with an IDE experience.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Current AI-assisted CLI tools are often part of larger systems and work better on Linux. I built llm-term to address these. It's a Rust-based tool that compiles into a single binary file. You only need to download the binary, add it to your PATH, and configure your OpenAI key to get started. While llm-term offers an option for gpt-4o, it works great with gpt-4o-mini. So it's not costly. I appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Stefan here from superglue and today I’d like to share a new benchmark we’ve just open sourced: an Agent-API Benchmark, in which we test how well LLMs handle APIs. We gave LLMs API documentation and asked them to write code that makes actual API calls. Things like "create a Stripe customer" or "send a Slack message". We're not testing if they can use SDKs; we're testing if they can write raw HTTP requests (with proper auth, headers, body formatting) that actually work when executed against real API endpoints and can extract relevant information from that response. tl:dr: LLMs suck at…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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