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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Forest Friends Zine

Learn to build system evals for your LLM-driven app

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Forest Friends Zine launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1WW

    Hey all! @sridatta and I wrote a book/zine called Forest Friends on system evals for LLM-driven apps. But it's a bit more whimsical, a bit more visual, and very much inspired by the meme of LLMs being a shoggoth polished into a smiley face with RLHF. LLM system evals are important as companies move past the flashy AI demos to reliable production apps. System evals keep coming up as the answer for what you "should do", but it's not exactly a standard part of the software engineering toolkit. So we pulled from @sridatta's seven years as a research engineer at Google, plus a ton of best…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Gradient▲153

    Developer API for building private LLMs that you own

    2023 · hyperagent.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    AI prompt engineering business model guide

    2023 · shushantlakhyani.gumroad.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Build LLMs powered by GPT & your own data

    2023 · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Build complex LLM applications fast and manage them at scale

    2023 · tryvelos.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Find your best LLM for a local inference

    2023 · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    I have been working in AI space for a while now, first at FAANG with ML since 2021, then with LLM in start-ups since early 2023. I think LLM Application development is extremely iterative, more so than any other types of development. This is because to improve an LLM application performance (accuracy, hallucinations, latency, cost), you need to try various combinations of LLM models, prompt templates (e.g., few-shot, chain-of-thought), prompt context with different RAG architecture, different agent architecture, and more. There are thousands of possible combinations and you need a process…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    DemoGPT▲94

    Auto generative AI app generator with the power of Llama 2

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Test-driven development for LLMs

    2023 · benchllm.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Trails▲81

    Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…

    Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  11. 11AE

    I've been working on a site [1] to give people control of their LLM workflows through AI evals - automated checks that, once defined, let you move fast without regressions and cut through hype with proof. That one-liner is aimed at software engineers, but I've spent my career helping cross-functional teams collaborate, and that's really what this is about. AI agents make powerful workflows very plausible, but only if teams can grow them incrementally without losing control - no vendor lock-in, no discipline silos, no blind trust in outputs. The site tries to meet different audiences where…

    Feb 2026 · ai-evals.io · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.

    2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    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 →

  14. 14

    Design, deploy, and optimize Generative AI Apps

    2023 · klu.ai · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    all-in-one LLM evaluation platform

    2024 · confident-ai.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    The LLM Evaluation Framework. Contribute to confident-ai/deepeval development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    I’ve spent the past 10 years working on AI in finance, with much of that time focused on building evaluation systems for production environments. As agents become more widely adopted, more software engineering and product people have start building them. But I’ve noticed that many teams are not yet fluent in systematic evaluation, or in the processes needed to keep agent quality high over time. For large organizations, that gap is rarely the bottleneck due to dedicated teams. But after speaking with a number of startups, it became clear that building strong, up-to-date evals is much harder…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Spelltest framework simulates conversations between AI ‘synthetic users' in an environment to test and refine LLM-based applications. It ensures your app converse with utmost accuracy and relevance. Post-chat, Spelltest assesses responses, providing qualitative and quantitative feedback on performance. Suitable for both chat and completion modes. When to use: - After modifying your prompt. - When your LLM provider updates. - As a CI step for you repo. All feedback and collaborations appreciated!

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Build source-backed knowledge bases with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or any AI agent. Export Project Knowledge Checkpoints, apply personal specialist review methods, shape Ideas, and promote approved work into Projects.

    Jun 2026 · llm-wiki.net · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Low-code LLM apps builder

    2024 · windyflo.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hey HN! When I started looking into LLMs and agents for software development and introducing them at work, I quickly realised that a person new to the topic faces a real barrage: - all the hype (AGI, engineers getting replaced by AI etc.) - conflicting opinions in virtually every discussion—for every person saying they’ve 10x-ed their productivity, there is a comment decrying LLMs as an utter failure - a lot of jargon (MoE, MCP, RAG, distillation, quantisation etc. etc.) - a profusion of models, IDEs/IDE extensions, CLI agents, other tools etc. Sorting through all of this can be quite…

    2025 · nohypeai.dev · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Discover, test, and integrate APIs/LLMs to accelerate agents

    2025 · astropods.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23TA
  24. 24

    LLM Distillation Tool

    2025 · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →