Alternatives
Products that do what Former – Open-source Cursor for SQL does
Hey everyone, Elliott and Matty here. We’ve built Former, an open source AI-first SQL Editor. The repo is available at https://github.com/former-labs/former and our home page is https://formerlabs.com/. We built Former to provide an AI-first development environment for working with data. We’ve seen incredible applications of AI to the software engineering space with Cursor, Windsurf, and others, but we believe that focussing on a product just for data teams is needed for their unique workflows. Former is starting as a full SQL editor experience with an…
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While Cursor is picking off and a lot of developers trying it out. I believe that a vast amount of beginners still struggle with a lot of basics and how to use the app. So I have compiled a few demos from the docs, and X tweets, and recorded a few myself so beginners can see how the cursor works. The website is open source, and my first time contributing, so if there are any mistakes or improvements to be made please let me know! thanks :)
2025 · cursorintro.com
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Hey HN community! Over the past year, AI copilots like Cursor and Windsurf have fueled a dramatic shift in software engineering workflows. And yet, many technical users in adjacent fields like data science and analytics have been unable to reap the rewards of this revolution. It turns out that the existing tools are a poor match for analytical workloads. Beyond that Cursor and similar tools have very poor support for Jupyter notebooks, data science is a fundamentally different discipline from software engineering and we believe it requires a correspondingly different tool. We're excited to…
Sep 2025 · sphinx.ai
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Mar 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN, I'm Namanyay and I've been using Cursor since 2 years, but it seems to make mistakes as the project size grows. This caused me to have to repeat myself a lot and it used to break my flow. I realized it's because Cursor (and other AI tools) are not able to keep an overview of the project. Plus, Cursor does not have a "memory" layer to remember important things that the user has already mentioned. I solved this by building an open-source MCP which maintains project and memory information within the user's file system. It's simple and installation takes 30 seconds. Github:…
2025
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Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com
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I used to run a startup back in 2018 where I built highly relevant prospect leads for companies manually. This is an Ai agent that does what I used to do manually - source, curate, enrich, qualify leads, and find the right decision makers with contact information. The Ai agent builds a custom database of leads automatically We just upgraded the new UI as well as made our agents smarter. Check out the new website: https://kurationai.com/ Demo: https://youtu.be/KmlGnP3dzkE?si=N6FZwNubi70hS4nJ Use "PHK15" to get 15% off on any plan. Thanks, Aurelien, Founder,…
Sep 2025 · kurationai.com
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Hey HN, A few friends and I have spent the past 6 years or so developing a way to write data transformation code in a way that can easily adapt to changes in logic or data elements both upstream and downstream without the need major refactoring, regression testing, or re-orchestration. We decided to open source the project about two months ago and published a CLI tool after we realized how big of a task it was to take on incumbents like stored procedures, dbt, and psyspark. It is early days for our community and we are looking to grow and engage with others to poke holes and contribute…
2024 · github.com
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Build you own query planner guide. I've been developing this guide for some time now, and I'm excited to finally share it with you. This project includes: - a SQL-like language - a fully-functional SQL planner/optimizer - a minimal query executor (for demoing purpose) GitHub: https://github.com/tuannh982/query-planner-guide
2024 · github.com
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Hey Hackernews! We’ve launched our new AI-powered report builder and we’re eager to get feedback. We set this up with some demo retail data, but this can plug into any SQL database to provide customer reporting through natural language. I’ve seen this type of feature demo well on other platforms, but never actually work, so we’re putting this out into the world for anyone to actually try themselves. We’re leveraging OpenAI under the hood and have made a ton of improvements to the prompt engineering to configure the reports (OpenAI doesn’t actually write the underlying SQL). Click into a…
2025 · custom.explo.co
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Hello everyone, While working on other projects, I found myself always having to connect and use SELECT * to see dummy entries or new users. I favored the CLI for monitoring my database entries, especially because I was testing and just adding dummy users + our first normal users in projects. So it became a bit tiring always having to connect to postgres, mysql and give select * queries from the CLI.
2024 · github.com
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Hey HN, we built a pure-Lua Neovim plugin that brings Cursor-style next-edit predictions to Neovim, running entirely on local models. Tab to accept, Esc to reject. GitHub: https://github.com/BlinkResearchLabs/blink-edit.nvim We're Blink Research Labs (https://github.com/BlinkResearchLabs) - an open research collective building AI coding tools in the open. Our philosophy is simple: if it's not open, it's not research; if it's not fast, it's not usable. We think the best AI coding tools shouldn't be locked behind $20/month subscriptions or closed-source…
Jan 2026 · github.com
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My name is Elliott. For the last three years, I’ve been building a DevOps platform on the best-in-class open source platforms (Kubernetes, Elixir, PostgreSQL, Grafana, etc.). The goal is to give engineering teams access to a modern DevOps infrastructure without needing to have a full SRE/DevOps team dedicated. It’s also open source /fair source - all the source code is here → https://github.com/batteries-included/batteries-included I shipped a public beta today and would love to hear initial reactions, thoughts, and feedback. Here are details of the platform: *…
2024 · batteriesincl.com
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Hi HN, I'm building Cursor Search, a Chrome extension that brings AI-powered search capabilities right to your cursor. I'd love to get your thoughts and feedback. What it does: Activates with a keyboard shortcut Displays a search bar that follows your cursor Provides instant AI-generated answers without leaving your current page Tech stack: Frontend: JavaScript, React (next js) Backend: Node.js AI: OpenAI's GPT-3.5 (planning to implement local models in the future) Hosting: Cloudflare DB: Supabase Why I built it: As a developer, I often found myself constantly switching tabs to look up…
2024 · cursorsearch.com
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Nov 2025 · playcode.io
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I built an open source desktop AI assistant after getting frustrated with how brittle most tools feel once questions go beyond basic Q and A. The goal was to explore whether an assistant could reliably handle interview style interactions such as system design discussions, multi step coding problems, and deeper follow up questioning without hiding behavior behind a closed SaaS. The assistant supports both cloud and local LLMs, uses a bring your own API key model, and is intentionally opinionated so behavior stays predictable under pressure. Most of the work went into managing context, follow…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN! We just shipped the public beta of the hosted version of Mathesar, our open source “intuitive spreadsheet UI, full PostgreSQL power” project. Until now, using Mathesar meant installing and running it yourself. Now you can use Mathesar for free without having to maintain your own infrastructure at https://mathesar.cloud. Mathesar Cloud is run by the Mathesar maintainers through the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that already maintains the open source project. We’re committed to ALWAYS keeping Mathesar 100% open source (no open core), nonprofit, and treat self-hosting as a first-class…
Jun 2026 · mathesar.cloud
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Hi HN! I'm a 15-year-old dev in Hong Kong who built ExcelTutor.pro. It's an AI assistant that generates Excel formulas, SQL queries, and automation scripts from plain English. Key features: * Infinite usage - no query limits * Formula generation - converts natural language to Excel formulas * SQL Query Builder - creates database queries from prompts * Automation Scripts - automates repetitive spreadsheet tasks Unlike manual solutions, it handles things like: =XLOOKUP(A2,Inventory!B:B,Inventory!F:F,"Not Found") in seconds. No more trial-and-error or Stack Overflow digging. You can: - Describe…
2025 · exceltutor.pro
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This repository gives you everything needed to supercharge your Cursor or Windsurf IDE with advanced agentic AI capabilities—similar to the $500/month Devin—but at a fraction of the cost. In under a minute, you’ll gain: * Automated planning and self-evolution, so your AI “thinks before it acts” and learns from mistakes * Extended tool usage, including web browsing, search engine queries, and LLM-driven text/image analysis * [Experimental] Multi-agent collaboration, with o1 doing the planning, and regular Claude/GPT-4o doing the execution.
2025 · github.com
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We built a structured search engine for Twitter called Bird SQL, available at https://www.perplexity.ai/sql. Our search interface uses OpenAI Codex to translate natural language to SQL. Our backend then verifies the SQL, executes it, and displays the results on the web app. This makes large structured datasets like a scrape of Twitter easy for anyone to explore. As background, while working on text-to-SQL as a general problem, we came to believe one of its most powerful applications is as a search tool because: - SQL is hard to write by hand and prone to errors - It allows you…
2022 · perplexity.ai
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