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AI · alternatives · 2026

HA

24 alternatives to Herd – A Go sidecar to stop stateful processes Puppeteer/LLMs from OOM

Hey HN. I'm an engineering student at Waterloo building stateful AI agents, and I kept hitting the same wall: whenever my Python scripts crashed or dropped a connection, the underlying Puppeteer or Ollama processes would just sit there orphaned, eating RAM until the node OOM-killed itself. Standard load balancers break sticky sessions, and passive HTTP timeouts are too slow for cleanup. I couldn't find a good local process pool that actually cleaned up dead stateful sessions reliably, so I built Herd in Go. It uses a persistent stream (gRPC/Unix sockets) strictly as a dead-man's switch.…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    I built LocalGPT over 4 nights as a Rust reimagining of the OpenClaw assistant pattern (markdown-based persistent memory, autonomous heartbeat tasks, skills system). It compiles to a single ~27MB binary — no Node.js, Docker, or Python required. Key features: - Persistent memory via markdown files (MEMORY, HEARTBEAT, SOUL markdown files) — compatible with OpenClaw's format - Full-text search (SQLite FTS5) + semantic search (local embeddings, no API key needed) - Autonomous heartbeat runner that checks tasks on a configurable interval - CLI + web interface + desktop GUI - Multi-provider:…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hi HN! We’re the team behind Fiddler, and we recently built an Agent Cache feature. It works by capturing an LLM request/response pair and, once caching is enabled, serving subsequent matching calls locally so duplicate requests never hit the provider. It’s meant to reduce three pains that show up together in agent development: token cost, feedback-loop latency, and output non-determinism. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

    Aug 2026 · telerik.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Viberia▲146

    Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…

    May 2026 · getviberia.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Spin up secure sandboxes in ~100 ms

    Nov 2025 · hopx.ai · its alternatives →

  5. 5AD

    Aqueduct: A cohesive server-side framework for Dart, including controllers, routing, OAuth 2.0, ORM, database migrations and CLI.

    2017 · aqueduct.io · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    I do fullstack dev for work and side projects and recently moved everything to a couple VPSs on hetzner. Great setup, low cost, but one thing kept bugging me, how do I know if something is down without manually sshing in all the time? I tried the grafana + prometheus stack but the configuration time and seeing it use more resources than my actual apps was rough. Tried some smaller solutions too but nothing felt right. So I said screw it and built exactly what I wanted. tori is a single go binary that runs on your server, reads host metrics from /proc and /sys, monitors containers…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    A finite-state machine library for the Go programming language - calebwin/go-sm

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Clam▲11

    A secure OpenClaw AI sidekick with a fully customizable UI

    Mar 2026 · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hey folks, wanted to show this off and get feedback. Still early/experimental but there are quite a few concepts I'm excited about here. This project came about while writing a program in Go and loving its approach to concurrency. Being a long-time Rubyist I immediately started to think about what similar concepts might look like in Ruby. I set out with two main design constraints: 1. Lightweight: I didn't want routines to be backed by fibers or threads. Having been involved some in the async project (https://github.com/socketry/async), I had some experience using…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Author here. Lately I haven't been able to be on my laptop much and I dislike the usual ssh from mobile experience. So I'm sharing this small personal project I built to monitor and manage my agents from mobile with some scrappy notifications built in as well in case anyone else might find it useful

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Doors: Server-driven UI framework + runtime for building stateful, reactive web applications in Go. Some highlights: * Front-end framework capabilities in server-side Go. Reactive state primitives, dynamic routing, composable components. * No public API layer. No endpoint design needed, private temporal transport is handled under the hood. * Unified control flow. No context switch between back-end/front-end. * Integrated web stack. Bundle assets, build scripts, serve private files, automate CSP, and ship in one binary. How it works: Go server is UI runtime: web application runs on a…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Love OpenClaw? Now ship it to production. Built in Rust.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Hey HN, I've been using OpenClaw for a few months as my local LLM gateway. It was genuinely fun — the convenience of routing multiple models through a single endpoint is hard to beat. But along the way, I stumbled upon a few surprises that made me uncomfortable: - Config files scattered in unexpected places (~/.openclaw, ~/.clawdbot, and more) - Background processes that respawn after termination - Logs that quietly accumulate without rotation - Cached data persisting long after I thought I'd removed it None of this is necessarily malicious, but when I decided to move on, I wanted…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Gomaa — Autonomous Agent Memory OS. Persistent memory system for AI agents with Obsidian vault integration, hybrid RRF search, knowledge graphs, security gates, and MCP server. - M4F-S/gomaa

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    What it does: A Postman/Insomnia-like TUI for building, sending, and organizing HTTP/GraphQL/gRPC/WebSocket requests. Supports saved collections stored as YAML/JSON files, environment variables, auth presets, response diffing, and request history. Why it's needed: This is the single largest gap in the Go TUI ecosystem. The abandoned wuzz (10.5k stars) proved massive demand for terminal HTTP inspection, but it's been dead for years. Posting (Python, ~6k stars) and ATAC (Rust, ~2k stars) are thriving alternatives in other languages. The Go options — gostman and go-gurl…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    A Herdr-native agent orchestrator for Pi. In addition to Pi itself, it can run Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and more as subagents in isolated, copy-on-write Git worktrees. - electric-dragon-80000v/pi-cowboy

    6d ago · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    AI Agents: Stop guessing why they fail. Rewind memory.

    Jan 2026 · blickstate.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    I'd like to share a project I've been working on for the past few months. It's a distributed workflow engine written entirely in Go. Some highlights: * Tasks are executed in a Docker container * Can run stand-alone or distributed * Highly extensible * Able to enforce limits (CPU/RAM) per task * Web UI Would love the get your feedback on it, and find out if this could be useful.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    I built DevClaw, an OpenClaw plugin that turns each Telegram group into an isolated, autonomous dev team: planner/orchestrator, DEVs, and QA all running on their own. I use it for all my development now. Issues on GitLab/GitHub are the single source of truth, and three things compound to save around 70% on tokens: model tiering (Haiku for typos, Opus for architecture), session reuse across tasks, and token-free scheduling that burns zero LLM calls for orchestration. Please try it and give some feedback. Also keen to hear from anyone running autonomous coding agents, especially what…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20LL

    Some time ago I built a simple app to run swarms of coding agents — I call it fleet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256389). It's based on centralized beads with a Python orchestrator and can run any coder (Claude, agy, Codex). Recently I added a UI to manage the whole agent lifecycle: adding new tasks, monitoring running ones, and a chat interface built on MCP with a centralized SQLite DB. From the UI I can spawn agents to run in any directory, define dependencies on other tasks, and specify which coder/model should do the job. Today I can run 10–15 agents…

    Jun 2026 · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    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 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Dont let your agent run wild

    Jul 2026 · sidewisp.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    LLM observability is an absolute must-have for anyone running something in prod (or prod-like). While all the observability startups are great, you're essentially sending all your OpenAI usage history - prompts, generations, chats - to a random third party. So this script deploys a basic proxy in your Azure account, catches all incoming OpenAI requests, stores logs in your own resource group, and comes with visualizations premade (charts, timelines, chat history, cost estimation, etc). Thanks for any thoughts and feedback!

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24AC

    Built an AI code reviewer using Letta (Python) that I can call natively from Rust applications. The interesting part: real-time streaming works perfectly across the language boundary with zero hassle using RunAgent. The agent runs in Python with persistent memory, leverages the best in house agentic memory management with Letta (Pythonic AI agent framework), and my rust code just uses it (kinda) natively, though Letta has no Rust bindings. And, streaming works like magic. No FFI, no complex bridges - just native async/streaming that feels like calling any Rust librar, but without…

    2025 · medium.com · 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 →