AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Hopper
Hi HN, we’re Sai and Aayush, and we’re building Hypercubic (https://www.hypercubic.ai/), bringing AI tools to the mainframe and COBOL world. (We did a Launch HN last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45877517.) Today we’re launching Hopper, an agentic development environment for mainframes. You can download it here: https://www.hypercubic.ai/hopper, and you can also request access and immediately get a mainframe user account to play with. There's also a video runthrough at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q81L5DcfBvE.…
Hopper is an agentic development environment designed for mainframe and COBOL systems. It brings AI tools to legacy mainframe platforms that power critical infrastructure in banking, payments, insurance, and government… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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Blocks▲448Hi HN, We just launched Blocks - an AI platform where anyone can build custom work apps and AI agents in minutes, no coding required. We’re seeing a shift in how software is built and used. With AI, software isn’t just about tracking processes anymore - it can actively help people get work done. The problem is that most teams still face 2 options: either buy off-the-shelf tools that never quite fit, or invest a lot of time and money into custom development. Neither works well. Blocks is the third option. It’s an AI-native platform where teams can create apps and AI agents for their workflows…
2025 · blocks.diy · its alternatives →
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Hello everyone. I've been working on this experimental editor called Huzzah. I've been working almost exclusively with coding agents since January of this year, and over the past few months I began to feel utterly exhausted by them. They're great, but I'm finding it more and more tedious to write full sentences for every change I want. Not only that, but it seems there's a complexity limit for codebases - beyond a certain point the agent begins confusing itself. I'd like to go back to writing code, but I don't want to go all the way back to fully manual coding. So I've come up with this…
Aug 2026 · danielvaughn.dev · its alternatives →
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Tonkotsu▲386Hey HN, I’m Derek, part of a small team of ex-Facebook engineers and designer building Tonkotsu. We strongly believe that the future of software development requires every developer to become the tech lead of a team of agents. That shift requires new tools and workflows that go beyond existing IDEs or terminal agents. Tonkotsu is our take on that next-gen tool. It’s a desktop app that lets developers plan technical work, delegate many coding tasks in parallel, and then review the diffs — all in one place. Our main difference is that we tightly integrate this plan > delegate > verify loop and…
Jan 2026 · tonkotsu.ai · its alternatives →
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Budibase 2.0▲381Hi there, Mike here from Budibase. We’ve recently launched AI Agents into Beta, alongside our existing open-source app-building and automation tools. We built Budibase Agents for teams that want to leverage AI within real-world workflows, using their own LLMs, data, and APIs. Because of this, our Agents can be powered by any LLM with an OpenAI-compatible API, including open-source and locally-hosted models. This means you can build Agents that connect to your existing toolstack, within your own environment. Some more details: - Agents' behavior is configured using natural language…
2022 · budibase.com · its alternatives →
- 6Verdent Deck▲295
Hi HN! We just launched Verdent, an AI coding agent that actually plans before it codes, tests its own work, and delivers production-ready results without you having to clean up after it. tl;dr Check out the website [1] and read the story [2] - The problem: Current AI tools dump code and leave you to debug. You ask for "build a login endpoint" and get a passwordless JWT mess that doesn't fit your project. We've talked to hundreds of engineers who are frustrated with having to micromanage AI output. - What we built: Verdent works more like a senior engineer. It asks clarifying questions…
2025 · verdent.ai · its alternatives →
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Viberia▲146Hey 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 →
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When we asked developers from large engineering teams, almost everyone is using Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot. But adoption is still inconsistent. Some of us would have 15 agents running in Claude Code at the same time; some would still refuse to use any of them and write code manually. There's a fragmented AI development problem: - Five developers building similar features, and all of them start from scratch - No way to share "here's how we prompt AI to follow our architecture" - No trail of how the AI changes were generated - People leave the company, so does the their knowledge Aviator…
2025 · aviator.co · its alternatives →
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Hello HN, I don't post on here much, but wanted to get some eyes on a new project I'm just launching. I think we definitely need one more AI code agent.. I'm a long-term C++ dev, and over 30+ years I've created some successful audio dev tools (JUCE, the Tracktion DAW, the Cmajor DSP language). All of these came from me getting annoyed with something I had to use, and deciding to have a go at my own take on whatever it was. So Juggler is my attempt at an AI code agent, after spending too many hours loving what the models could do, but hating the CLI experience, and having some opinions of…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Clark▲264Hey folks, I've been building Clark solo, with the aim to match Manus agent (I really like it!) in features and capabilities, but also in its relentless ability to just complete tasks while using browser, computer etc. So far I think I've achieved 1:1 core feature parity: 1) computer use agent 2) browser use in same thread 3) wide and deep research - clark calls clark 4) integration with google tools Would love to have community feedback and for you to try it out, a couple thousand people already using it daily for very broad use cases. You can use this referral link, that hopefully works…
Jul 2026 · clarkchat.com · its alternatives →
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I think graph is a wrong abstraction for building AI agents. Just look at how incredibly hard it is to make routing using LangGraph - conditional edges are a mess. I built Laminar Flow to solve a common frustration with traditional workflow engines - the rigid need to predefine all node connections. Instead of static DAGs, Flow uses a dynamic task queue system that lets workflows evolve at runtime. Flow is built on 3 core principles: * Concurrent Execution - Tasks run in parallel automatically * Dynamic Scheduling - Tasks can schedule new tasks at runtime * Smart Dependencies - Tasks can…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Open-source collaborative agentic workspace for data teams
Sep 2026 · alkera.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! My name is Olaf, I work at CircleCI as a technology advisor in the CTO office, came in through the acquisition of my company Vamp.io (progressive delivery for microservices on k8s) in 2021. Wanted to hear the HN community feedback and thoughts on a project we think could be very interesting when adding AI coding agents to the SDLC and your CI pipelines. Our team at CircleCI built Chunk sidecars after repeatedly running into the same issue internally: by the time our CI catches a failure, the agent has already moved on and most of the useful context is gone. The basic idea of Chunk…
May 2026 · circleci.com · its alternatives →
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Leap▲112We just launched Leap, an AI developer agent that helps you build and deploy apps with real backends to your own AWS or GCP cloud. We built it because every AI app builder we tried fell short. They were fine for prototypes, but not for real systems. No support for proper backend infra, no isolated test environments, and sometimes shockingly no way to own your code. We build Leap to be more appropriate for developers: - Connect GitHub to put your code in a repo you control - Work with code generation using pull request–style revisions with diffs - Get Architecture diagrams and API docs for…
2025 · leap.new · its alternatives →
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Cosmic AI Agents▲145Hey HN, We're Cosmic (YC W19), a headless CMS. Today we're launching Team Agents and the Cosmic Agent. Team Agents are AI-powered team members that live in Slack, WhatsApp, and Telegram. They have names, roles, persistent memory, and real capabilities. Not chatbots. Not one-off prompts. Persistent agents that work alongside your team. Here's what they can do: CONTENT AGENTS write blog posts, landing pages, and marketing copy. They generate images, add SEO metadata, and publish directly to the CMS. Message them in Slack, get a finished post back. CODE AGENTS read your codebase, create…
Dec 2025 · cosmicjs.com · its alternatives →
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Boxes.devfree tier, from $19/mo▲112Hi HN, we’re Nick and Drew, and we’re building boxes.dev – the first cloud-only agentic dev environment (ADE) that gives every Codex and Claude Code agent its own cloud computer. We’re two engineers who previously built Gem (co-founder/CTO and first hire), and we spent the last year coding almost exclusively using Codex and Claude Code. It’s been a huge change to how we code, and it’s been exhilarating seeing the models keep getting better – but we eventually realized that developing on localhost was holding us back: - Git worktrees are clunky to set up and use for parallelizing work -…
Jun 2026 · boxes.dev · its alternatives →
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UiHub▲118Appaca is my third pivot. A couple of years ago, I started working on an idea on no-code platform that generates code. The goal is to help devs and agencies ship products faster for their clients. I went through Antler startup accelerator and got initial funding. I was working on the right problem, but wrong solution. Instead of no-code, I should have jumped into LLM a lot earlier. I felt defeated when Lovable, Base44, and Bolt came out strong, showing the world what LLMs can do in software development. No one cared about my product anymore. I pivoted my startup second time after that, to an…
2023 · appaca.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi all, this is Burak. When agents became a reality one of the first things I wanted to do was to automate building dashboards. The first, and the most obvious, wall that I ran into was that a lot of the tools were just driven by UI. This meant that without the agents handling browser UIs and whatnot, it wasn't possible to have the agents do that. In addition, it would be impossible to review any of the changes the agent would make. The first instinct there is to get your agent to build a React app for the dashboard. This works beautifully for the happy path, but I quickly ran into other…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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We built a computer use agent once and got it benchmarked at the 2nd position in the biggest benchmark for this field but in the process, we realized one thing, how outdated and inefficient these benchmarks are and how they don't truly capture how these tasks went. So we thought a community led benchmarking arena would be the way to go about. https://coarena.ai/. You just have to put in a task and two side by side windows with hidden models will show up and do the same task and at the end you vote which one did better(or none). We have a leaderboard where we rank all the…
Aug 2026 · coarena.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I’m Vincent from Aden. We spent 4 years building ERP automation for construction (PO/invoice reconciliation). We had real enterprise customers but hit a technical wall: Chatbots aren't for real work. Accountants don't want to chat; they want the ledger reconciled while they sleep. They want services, not tools. Existing agent frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT) failed in production - brittle, looping, and unable to handle messy data. General Computer Use (GCU) frameworks were even worse. My reflections: 1. The "Toy App" Ceiling & GCU Trap Most frameworks assume synchronous sessions.…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Velane▲95n8n is built for humans dragging nodes on a canvas. That breaks down at B2B scale (embedding in a product, multi-tenant scalability, etc). n8n does have an MCP server so agents can create workflows too, but it outputs raw JSON. That's fine for n8n's engine, but painful for a coding agent (or a human reviewing its output) to read, write, diff, or debug. I'm building an alternative where workflows are authored by a coding agent in [a more dev-legible format] instead of JSON blobs, and execute it at scale.
Jul 2026 · velane.sh · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, Automated research is the next big step in AI, with companies like OpenAI aiming to debut a fully automated researcher by 2028 (https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/20/1134438/openai-i...). However, there is a very real possibility that much of this corporate research will remain closed to the general public. To counter this, we spent the last month building Enlidea---a machine-to-machine ecosystem for open research. It's a decentralized research hub where autonomous agents propose hypotheses, stake bounties, execute code, and perform automated…
Mar 2026 · enlidea.com · its alternatives →
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Bleenk▲41I kept running into the same issue whenever starting a new project: the setup phase consumed more time than the actual feature work. Preparing boilerplate, restructuring directories, performing refactors, resolving dependency conflicts, and wiring framework logic consistently took hours before I could write meaningful code. Even with modern tooling, the early-stage workload was nearly identical across projects. To remove that bottleneck, I built Bleenk, an AI coding agent that operates directly on real repositories. Instead of generating isolated snippets, it performs multi-step…
Jan 2026 · bleenk.app · its alternatives →
- 24PC
Hey HN — 2 months ago we shared our first product with the HN community (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43362535). Despite receiving lots of traffic from HN, we didn’t see any traction or retention. One of our major takeaways was that our product was too complicated. So we’ve spent the last 2 months iterating towards a much more focused product that tries to do just one thing really well. Today, we’d like to share our second launch with HN. Our original idea was to help software engineers build high-quality LLM applications by integrating their domain knowledge into a…
2025 · withpi.ai · 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 →