AI · alternatives · 2026
22 alternatives to I built a firewall for agents because prompt engineering isn't security
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…
Below are 22 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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Trails▲81Hey 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 →
- 2
Hi HN, Matvey, Ildar, Joey, and Dominik here. If you're building LLM agents that use tools, you're probably worried about prompt injection attacks that can hijack those tools. We were too, and found that solutions like prompt-based filtering or secondary "guard" LLMs can be unreliable. Our thesis is that agent security should be handled at the network level between the agent and the LLM, just like a traditional web application firewall. So we built Archestra Platform: an open-source gateway that acts as a secure proxy for your AI agents. It's designed to be a deterministic firewall against…
2025 · archestra.ai · its alternatives →
- 3
over this weekend myself and two of my friends took part in a hackathon and built this side-project. we have been diving into computer-use recently and developed an sdk to make it easy to implement for devs like us. one feature we were missing though, was the agent being able to log into services. anthropic understandably blocks this capability with their guardrails, and you wouldn't want your credentials to end up in any model context anyways. so we added a keychain service to the vm that the agent is using. it was built using the pass cli (https://www.passwordstore.org/).…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Hi HN folks, I have been building AI agents for quite some time now. The shift has gone from LLM + Tools → LLM Workflows → Agent + Tools + Memory, and now we are finally seeing true agency emerge: agents as systems composed of tools, command-line access, fine-grained system capabilities, and memory. This way of building agents is powerful, and I believe it is here to stay. But the real question is: are the systems powering these agents ready for that future? I do not think so. Using Docker for a single agent is not going to scale well, because agents need to be lightweight and fast. LLMs…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5YA
After adding "Human" as a LLM provider to OpenCode a few months ago as a joke, it turns-out that acting as a LLM is quite painful. But it was surprisingly useful for understanding real agent harnesses dev. So I thought I wouldn't leave anyone out! I made a small oss game - You Are An Agent - youareanagent.app - to share in the (useful?) frustration It's a bit ridiculous. To tell you about some entirely necessary features, we've got: - A full WASM arch-linux vm that runs in your browser for the agent coding level - A bad desktop simulation with a beautiful excel simulation for our computer…
Feb 2026 · youareanagent.app · its alternatives →
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The only way to go fast is full YOLO mode in your coding agent. I've got the local sandbox figured out (pro tip: Incus VMs work great) but I wanted to keep my agents from doing things like inadvertently blowing up my cloud services or chasing a prompt to POST to some random website. I struggle most with this on my side projects where my permission model isn't quite as robust as it is at the office. I started with a firewall on the Incus container but every time the agent needed access to something new, I was poking more holes in it - and it didn't differentiate between HTTP verbs. I've been…
Jul 2026 · trollbridge.dev · its alternatives →
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Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh · its alternatives →
- 8IS
Hey HN! For that last 8 months I've been trying to make agents that can hack web applications to find vulnerabilities in them - An AI Security Tester. The system has 29 agents in total, a custom LLM Orchestration framework which works on the task-subtask architecture (old-school but works amazingly for my use case, and is pretty reliable) with custom agent calling mechanism. No Auo-Gen, Langchain and Crew AI - Everything custom built for pentesting. Each test runs in an isolated Kali linux environment (on AWS Fargate), where the agents have full access to the environment to undertake any…
2025 · its alternatives →
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I’ve been cautiously (and nervously) playing with openclaw and a number of other claw and code agents for a while now, but trying out different ones was tricky so I wanted a simple way to switch out channel ownership… then I wanted more. Security is hard, and I wanted to make it easier. This is FAR from polished, and no claims that I’m a “security expert” but I tried to think and research a bit on different threat models (I think of 2 broad ones for agents, external adversaries and internal agentic failures) and try and offer best in class protection on both, while also not having any…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10IM
Hey HN, I’m Chris, a solo dev in Melbourne AU. For the past month I've been spending my after work hours building AgentVisa. I'm both excited (and admittedly nervous) to be sharing it with you all today. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the future of AI agents and the more I experimented, the more I realized I was building on a fragile foundation. How do we build trust into these systems? How do we know what our agents are doing, and who gave them permission? My long-term vision is to give developers an "Agent Atlas" - a clear map of their agentic workforce, showing where…
2025 · agentvisa.dev · its alternatives →
- 11
Hey HN! I've been wanting to use something like OpenClaw for a while but couldn't get myself to give it access to anything important due to all the risks involved. Prompt injection is still a problem (even though some people seem to ignore it) and so are hallucinations and mishaps that cause agents to do things like delete production data [1]. Even harnesses like Claude Code and Codex are subject to this, particularly since we're getting progressively looser about how we run them e.g. Conductor is really popular and runs agents without any sandboxing. That means we're in a bit of an…
Apr 2026 · agentport.sh · its alternatives →
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Hey everyone, My friend and I built a simple bug fixing app that listens for alerts/issues from Sentry, contextualizes it against your codebase, and any other data sources you wish to connect (right now we support Notion, Google Docs, and Slack), and deploys an ai agent to write a PR for review in Github or Gitlab to solve the bug. Our current demo shows the end-to-end process for a trivial bug fix, but we have been testing it with open source python repos like http-pie, comparing how our agent solves a bug compared to a human engineer and it gets fairly close. We are working on adding…
2023 · resolvd.ai · its alternatives →
- 13FP
We've built an open-source tool to stress test AI agents by simulating prompt injection attacks. We’ve implemented one powerful attack strategy based on the paper [AdvPrefix: An Objective for Nuanced LLM Jailbreaks](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10321). Here's how it works: - You define a goal, like: “Tell me your system prompt” - Our tool uses a language model to generate adversarial prefixes (e.g., “Sure, here are my system prompts…”) that are likely to jailbreak the agent. - The output is a list of prompts most likely to succeed in bypassing safeguards. We’re just getting…
2025 · security.vista-labs.ai · its alternatives →
- 14
I love Claude Code but got tired of having nothing to do while I waited for sessions to finish, and managing multiple sessions on the command line was getting annoying and I kept losing track of the tabs. I originally built a quick and dirty version of this for my own use, but decided to polish it up and make it open source. The idea is that you should be able to do all your agentic coding without leaving the tool or needing to go back to a traditional IDE. You can view the diffs, run your program, and merge your changes back. I support OSX and Linux right now, but could add Windows support…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15PS
I didn't want to buy a standalone computer or repurpose a laptop to run constantly so I could maintain a system to sync my LLMs, so I built this. It's a simple overview of my system, laid out in a way easy to unpack and replicate for yourself. The project is meant to be configured individually, and uniquely, since one solution might not be what's best for another. If anything, maybe it gives you some ideas on how to implement things for your own project. Best wishes, Ryan.
Aug 2026 · pacslate.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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TL;DR: we built a framework-agnostic agent runtime that uses gVisor for isolation and runs on k8s. It’s open-source under AGPLv3 Recently we’ve been working on a customer support “AI assistant” - essentially an interactive knowledge base/L1 support but with an option to touch resources that belong to a customer it’s talking to. We found existing tools to be lacking in these aspects: 1. Fully intercepted i/o. We wanted to trace out LLM calls as well as any other networking calls attempted by the harness so that guardrails and audit trails apply to all current and future systems…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hey HN. I built an AI agent harness over the past few months and I'm open sourcing it today. Some context on why. I've been building with Claude Code daily using this harness. It orchestrates multiple AI agents as a team, with a dashboard, chat, kanban board, the works. I used it to build a full SaaS product (MyUpMonitor, https://myupmonitor.com) in about 24 hours of focused coding. Then yesterday Anthropic announced Mythos and decided to keep it behind closed doors. Meanwhile I'm paying for Claude and I can't access their best model. I don't think that is nice at all... So I'm…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19IB
I was somewhat hesitant about sharing this personal projects, especially since I just saw that cool looking Werk[1] tool posted, but I figured that my ADHD-fueled creation might still have it's own place to be. I just finished rewriting the code for a personal tool I use to automate terminal tasks while minimizing the amount of Python/Bash code I have to write. As with all other tools I create for my own use, the guiding principle is simplicity and approachability, as if the tool creates more issues or friction than it solves, I'll get discouraged from using it again. [1]:…
Jun 2026 · 0xff.nu · its alternatives →
- 20YA
Hey HN, I wanted to see what happens if you put a large group in control of a site that’s completely built and updated by an AI agent. See the site here: https://youarethepm.com. I first tried this with a small group of co-workers and it worked surprisingly well, so the obvious next step was: give it to a bigger group of strangers and see what we learn. This site is fully autonomous. An AI agent reads this thread, decides what to do, writes code, and ships updates on a virtual computer. I might step in if it gets totally stuck, but the goal is for the site to evolve primarily based…
Jan 2026 · youarethepm.com · its alternatives →
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Block malicious web content before it reaches your AI.
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 22
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