Alternatives
Products that do what I built a new software primitive. It replaces AI screenshot agents does
I built a Rust binary (~700KB, two dependencies) that snaps onto any Windows application, continuously reads its UI Automation accessibility tree into a SQLite database, and lets external processes control the app via SQL INSERT. The core insight: every GUI application already describes itself as structured text through the accessibility layer (built for screen readers since 1997). Every major AI lab is taking screenshots of this and running vision models on it. DirectShell just reads the text directly. What it does: - Reads every button, field, menu item into a queryable SQLite DB…
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I've been building computer-use tools for a while, and I quietly launched this about a month ago (122 Stars on GH). I figured it was worth sharing here. Over the last few months, a lot of computer-use agents have come out: Codex, Claude Code, CUA, and others. Most of them seem to work roughly like this: 1. Take a screenshot 2. Have the model predict pixel coordinates 3. Click x,y 4. Take another screenshot 5. Repeat That works, but it's slow, expensive in tokens, and fragile. If the UI shifts a few pixels, things break. And the model still doesn't know what any element actually is. But the…
May 2026 · github.com
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Libretto (https://libretto.sh) is a Skill+CLI that makes it easy for your coding agent to generate deterministic browser automations and debug existing ones. Key shift is going from “give an agent a prompt at runtime and hope it figures things out” to: “Use coding agents to generate real scripts you can inspect, run, and debug”. Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cDpIntmHAM. Docs start at https://libretto.sh/docs/get-started/introduction. We spent a year building and maintaining browser automations for EHR and payer portal…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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We wrote our inference engine on Rust, it is faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases. Your feedback is very welcomed. Written from scratch with idea that you can add support of any kernel and platform.
2025 · github.com
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2014 · github.com
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I've been building Pneuma, a desktop computing environment where software doesn't need to exist before you need it. There are no pre-installed applications. You boot to a blank screen with a prompt. You describe what you want: a CPU monitor, a game, a notes app, a data visualizer and a working program materializes in seconds. Once generated, agents persist. You can reuse them, they can communicate with each other through IPC, and you can share them through a community agent store. The idea isn't that everything is disposable. It's that creation is instant and the barrier to having exactly…
Mar 2026 · pneuma.computer
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I'm an "ideas person" who messes around with AI on a low budget. I got tired of watching my tokens vanish and context windows filling up while agents fumbled around trying to find the right thing. Agents don't flail like they used to with shell tools, but there are still weak/blind spots and back-and-forth episodes — especially when using tools in combination/sequence. So I built "tilth" today. Or rather, AI built it — every line is Opus 4.6. I spent a lot of my precious tokens getting it to "not shit" (at least several of the different vendors' AI overlords assure me it's not…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN! We posted Rivet Actors here previously [1] as an open-source alternative to Cloudflare Durable Objects. Today we've released SQLite storage for actors (Apache 2.0). Every actor gets its own SQLite database. This means you can have millions of independent databases: one for each agent, tenant, user, or document. Useful for: - AI agents: per-agent DB for message history, state, embeddings - Multi-tenant SaaS: real per-tenant isolation, no RLS hacks - Collaborative documents: each document gets its own database with built-in multiplayer - Per-user databases: isolated, scales…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, Founder here. We built Pica, an open-source platform in Rust to enable agentic AI with three main focus areas: - Access to APIs and tools: Universal SDKs that let AI agents use thousands of external actions without blowing up your context window. - Visibility and traceability: Full audit logs of every decision/action to ensure transparency and accountability. - Alignment with human intentions: Seamless guardrails for autonomous tasks; e.g., restricting certain email actions to human approval. Why this matters: As autonomy in AI grows, we need robust solutions for trust and…
2025 · picaos.com
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May 2026 · github.com
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2025 · spiceai.org
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2024 · github.com
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Hey HN! I really like local apps for their simplicity and privacy and hate paying Saas bills and I wanted a way to start automating my life with AI so I started building Anything. Anything is built on Tauri so the front end is React and the "backend" is Rust. It's 100% local & 100% doesn't ask you to spin up docker to use. Another core goal of the app is to get away from "package bloat" you see in other general purpose AI oss projects where they have a package.json that is 300 lines long ( more on that later. ) Oh btw I suck at Rust! I learned Rust while building this so the code is _not…
2024 · github.com
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That's a bold claim. But I genuinely feel like I might have actually solved computer use (demo: https://x.com/mdlahfir/status/2088109763783700827?s=20) For context, I've been building agent-desktop (Inspired by agent-browser by Vercel Labs), an automation CLI for desktop apps. It's like Playwright but for desktops, not just native, but for Chromium apps as well. Trust me, yes, Chromium apps whose accessibility tree is dense. MacOS is GA; I'm almost close to launching for Windows and Linux! So, how did I solve it? Basically interoperability. The biggest issue with…
22d ago · github.com
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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
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