nowfound

AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I built a smart proxy so your coding agent can run loose

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…

Trollbridge is an HTTP/HTTPS proxy that sits between coding agents and external services, letting developers control what their agents can access. It offers allow and deny lists for different HTTP verbs and endpoints… 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.

  1. 1
    Proxy 1.0▲718

    Your AI Assistant that actually gets things done

    2025 · convergence.ai · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol. Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day. A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship…

    Mar 2026 · georgelarson.me · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    We built an open-source proxy that sits between coding agents (Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) and the LLM, compressing tool outputs before they enter the context window. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFZ6MPrwjw#t=9s. Motivation: Agents are terrible at managing context. A single file read or grep can dump thousands of tokens into the window, most of it noise. This isn't just expensive — it actively degrades quality. Long-context benchmarks consistently show steep accuracy drops as context grows (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 eval goes from 97.2% at 32k to 36.6% at 1M…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Integuru▲161

    Hey HN! We’re Alan and Richard from Integuru (YC W24). We generate fast, reliable integrations for platforms lacking official APIs. About 2 years ago, we released the first agent that reverse-engineers network traffic to build integrations (https://github.com/Integuru-AI/Integuru). Since then, we’ve developed a new approach to reverse-engineer platforms’ source code directly. This solution also includes authentication support. Here’s a demo: https://youtu.be/4l2L8fILC2g?si=nbWbDiFrWZIWRPM7. Many AI products need to integrate with web apps, but platforms…

    May 2026 · integuru.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey HN! This is Adil, Salman and Jose and and we’re behind archgw [1]. An intelligent proxy server designed as an edge and AI gateway for agents - one that natively know how to handle prompts, not just network traffic. We’ve made several sweeping changes so sharing the project again. A bit of background on why we’ve built this project. Building AI agent demos is easy, but to create something production-ready there is a lot of repeat low-level plumbing work that everyone is doing. You’re applying guardrails to make sure unsafe or off-topic requests don’t get through. You’re clarifying vague…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    HTTP API for Claude Code, Goose, Aider, Gemini, Amp, and Codex - coder/agentapi

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    CtrlAI▲104

    Transparent proxy that secures AI agents with guardrails

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I've been experimenting with Claude Code, ChatGPT Agent, and OpenClaw to perform more open-ended tasks for me online. A big blocker I've hit on shopping and research tasks is the agent getting a key piece of info wrong. For example, in one case, my agent decided to add a brand I don't like to the cart because the site flagged it as almost sold out The HN crowd is probably pretty aware of the threats and can avoid them while browsing. But what about their agents? I tried prompting, but it was ineffective, because once the AI saw the threat, it polluted/distracted its context Looking at…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    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 →

  10. 10
    SuperHQ▲95

    Hey HN, I built SuperHQ, an app that lets you run coding agents in local sandboxes (powered by Shuru). No custom UI wrapping the agents, they run as CLI/TUI like they were designed to. It just provides you the tools most of us (okay, maybe just me?) needed for running multiple coding agents in parallel without worrying about breaking your system or work environment. Each agent runs in its own microVM. You mount your projects in, writes go to a tmpfs overlay so your host is never touched, and you get a unified diff view to accept or discard changes. API keys never enter the sandbox, they…

    Apr 2026 · superhq.ai · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    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 →

  12. 12

    At my last company, we connected Claude Code and Cursor to almost all our internal services via MCP. It made the team incredibly fast, but we hit a wall: permissions. If you give an agent "Read Only" access, it can’t actually fix anything. If you give it "Write" access, it’s only a matter of time before a hallucination or a bad prompt results in a deleted database or a nuked production bucket. We had a few "close calls" that convinced us that simply reducing IAM permissions makes agents useless. I built Armour (https://github.com/fuushyn/armour) to solve this. It’s a…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    To power the firewalling for our agents so that they couldn't contact arbitrary services, I build netfence. It's like Envoy but for eBPF filters. It allows you to define different DNS-based rules that are resolved in a local daemon to IPs, then pushed to the eBPF filter to allow traffic. By doing it this way, we can still allow DNS-defined rules, but prevent contacting random IPs. There's also no network performance penalty, since it's just DNS lookups and eBPF filters referencing memory. It also means you don't have to tamper with the base image, which the agent could potentially manipulate…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Prefix any AI coding agent with `greywall --` for a live feed of every read, write, and connection. Allow by default; ask mode and deny rules opt-in via config. Linux and macOS.

    Mar 2026 · greywall.io · its alternatives →

  15. 15FL

    Hi HN! We just launched Codacy Guardrails, an IDE extension with a CLI for code analysis and MCP server that enforces security & quality rules on AI-generated code in real-time. It hooks into AI coding assistants (like VS Code Agent Mode, Cursor, Windsurf), silently scanning and fixing AI-suggested code that has vulnerabilities or violates your coding standards, while the code it’s being generated. We built this because coding agents can be a double-edged sword. They do boost productivity, but can easily introduce insecure or non-compliant code. One recent research team at NYU found that 40%…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  16. 16
    Aether▲26

    Since coding agents like Claude Code and Codex came out, I've been pretty obsessed with them. It's hard not to when you're getting a 20x discount on inference. I've also been frustrated by them a lot. I hated walking around with my laptop lid open while connected to a hotspot on my phone, having to tediously accept commands so I don't lose my root directory, and running out of RAM when running multiple agents that were spinning up dev servers in different worktrees at once. A lot of people would say existing cloud agents are the solution to this, as none of the above problems apply to any…

    Jul 2026 · runaether.dev · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    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 →

  18. 18

    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 →

  19. 19

    Runtime firewall for AI coding agents.

    Aug 2026 · contextfence.dev · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hi HN! I’m Bobbie Chen, Product Manager for Fraud and Security at Stytch. Today we are launching IsAgent: a lightweight JavaScript SDK that tries to detect agentic traffic on the frontend, enabling you to build agent-friendly experiences. You can try it out on our site at IsAgent.dev or install it via: npm install @stytch/is-agent (requires registration to use) Try viewing IsAgent.dev as a human. Then try using ChatGPT Agent to view the page: "Visit IsAgent.dev, wait a few seconds, and then take a screenshot." (or, toggle the switcher at the top) We built this because we’ve had a lot…

    2025 · isagent.dev · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Your agent team, on your machine. Open-source harness for multi-user Claude agents. - yaodub/cast

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Tool-agnostic TypeScript library for observing coding agent sessions. Built-in Cursor provider, extensible to Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. - vtemian/agentprobe

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    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 →

  24. 24

    Coding agents craft arbitrary code so securing them is more complicated than red-teaming. We post trained a cyber-security small llm, changed how it reasons and supplemented our controls using program analysis techniques such as inline reference monitoring to outperform GPT5.5-xhigh on hard benchmarks like LinuxArena and SleightBench. Free product available at harden.run and full benchmarks in the blog post.

    Aug 2026 · harden.run · its alternatives →

Also compare

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 →