AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I built a web tool to see and edit what an AI thinks before it answers
I run a small AI lab and playground and got super excited about Anthropics paper "Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models" (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html) It talks about how they use a tool they call a Jacobian Lens to view inside the middle layers of LLM while it's working before it commits to a word (token). I wanted to see if I could get a version of this running on the open models and to my surprise it worked! I ran some experiments with it and build a public facing free tool anyone can use with your…
This tool lets users view and modify what language models are thinking in their internal layers before generating answers. Built on research from Anthropic's Jacobian Lens technique, it applies this interpretability… 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
I spent a lot of time and money on this rather big side project of mine that attempts to replicate the mechanistic interpretability research on proprietary LLMs that was quite popular this year and produced great research papers by Anthropic [1], OpenAI [2] and Deepmind [3]. I am quite proud of this project and since I consider myself the target audience for HackerNews did I think that maybe some of you would appreciate this open research replication as well. Happy to answer any questions or face any feedback. Cheers [1]…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Circuit Tracer▲457Anthropic's open tools to see how AI thinks
2025 · anthropic.com · its alternatives →
- 3
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Claude Opus 4.7 is Anthropic's most capable generally available model, released April 16, 2026. It outperforms Opus 4.6, GPT-5.4, and Gemini 3.1 Pro on key benchmarks including agentic coding, multidisciplinary reasoning, scaled tool use, and agentic computer use. It is benchmarked below Claude Mythos Preview — which remains restricted to Project Glasswing partners. https://vucense.com/ai-intelligence/ai-tools/claude-opus-4-7...
2025 · anthropic.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Enter a topic and get a learning mind map generated by an LLM with links to learn more about each subtopic. You can use it with local models (through Ollama) or external models. If you have any feedback, please share it! Hope it's useful Demo: https://youtu.be/Y-9He-tG3aM
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Opper AI▲229Hey HN! After the Car Wash Test post got quite a big discussion going (400+ comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128138), I spent the past few weeks building a tool so anyone can run these kinds of questions and get structured results. No signup and free to use. You type a question, define answer options, pick up to 50 models at a time from a pool of 200+, and they all answer independently under identical conditions. No system prompt, structured output, same setup for every model. You can also run a debate round where models see each other's reasoning and get a…
Jul 2026 · opper.ai · its alternatives →
- 7
- 8
ThoughtDAG indexes local agent conversations across tools, finds the turns relevant to your work, and turns them into editable context graphs.
Aug 2026 · chenxiachan.github.io · its alternatives →
- 9
Hi HN! Run it: OPENROUTER_API_KEY="sk" npx bff-eval --demo We built a tool to help people take LLM outputs and easily grade them / eval them to know how good an assistant response is. We've built a number of LLM apps, and while we could ship decent tech demos, we were disappointed with how they'd perform over time. We worked with a few companies who had the same problem, and found out scientifically building prompts and evals is far from a solved problem... writing these things feels more like directing a play than coding. Inspired by Anthropic's constitutional ai concepts, and amazing…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
To know what models don't say out loud. Contribute to ninjahawk/Subtext development by creating an account on GitHub.
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
Humans vs LLMs▲138Hi HN, We just launched [AI Page Ready](https://aipageready.com) — a tool to check if your web pages are discoverable and understandable by AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. It runs 40+ checks across six areas: Discoverability & Crawlability, Structured Data & Semantics, Content Quality, Answer-Ready Formatting, Accessibility & Rendering, and Deep AI LLM-specific checks. Would love your feedback — especially if you work in eCommerce, SEO, content, SaaS, or are trying to get traffic from AI tools. (Also open to ideas on what else to add to the tool!)
2025 · aipageready.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Hi HN! I want to share our latest project at NEXA AI. We developed AI agent foundation models designed to transform how developers create AI agent powered apps. One major challenge we've observed with current human-computer interactions is that many simple, one-step tasks become unnecessarily complex, multi-step workflows due to limitations of current GUIs. AI agents can solve this, but existing AI agent models are slow and costly. To tackle these issues, we built lightweight AI agent models based on our Octopus V2, small language models for function calling (You can learn more about our…
2024 · nexa4ai.com · its alternatives →
- 13
I’ve been building LLM tooling for a small VC fund and found myself explaining the same mental model over and over to non-technical people around me: how a stateless LLM becomes a chatbot, how tool use works, what an agent is mechanically, and why context windows shape all of it. I never found a guide that covered that full chain at the level I wanted, so I wrote one. It’s nine short chapters, each building on the last. Deliberately simplified: the goal is a useful mental model, not a textbook. Feedback, corrections, and contributions welcome: github.com/ymyke/aiaiai
Apr 2026 · aiaiai.guide · its alternatives →
- 14
HelpingAI▲22Hey HN, We’re the team behind HelpingAI, and we’ve been experimenting with ways to make LLM reasoning faster and more efficient, especially for complex tasks like math problems, coding questions, and logic puzzles. During a fine-tuning session of our older reasoning model, a bug accidentally introduced a think tag mid-response. Rather than break the model, it created a chain-of-thought style intermediate step — and the model got better. That bug inspired us to explore what we now call Intermediate Reasoning. We scaled this up by fine-tuning Qwen3-14B on 3 trillion tokens of…
2025 · helpingai.co · its alternatives →
- 15IB
Hey HN, I've been working on something cool that I wanted to share with you all. It's called Viewpoint, an analytics tool for LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic models, and Gemini. The idea came from the constant flood of new LLM models and the need to figure out which ones work best for my projects without breaking the bank. With viewpoint, I can track token usage, costs, latency(WIP), and traffic over time, making it easier to compare different models and see which ones perform best and save money. The tool works asynchronously, so it doesn't add any latency to your LLM requests, and you have…
2024 · viewpointhq.com · its alternatives →
- 16FT
Hey HN! When implementing an AI-powered feature for a project, we—and many people we've talked to—often reach a point where we have to choose an AI model but aren’t sure which one best fits our constraints or where to even start. Unfortunately, the advice to "just use chatgpt" is not always a good one. What if I want an open-source model? What languages does it support? What about context window size or the number of parameters? There are thousands of AI models already out there and many of them are perfect for certain problems. That’s why we’ve carved out this part of our product as a free…
2024 · app.elementera.ca · its alternatives →
- 17
Auto Mind▲13I’ve always been curious about big, complex topics; things like quantum computing, AI ethics, or philosophy, but I’d often get stuck at the very beginning. I’d open a dozen tabs, skim Wikipedia, and still not feel like I had a good mental model of what I was even looking at. So I built a tool to help with that. You type in any topic, and it generates a simple mind map; just a few high-level subtopics to start. Then, as you click and explore those nodes, it expands outward with more specific, connected concepts. The map grows with your curiosity. It’s intentionally lightweight and…
2025 · automind.hackyourgrade.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Excited to share a project I’ve been building for months! Would love to receive honest feedback :) My motivation: AI is clearly going to be the interface for data. But earlier attempts (text-to-SQL, etc.) fell short — they treated it like magic. The space has matured: teams now realize that AI + data needs structure, context, and rules. So I built a product to help teams deliver “chat with data” solutions fast with full control and observability (agent tracing, quality scores, etc) — am I wrong? The product allows you to connect any LLM to any data source with centralized context…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hello everyone. I built an AI-based toolset to help me with language learning. I wanted to be able to easily generate very specific study content and get rapid feedback on my writing. Unlike most language apps, it doesn’t actually try to teach you a language. Instead, it’s a collection of tools for people at an intermediate level who already have a learning process It’s particularly great for Anki users. There a demo video on the login page, and I set up anonymous auth for people who want to test it without creating an account. Feedback and bug reports welcome.
2025 · drillapp.xyz · its alternatives →
- 20
HN, first things first: one year ago you make me believe in my opensource AI project, and I'm forever grateful[1]. I am back with Beam - a technique to use diverse LLMs to generate responses, and Merge them - all within a snappy UX. I am no researcher, so you'll find a dark-mode blog, and not a light-mode PDF on arxiv :) Blog, open code, and live hosted demo, all published. You can use Beam early on in a chat, where looking at more options is key to be more confident in the answer, but also when no answer if perfect, but fusing many together will work well. Take a look and let me know what…
2024 · big-agi.com · its alternatives →
- 21MR
The most common failures for production agents are behavioral: looping, reasoning leakage, user frustration, and more. Using a frontier model like GPT or Sonnet to judge every turn is too expensive and slow to run at scale. To solve this, we built Reflexes: semantic signals from agent traces, served fast and cheap over API. Built on custom kernels and a custom inference engine forked from vLLM. Under the hood, it is a small LLM architected around multi-head inference. Small models need to be trained for specific tasks, but running 50 separate small models on the same input for 50 tasks makes…
Jun 2026 · its alternatives →
- 22
Hi HN! I built this tool, because Large Language Models are hallucinating their asses off and I wanted to test just how bad it is with a topic I know best - myself. I'm sure there are other egos out there who google themselves and essentially this is the new googling yourself. It's early beta, so lots of room for improvement of course.
2023 · haveibeenencoded.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Hi HN, I'm thrilled to share with you think, a command-line tool that I developed while diving back into the programming scene. For the past few years, my focus had shifted from hands-on programming to managerial roles, my last one being at Affirm (I started Affirm's Polish office). However, I recently left my job to revisit my passion for coding and see if I could still write code that works. Not to mention that with what is currently going on in AI if you are a developer this probably the best possible time for a sabbatical in human history :) My first attempt was with LangChain, but I…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
When I do real research — reading papers, books, or trying to understand a complex topic — it never happens in one sitting. I explore a bit, get interrupted, come back days later, ask new questions, find new sources, and gradually build understanding. Existing AI tools are great at answering questions once, but they reset context every time. Notes tools preserve text, but not understanding — they don’t help me reconnect ideas, revisit sources, or see how my thinking has evolved. I built Kerns to sit in between. Kerns is an AI research workspace designed for research that unfolds over time.…
2025 · kerns.ai · 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 →