Alternatives
Products that do what I built an open-source, local-first alternative to LangSmith does
Hey HN. Built this because LangSmith needs a cloud account just to see my own traces. pip install opensmith — everything shows up at localhost:7823. SQLite. No accounts. No config. Fully offline. 800+ downloads in 2 days. Surprised me. Would love honest feedback from this community.
- 1LA
I've been working on Lurnby for 2 years. It's kind of like a mix of pocket + kindle + anki. It lets you => add add epubs, pdfs, and web articles to the app => highlight and add comments => tag and organize highlights => review them with a spaced repetition system Today I made the decision to open source the project. I'm passionate about helping other people learn to learn better and hope that this will allow a lot more innovation in the tool and the space. I'm very new to open source and development in general really, but looking forward to receiving the guidance of the community.
2022 · github.com
- 2SF
I've built a thing! A few months back someone (not me) posted my Mac app Droplings to HN. It was incredibly rough around the edges back then, and in alpha. Well, it's finished now and sparkles like crazy. Please take a look! :)
2012 · servus.io
- 3SL
So a while ago I was thinking it would be neat to build a site that had the most absolute utility. The idea I came up with was a site to store those little protips that are super useful, if you know them ahead of time. I hired a guy to work on it with me, and ClueDB was born: http://cluedb.com/ Please give it a whirl (it uses Twitter auth as login but doesn't tweet anything) and tell me what you think! (Various trivia: My first try at a project coded by someone else and "product managed" by me. Runs on Flask + MongoDB. Also, this is totally unrelated to my startup.)
2011
- 4CA
2020 · github.com
- 5FG
Built this as a guide for users of my hosting service. Everything here was run on a real instance. The Mesa/LLVM dependency is genuinely painful on a 1GB disk, and I couldn't find a way around it. WindowMaker won the window manager battle purely on dependency chain cleanliness; it pulls in no GTK, no Python, no audio stack. Happy to answer questions about any of the choices made. Screenshots at the end.
Mar 2026 · tierhive.com
- 6MS
I have finally convinced my son to take a step forward to publish something in public domain. As he is learning Python these days, he made a scraper to download Cambridge past papers (GCSE / IGCSE). If you like it, encourage the kid by pressing the Star button :) https://github.com/UsamaKashif/CambridgePastPapersDownloader
2019
- 7IC
Read an article about analyzing Garmin data with AI. Sounded great — except I didn't want to send my health data to any cloud service. So I asked Claude to write me 2-3 scripts and a dashboard. This escalated a bit. 30 days and 20$ later I have this: A local-first Garmin archive with interactive HTML dashboards, Excel exports, weather and pollen context, AES-256 encrypted token storage, and a self-healing data pipeline with 515 automated tests. Windows desktop app, no terminal needed. Nothing leaves your machine. I never wrote a line of Python. I understood the problems and made the…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 8SA
Hi, this has been a labor of love over the last few days =) Can't wait to hear you feedback and of course AMA!
2023 · blog.airsequel.com
- 9IM
Try it at: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com No sign up, totally free - no download. Let me know what you think. Prior art exists (brow.sh) but I wasn't satisfied with their graphical take. I wanted the raw, old skool terminal days of the early internet - BBS, and old green phosphor library comptuers - but running the modern web, with all the bells and jingle jangle whistles (JavaScript, etc). No funding, no VC, just 100% raw terminal fun. Not sure how long the demo will last, but try it out.
Jul 2026
- 10MM
I kept on reading you guys on how to do it, how not to do it. On January I started with thinkpython, learn python the hard way, mit course on programming, and every other python material I found. You just need to find the best resourse for YOU. I did Udacity's CS253 course, got my certificate and made my MVP! If your one of those guys like me, just get your ideas out there and the project will push you forward. Farm management software in South America is broken. We still have cd and downloadable updates. We've seen www.farmlogs.com and www.farmeron.com for USA and Europe. How about…
2012
- 11IM
I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com
- 12MC
I've been building mmerch.com alone for roughly the past two years part time. I'm really hoping I can get some reviews/critiques on it. Thanks! mmerch.com
2013
- 13M2
2019 · reddit.com
- 14IM
- 15IP
2020 · bitbucket.org
- 16PS
I was debating when to post this, but I've been using it locally in a variety of situations for several months and I think it's pretty stable (and usable!). There are more features I'd like to add, but I wanted to see if there was much interest before spending much more time on it right now.
2025 · github.com
- 17MA
Hey any astrophysicist reading hn there? Was sick in august (yeah isn't that nice) and made a small python fits table viewer for the terminal with textual. It would be great to have people try it so if you find any issue I can improve it. If you have no FITS file but would like to try regardless there are some test file in `/test`. Ciao!
2024 · github.com
- 18IB
After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
- 19UI
Hey everyone! I am excited to share updates on four of my & my teams' open-source projects that take large-scale search systems to the next level: USearch, UForm, UCall, and StringZilla. These projects are designed to work seamlessly together, end-to-end—covering everything from indexing and AI to storage and networking. And yeah, they're optimized for x86 AVX2/512 and Arm NEON/SVE hardware. USearch [1]: Think of it as Meta FAISS on steroids. It's now quicker, supports clustering of any granularity, and offers multi-index lookups. Plus, it's got more native bindings than probably…
2023 · usearch-images.com
- 20OI
Hey HN, I've been using OpenClaw for a few months as my local LLM gateway. It was genuinely fun — the convenience of routing multiple models through a single endpoint is hard to beat. But along the way, I stumbled upon a few surprises that made me uncomfortable: - Config files scattered in unexpected places (~/.openclaw, ~/.clawdbot, and more) - Background processes that respawn after termination - Logs that quietly accumulate without rotation - Cached data persisting long after I thought I'd removed it None of this is necessarily malicious, but when I decided to move on, I wanted…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 21MF
Hi! Long time reader, first time submitter. I've finallllyy got my first webapp online. It's been a long time coming, I started it over a year ago and just been an hour here, a couple of hours here, and a period of a couple of months of nothing. I first wrote it as a way to learn some python it sort of grew to fill a need I had. It's at a point now where I'd LOVE some feedback as I am going round in circules. Please, it's free, just hit the home page, plugin in a name/email and url you want to links checked on. If you use the name 'DeleteMe' I will remove the account after a week, so feel…
2012
- 22TI
Hello HN, While browsing the Python docs yesterday, I discovered that the latest 3.12 version has added support for a `python3 -m sqlite3` interactive shell. I looked into the source code, and its implementation was simple, giving me an idea: Why not hook the beautiful llm library by simonw into such an interactive shell, and thus have direct LLM support in SQLite? Without writing a C extension, build a shared object and all that fuss. Well, now you can `pip install tsellm` and do just that. demo gif:…
2024 · github.com
- 23WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 24IB
I had 14,000 photos sitting on a drive and wanted an excuse to play with local vision models and Elixir/Phoenix. I originally tried to get LLaVA to tell me if a photo was 'good' or matched my style, but quickly learned that LLMs have terrible taste. I ended up demoting the LLM to just extract metadata, and built a custom CLIP/Ridge Regression pipeline to actually learn my preferences based on how I rate things. The stack is Phoenix/Oban on the orchestrator side, and Python/FastAPI/Instructor for the AI workers. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture,…
Apr 2026 · qwelian.com
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