AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I recreated Windows XP as my portfolio
Years ago I stumbled across a basic version of this concept and it stuck with me. I knew if I was ever going to take on such a project, it would need to be flawless, but without coding experience it was just another idea that would never happen. By the end of 2024, as AI coding tools exploded everywhere, I finally had a way to make it real. I started from zero knowledge and spent months collaborating with AI agents as a learning experience. Every pixel and every function went through me. The AI translated what I asked for into code, but every decision was human. I didn't use existing OS…
This is a browser-based recreation of Windows XP built from scratch as a portfolio project. The creator, who had no prior coding experience, collaborated with AI coding tools over several months to build a fully… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Projekt▲128I'm a product designer & front-end engineer who's been building with AI coding agents for the past year and working on teams launching AI products even longer. I always found the tools to be powerful, but the workflow around them lacking. I was constantly bouncing between terminals, browsers, file managers, and a rotating cast of IDEs. Nothing ever hit the right balance of simplicity and control. So, like any completely over-burdened dad and leader, I built my own. Projekt is an agent-agnostic workspace that consolidates everything into one place. Bring your own key, bring your own agent —…
Mar 2026 · getprojekt.com · its alternatives →
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AI Browser▲143Hey HN! I built Browser AI after getting frustrated with the official Playwright MCP server in Claude Code. If you've used it, you know the pain: - 20+ separate tools that Claude has to juggle (click, fill, navigate, wait_for_selector, etc.) - Context window explosions from verbose screenshot data and DOM snapshots - Constant tool selection errors where Claude picks the wrong tool or forgets parameters Browser AI wraps Playwright MCP with a single natural language interface. Instead of Claude managing dozens of tools, you get one: browser_ai.execute. Just tell it what you want in plain…
Nov 2025 · aibrowser.surf · its alternatives →
- 3LightLayer▲94
Hey HN. We're Mus and Isaac - creators of LightLayer. We've been outputting a ton more code since using agentic dev tools. It's been great. But we're starting to see a new bottleneck emerge that's no longer writing the actual code: reviewing code. We’d love to hear from folks here if they’re feeling the inertia of code reviews a lot more these days with the surge in development velocity. For us, it was the reason we decided to pivot what we were working on before, and go full-time on building a workspace aimed at bringing the code review experience up to speed for the AI era. To be clear:…
2025 · lightlayer.dev · its alternatives →
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TaskShell▲86I initially built this for myself but some folks asked me to open access to it. Let me explain what I built and why. I'm a product designer who transitioned from only designing to building complete software products myself and I found myself using AI coding agents literally every day. I started with cursor, then codex and claude code, then kilo code, and then moved to opencode. The only thing AI agents couldn't get done for me was to keep track of my todos and tasks for all my projects. I ended up vibe coding a todo app separately or using apps like TickTick. The main issue with separate…
Apr 2026 · taskshell.app · its alternatives →
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I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.
2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! I'm Matt, founder of Frontend Mentor (https://www.frontendmentor.io). We provide front-end and full-stack coding challenges with professional Figma designs, enabling developers to build real projects and grow their skills. The problem: AI coding tools are great, but they can work against you when you're learning. Ask Copilot or Cursor to help with a beginner project, and they'll happily write the whole thing for you. You ship the project, but you didn't really learn anything. What we did: We added AGENTS.md (and CLAUDE.md) files to every challenge's starter code. These files…
2018 · frontendmentor.io · its alternatives →
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- 8IG
I recently quit my job at a decent TTS company I was working for as a software developer advocate to pursue what I have always enjoyed doing, which is creating software that is helpful. Before and after quitting my job, I have always found it expensive and time-consuming to hire a designer that can come up with a decent logo for my software, and as a software engineer, I really enjoy coding, not designing. One day, I made a pretty bold move to design a logo, and it took me a whole day to come up with a logo that looks nice. This is the reason I built Owl AI, a logo generator that generates…
2024 · app.owlai.art · its alternatives →
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Hey everyone, I’m the maintainer of the popular screenshot-to-code repo on Github (46k+ stars). When Claude Opus was released, I thought to myself what if you could send in a video of yourself using a website or app, would the LLM be able to build it as a functional prototype? To my surprise, it worked quite well. Here are two examples: * In this video, you can see the AI replicating Google with auto-complete suggestions and a search results page (failed at putting the results on a separate page). https://streamable.com/s24pq6 * Here, we show it a multi-step form…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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InstawebAI▲13Hello HN! A few weeks ago I tried looking for a way to quickly create business sites without spending hours designing or using generic templates. AI seemed to be the answer. After trying multiple AI builders I couldn't find one that was easy to use and didn't use templates. I wanted something truly dynamic a tool that can create a website for anything fully AI driven design decisions based on my description. So I created one. A truly dynamic AI web builder.(Powered by GPT4 with styling done in tailwind css). Try it out here https://www.instawebai.com
2024 · instawebai.com · its alternatives →
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I've been experimenting with ways to increase AI adoption for non-technical people. Basically, all companies are pushing for AI because it's all over the news and they feel left behind but most people have no clue where to start. I think 90% of people (ie non coders) are sufficiently well served by using cowork instead of claude code or something similar. If we can get people from sales, customer support, marketing, etc to collaborate with skills and cowork to form a company brain, I think it's gold. So I think there's opportunity for the community to share skills that work well for 1000s of…
Jun 2026 · claudinho.xyz · its alternatives →
- 12IM
Hi HN! Solo developer here. 10 days ago, I started building this after spending countless hours copying/pasting marketing sections and fighting to keep them consistent with our design system. I wondered: "What if AI could understand our design system and generate React components that actually match it?" Current progress (10 days in): - Can generate hero sections that follow your design tokens - Uses your actual component variants and styles - Works with Next.js, Tailwind, shadcn/ui It's very early days, but I'm excited to share it with other devs who: - Are tired of rebuilding…
2024 · robustlaunch.com · its alternatives →
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I started four years ago on what we now call Nexlayer. Back then, there were no AI coding agents. We were just trying to make shipping real production apps suck less. Then Chatgpt happened. Cursor happened. Claude Code happened. Suddenly people were building apps in 10 minutes but still spending weeks trying to make it real. We realized: the cloud wasn't built for agents. It was built for humans who know infrastructure. So we rebuilt it. Nexlayer is an agent-native cloud platform. Your coding agent connects via MCP, you say "deploy this to nexlayer," and it's live. The MCP auto-detects your…
2024 · nexlayer.com · its alternatives →
- 15IB
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 →
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I've spent 30 years making games as both a hobby and profession, working with Unity, Unreal, GameMaker, RPG Maker, Ren'Py, Godot, and many others. A few years ago, I attended a game dev meetup and met dozens of people with incredible passion for making games – but they were struggling because they lacked technical knowledge. That's when I decided to build a tool that anyone could use to create games. I started developing this as a side project, eventually raised ~$100K through crowdfunding in Korea, then secured ~$200K in angel investment. I assembled a team, and we've been building this…
2025 · play-maker.io · its alternatives →
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Founder here. I built NEO, an AI agent designed specifically for AI and ML engineering workflows, after repeatedly hitting the same wall with existing tools: they work for short, linear tasks, but fall apart once workflows become long-running, stateful, and feedback-driven. In real ML work, you don’t just generate code and move on. You explore data, train models, evaluate results, adjust assumptions, rerun experiments, compare metrics, generate artifacts, and iterate; often over hours or days. Most modern coding agents already go beyond single prompts. They can plan steps, write files, run…
Jan 2026 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I'm Oliver. I've been in the software and cloud engineering industry for a long time (28 years), and this past year genuinely changed how I think about coding. The bottleneck isn’t syntax anymore. It’s clarity. I now spend more time describing what I want, testing results, and refining instructions than writing code line by line. The spark for this project came from a presentation I gave at my son’s school in December, 2025. I expected mild interest. Instead, kids were completely engaged — hands up, pitching game ideas, iterating in real time. That made me question something I’d…
Jan 2026 · pixelarcade.studio · its alternatives →
- 19PA
Hi hn, Its been a while since my kid has been dreaming to make videogames, as you know, the entry bar is high, too many technical details are involved. A few months ago, we started making games, we have tried many different ways, from dragging blocks to write code with a high-level library to make it simple, it is still too much work. Getting into the AI boat, I decided to give it a try for making games, turns out that it works super nicely, still, you still have many technical concepts involved, what language should the game be written in? where do you store the file/assets? how do you…
2024 · playcodeai.com · its alternatives →
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It works by using open AIs new gpt-image API, image processing algorithms and some prompt engineering. Still has some limitations, but can already generate ready to use assets.
2025 · pixel-gen.ai · its alternatives →
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I've been a photons-on-glass filmmaker for over ten years, and I've been developing ArtCraft for myself, my friends, and my colleagues. All of my film school friends have a lot of ambition, but the production pyramid doesn't allow individual talent to shine easily. 10,000 students go to film school, yet only a handful get to helm projects they want with full autonomy - and almost never at the blockbuster budget levels that would afford the creative vision they want. There's a lot of nepotism, too. AI is the personal computer moment for film. The DAW. One of my friends has done rotoscoping…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22IB
Hey everyone! I wanted to share a side project I've been working on that I think could be really useful for a lot of people, especially those in the web development and no-code space. As a developer with over five years of experience, I've done my fair share of freelance web development projects. Initially, I always coded everything from scratch, but as I took on more projects simultaneously, I started using Webflow to save time. While Webflow was helpful, I often found myself wishing for a faster way to set up a website – something that would allow me to start with a template and then…
2024 · instwebai.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Sean from MindStudio here. I wanted to share something we've been working on that I think introduces some new ideas into the "AI coding agent" space. Remy is an AI agent that builds full-stack TypeScript apps from a spec written in a new flavor of annotated markdown. The spec has two layers: prose describing what the app does, and annotations that carry the technical precision (data types, edge cases, validation rules, code snippets). The agent then "compiles" this into code: backend methods, typed schemas, frontends, test scenarios, and everything else are derived artifacts of the…
Apr 2026 · remy.msagent.ai · its alternatives →
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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 →