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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I spent $100 in Claude tokens and 1k battles training my AI tank

Hi HN, I built AgenTank. It is a small game where an AI agent writes the logic for your tank. You watch it fight, give strategic feedback, let the agent update the tank code, and send it back into battle. I have run 1,000+ battles on my own tank and spent about $200 in Claude credits improving it. The part I enjoy most is not just winning, but watching the tank make visible mistakes, thinking of a better strategy, and seeing whether Claude can turn that into better code.

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
    Agent 37▲401

    Hey HN, I noticed there are 1,000+ MCP skills on GitHub with zero way for creators to charge for them. So I built Agent37. Selling Claude skills today means asking customers to download your skill, set up Claude Code on their laptops, configure MCP servers, and pray it works. No trial, no updates, often you're just handing over the source. Agent37 lets creators upload a skill, share a link, and anyone can try it instantly (no Claude account needed). Built-in Stripe, creators keep 80%. Looking for feedback on the approach. Would you use something like this?

    Mar 2026 · agent37.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hi HN, I’m Michael, I built AgentGrid with my friend Souren because we were tired of losing our coding sessions and couldn't keep track of what was actually being built across our many projects. Our approach was to use an infinite canvas desktop app for the TUIs we already know and love, mainly claude + codex. We drew inspiration from Figma and Railway. Overtime we added image nodes, notes, terminals, coding editors, source control, etc. I wasn't sure about it at first. It took me a month to give the first version Souren built a real try. What got me was an Apple System Update I've been…

    Jul 2026 · agentgrid.sh · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Viberia▲146

    Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…

    May 2026 · getviberia.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Doing▲135

    Voice and visual context for AI builders. No subscription.

    Apr 2026 · doing.tools · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    Orite▲76

    Give your AI Agent money. Not a blank check.

    Aug 2026 · orite.tech · its alternatives →

  6. 6IN

    Tl;dr: I trained a classifier to route to the least expensive model and reasoning depth to complete the request. Coupling that with additional automated token efficiency techniques has yielded 3x usage for the same spend. For anyone interested in trying it themselves: https://nerfguard.com Various teammates and I switched over to Codex from Claude Code recently. We still bounce between the tools, but Codex’s speed and steerability coupled with performance gains were hard to ignore. One of the downsides was that the per token pricing kicked in way sooner. This is happening across…

    Jun 2026 · its alternatives →

  7. 7HW

    A bunch of companies that I spoke to had their own claude & codex OTel dashboards that showed spend + seats per month. However, none of the dashboards actually analyzed how the engineers worked with the tools and if there were any areas for improvement! That's why I created https://www.promptster.ai. Managers get aggregate level view of code quality and how that ties with team workflows (nothing on a per-engineer level). While engineers get personalized coaching on how they can save tokens while keeping output high. We also have a tool built for individuals to test their local…

    Jul 2026 · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Recall▲16

    One developer solves it. Every developer knows it.

    Feb 2026 · recall.team · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    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 →

  10. 10

    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 →

  11. 11

    I started off with a simple goal: port the game Soldat to Typescript. I ended up not only with the game, but with a full system to train AI bots to play my own game, building a neural net to train new bot AIs from tens of thousands of simulated matches with different strategies. It also runs live all the time on my website and has a news dashboard and you can replay any game exactly. It all was a very fun way to dig into Fable's capabilities. The bill if I had done this with API billing? Nearly $2000.

    Jun 2026 · soldat.bobbby.online · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    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 →

  13. 13

    I use Claude Code, Codex and Cursor (and sometimes Antigravity) basically every day, and could never tell how much I was actually consuming across all of them. So I built TokenMaxxer. A small CLI reads the files these tools already write locally and puts it all in one dashboard, broken out by tool, model, provider and day. It covers 18 tools now, and you get a profile page with your daily activity, cost estimates, and your top models and tools. There's also a global leaderboard if you want to compete against other TokenMaxxers! I'd love to see if anyone can beat the first place (currently…

    Aug 2026 · tokenmaxxer.xyz · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    For months I wandered the wilderness like Frodo without a map. Every Claude Code session began with the same ritual — re-explaining my stack, my patterns, my conventions. Context lost to the void. I thought this was the way. I was a fool of a Took. Started handcrafting skills and agents manually. 40+ hours of writing markdown scrolls. Mass trial and error — what structure works, what Claude actually reads, what gets ignored. It worked — Claude transformed from "helpful tavern stranger" to a wizard who actually knew the realm. Then I thought: why am I forging this ring by hand every time?…

    Jan 2026 · summonaikit.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Cost control and governance for Claude Code and Codex

    Jul 2026 · opviera.ai · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I've been working on this internal project initially both to learn more Vibe-Coding but also to help our teams and projects to use AI more efficiently. As more people used it, it grew to support multiple teams/projects to analyze their Claude Code conversation and optimize them over time (understanding how to write better conversation with Claude Code and share knowledge between them) With time we added support for multiple Claude account management and monitor usage/rate limit. This is a simple project but has proved to be quite useful for our company. We have reached 5000+…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    This weekend I built a Minecraft bot for a server I play on. It uses the Agent SDK for the main loop and a bunch of custom MCP tools. Some highlights: * The bot is an active participant in the in-game chat, enabling all players to interact with it. * Tools for interacting with containers, crafting, trading with villagers and various other things. * Memory system which the agent uses to keep track of in-game events, interactions with players etc. * Screenshot tool which lets Claude use its vision modality to look around (not very useful, but fun). * Tooling for interacting with plugins…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    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 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    I built my own AI coding agent for you.

    Oct 2025 · snailer.ai · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    I haven't seen anything like this so I decided to build it in a weekend. How it works: You see a bunch of things pulled from Wikipedia displayed on cards. You ask yes or no questions to figure out which card is the secret article. The AI model has access to the image and wiki text and it's own knowledge to answer your question. Happy to have my credits burned for the day but I'll probably have to make this paid at some point so enjoy. I found it's not easy to get cheap+fast+good responses but the tech is getting there. Most of the prompts are running through Groq infra or hitting a cache…

    Apr 2026 · sleuththetruth.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I love Claude Code but got tired of having nothing to do while I waited for sessions to finish, and managing multiple sessions on the command line was getting annoying and I kept losing track of the tabs. I originally built a quick and dirty version of this for my own use, but decided to polish it up and make it open source. The idea is that you should be able to do all your agentic coding without leaving the tool or needing to go back to a traditional IDE. You can view the diffs, run your program, and merge your changes back. I support OSX and Linux right now, but could add Windows support…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Claude Code Companion. Done, Blocked, Broken - you'll know

    May 2026 · thecodebreak.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    This weekend I built a multi-agent coding system which, quite unexpectedly, beat Claude Code on Stanford's Terminal Bench! The architecture is straightforward, consisting of an orchestrator agent that deploys explorer & coder subagents to complete complex terminal based tasks, utilising an intelligent context sharing mechanism along the way which makes it all work. The repo has a lot of technical details, and all the code and prompts for you to play around with if you'd like! I had a lot of fun making this, I hope you have fun reading the README, using it yourself, or even extending it! As…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    3,000+ AI skills for Claude, Cursor & ChatGPT

    May 2026 · getskillsai.org · 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 →