AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I vibe coded a DAW for the terminal. how'd I do?
So, I've never written a line of Rust in my life. I wouldn't know an `&mut this` from a mutandis. But I saw a tweet about a month ago that said, in this new era of AI, you'd be able to just take a library that you love, throw a TUI around it, and call it an app. So I spent about 200 bucks last month, here's what I came up with: Imbolc is a DAW that runs entirely in your terminal. It talks to scsynth over OSC and ships 58 instruments and 39 effects. VSTs are a work in progress, also GarageBand loops if you want to recreate "Umbrella". The codebase is about 60k? lines of Rust across 5 crates,…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1IU
Hi Hacker News, This is definitely out of my comfort zone. I just wanted to show you guys because I'm super proud of it. It's a 100% faithful recreation based off of the schematics, patents, and ROMs that were found online. So please watch the video and tell me what you think https://youtu.be/auOlZXI1VxA The reason why I think this is relevant is because I've been a programmer for 25 years and AI scares the shit out of me. I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for…
Jan 2026 · its alternatives →
- 2
Viberia▲146Hey 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 →
- 3
Hey HN i’m a platform engineer and my day job I mainly focus on kubernetes clusters and terraform with the occasional C#, Typescript when building services, so this could well be completely out of my depth. Jolt started as an experiment to see whether I could build my own network at all. I’ll also be honest that most of this code was agentically written. However the high level decisions and architecture were mine based on research, experimentation, trial and error. Canary testing was one of the consequences of that when you build this way you need something slapping your AI-driven confidence…
Aug 2026 · alexanderwanyoike.github.io · its alternatives →
- 4IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 5
I know mentioning Michael Seibel is almost cheating, but this week he demonstrated the "leaky pipes" concept to me. Not that I know the guy, but in one of his videos he says something on the lines of "If you are unsure if you app is ready to be launched, just launch it. It's like a house with leaky pipes, just open the main, grab your tools, and start fixing wherever water is leaking". So we did it, we launched drummy earlier this week on /r/InternetIsBeautiful and we got very close to 10k users in just one day! Survived the hug of death, learned a ton, and made changes all around.…
2022 · drummy.io · its alternatives →
- 6
Hey HN! Last week I was working on a website and needed a way to synchronise visuals with live music. I've used MIDI controllers for this before, but I am travelling right now and don't have mine with me. So I had the crazy idea to build a browser extension that uses the keyboard as input and includes a sequencer. I gave myself 24 to work on it. It ended up taking longer (of course), specially since I ended up creating a demo, a small landing, docs, and an intro video. Took me one week from idea to launch (pushed quite a bit tbh). Features: - Works as a browser extension. Atm distributed…
2024 · minitap.io · its alternatives →
- 7
Howdy friends. I've been a zero to one product manager for 12 plus years and along the way I kept borrowing pieces from different discovery frameworks until I had a methodology of my own, one that actually raises the odds of an idea succeeding. This does not replace user interviews obviously, but it leads you in the right direction. Looking forward for your feedback
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8IM
So, I'm learning VIM and made this yesterday, I pretend to increment it as I learn new stuff. You move with HJKL and that's it for now. Don't let the sublimes consume you. http://worms.io/vimwarrior/
2016 · its alternatives →
- 9
I’ve had this idea for a new code editor chord grammar bouncing around in my head for over 2 years, and now I can finally release v0.1 of ane. You can run it one-shot from scripts or agents (`ane exec —chord…`) or use its full-on TUI editor. ane is pure Rust, and integrates tree-sitter and LSP to provide a pleasant and predictable terminal code editing experience. I’d love folks to try it out and give feedback! Thanks :)
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 10
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 →
- 11KY
Hey HN! I wanted to practice "vibe coding" and see how far and fast I can go by only prompting, without actual coding. I decided to make a simple CLI app that scrapes web docs into a single md file (I was annoyed that LLM keeps writing Tailwind 3 code for a Tailwind 4 project). In just a couple of hours, the CLI app was ready! Then iterated on arguments for another couple of hours. Result: https://github.com/vladstudio/web2llm Then I decided to go further and "productize" the CLI by making a web app for it. Another half-day, and the web app is ready!…
2025 · web2llm.dev · its alternatives →
- 12
I recently encountered a situation where JetBrains IDEs weren't working for a project, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to keep paying the yearly fee. I decided to de-IDE myself and as part of it I decided to look at my options. The more I saw of Emacs the more interested I got. However using the Doom emacs distribution kind of threw me in the deep end without actually understanding how Emacs operates. I was lost and bounced off quick. I decided to take the approach of starting with vanilla Emacs and trying to get it to work for me as an IDE one step at a time. This post was me documenting…
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Just wanted to make my first post about something interesting I've been working on for some time. Any ideas/suggestions for new hardware or software I should try out are welcome, though I will only have time for a major overhaul in a month or two where I want to redo and document everything a bit better than how it is currently. Hope this can inspire someone to start their own homelab or give some ideas to already existing ones!
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Fully leaned into vibe coding this time around. Started on v0, at some point ejected into running locally (getting v0's exported folder to run locally was a challenge), then iterated with Cursor over the course of a few hours. Really neat how much can be accomplished just conversationally these days.
2025 · macrodata-refinement.arjit.me · its alternatives →
- 15
Hi HN! I've never posted anything on here before, but this project was too fun to pass up. I've been learning a lot about agents lately, and wanted to see if I could replicate some of the results of Windsurf and Cursor. Generally I love these tools, but when you're stuck behind an "enterprise" firewall, they don't work as well. This sad state of affairs motivated me to understand SWE agents more. Does it work? Yes. Is it as good as Cursor and Windsurf? Not quite, but it's pretty darn close, depending on the model you use. I'm lacking a few features like semantic indexing, MCP support, but…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 16
Hi - I'm part composer, part engineer and big fan of reading blogs where people learn out loud or with the garage door up by sharing their notebooks or journals. I've been doing this in Moleskines for years (going back to the 80s) but made it a new year's in 2024 resolution to post SOMETHING everyday, so long as I created the sound. I have a big archive of demos and seeds of ideas, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to do something with those in the process. Being so steeped in programming for the last 30 years, a healty chunk of this material is made via coding with Csound, TidalCycles, some raw…
2025 · listenfaster.com · its alternatives →
- 17VI
This was submitted before but it didn't seem to get much attention because I don't think the title was very descriptive and the submitter was brand new. I almost didn't click it but once I did I thought the project was pretty awesome and had a lot of promise. Hope this doesn't violate the rules, I have no horse in the game, but the creator is here on the site so hopefully he'll be able to answer your questions.
2022 · docs.vaxiin.io · its alternatives →
- 18
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 · its alternatives →
- 19IJ
Hey all. For the last few years, I have been developing a software synthesizer as a side project. It's taken longer than I both hoped and feared, but earlier this week I finally shipped 1.0. Details about the synth itself are up on my website, https://lhiaudio.com/. For those who are unfamiliar, in music production, there are host applications (such as Logic Pro, Ableton Live, or REAPER) in which most of the work (such as recording or sequencing MIDI data) is done. These applications generally have some built-in tools for the actual generation and processing of audio data, but…
2018 · its alternatives →
- 20
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 →
- 21
Hello HackerNews, I'm Kaamkiya, the author of this program. It's a collection of minimal games made for terminals, like 2048, Hangman, and even two player games like pong. They're all text-based, but they can actually be quite fun. If you want to test it right now, you can do this: go run github.com/Kaamkiya/gg@latest I started this project out of boredom, honestly. I was bored, and when I'm bored I like to code or play video games. So I coded video games. I kept them really minimal though, because I'm not great at gamedev and thought it would be easier to contribute to text-based…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22
This is a model I’ve been thinking about lately. It demonstrates a pattern that I’m wondering could exist, where terminal applications, BBS-style shared user boards, and other expressions of creativity and sharing are created with web technologies but rendered into the terminal and accessed over SSH. I like that this brings back some kind of old days of the internet feeling and uses web technologies but sidesteps the public World Wide Web, even though it’s still on the internet. You can try it out too right now, and I’m thinking about making the self-hosting specialized applications part a…
Jul 2026 · duetbrowser.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Hey HN! I really like local apps for their simplicity and privacy and hate paying Saas bills and I wanted a way to start automating my life with AI so I started building Anything. Anything is built on Tauri so the front end is React and the "backend" is Rust. It's 100% local & 100% doesn't ask you to spin up docker to use. Another core goal of the app is to get away from "package bloat" you see in other general purpose AI oss projects where they have a package.json that is 300 lines long ( more on that later. ) Oh btw I suck at Rust! I learned Rust while building this so the code is _not…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hey yall, I built this for my makerspace. We wanted to let each other borrow things, but also didn't want to put up a big shiny sign saying "hey everyone, my garage has a super fancy oscilloscope just sitting there" and also didn't want to necessarily always need to say yes to everything. However, when I show it to people, they've been suggesting using it for other things like board games, or wedding equipment, etc. I'm still trying to find PMF, so please let me know what you think! For the stack, it's all Elixir + LiveView which is really nice, and then Fly.io, Fly's MPG, Tigris Data,…
Aug 2026 · toolpool.garden · its alternatives →
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