AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I vibe-coded a working macOS driver for an obsolete laser engraver
The Epilog Zing lasers were 50w desktop industrial lasers from circa 2010. They never had support outside of windows. This was based off of LibLaserCut which is a Java project that reverse engineered these machine's protocols. This is a CUPS driver implemented in Swift and C. Maybe this is a small example of AI doing something positive, like breathing new life into old machines :)
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.
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A multitasking monolithic Kernel based x86 targeting Operating System written in C# from scratch aiming for high-level implementation of drivers in managed environment. - amaneureka/AtomOS
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
- 5RX
Hi all, long time lurker, first time poster. I want to share with you all something we've been working on for a while at Lambda: the Razer x Lambda Tensorbook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMh6Dhq7P_Q But before I tell you about it, I want to make this all about me, because I built this for me. See, while I'm genuinely interested in hearing from the community what you think as this is the culmination of a lot of effort from a lot of people across so many different fields (seriously, the number of folks across manufacturing, engineering, design, logistics, and marketing who…
2022 · its alternatives →
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I've never posted on ShowHN before, but I wanted to share my Xmas 2025 project; to try a new approach to controlling our kids screen time. This also involved massively over-engineering a solution in order to play with a shiny new gadget (and avoid the in laws at Christmas, obviously) I've shared some learnings on AI coding with embedded devices, and how I approached the product design/hardware selection side of things. The Web App is at https://screenie.org - and I'm Open Sourcing the device and web app code later today (links to follow on that site)
Jan 2026 · partridge.works · its alternatives →
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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 →
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PAI▲9Hi HN! I've been spending the past month on PAI, a Linux-esque harness for a personal assistant AI for your Mac. Instead of giving a chatbot a bunch of tools, I wanted to just drop the LLM into a terminal and see how it'd fare. I've been using it to manage my calendar, 5+ email accounts, and engaging with / responding to people in a timely manner (casus belli for this entire project). After seeing how other always-on assistants were designed, I thought the Unix / Linux philosophy of system design could be applied to AI harnesses, and I wanted to experiment with how it'd hold up…
Jul 2026 · whitematterlabs.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi! This is a version 2.0 2x Context window 7-8x Faster Less hallucinations :)
2025 · shortcutbuilder.com · its alternatives →
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I've going through a backlog of projects and checking them off with Claude Code. What started out as a quick afternoon of coding with claude has relight my love of making.
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I’ve spent the last decade building hardware products like humanoid robots, 3D printers, and self-driving tractors. I needed a tool to navigate technical documents faster, so I created one with friends. This tool helps with component search, cross-referencing, comparison, and debugging. We’d love your feedback, whether you find it useful or not. Thank you! Try it here: www.convergelab.ai
2024 · convergelab.ai · its alternatives →
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I made my first macOS utility app that ships with a bundled Gemma 4 model, specifically the Gemma E4B one. It made my app DMG have 5.3 GB in size, but I think it is a small size for the power that this free local model can provide. It runs fine on CPU, but can also run on Apple Silicon GPU, although I did not notice any performance improvements with GPU (tested on a M5 chip). I think these local lightweight and multimodal models will open multiple possibilities for new software tools where privacy is essential.
May 2026 · snapname.app · its alternatives →
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We made a dumb terminal for AI! Type \ to see commands you can use.
2025 · vt320.odai.chat · its alternatives →
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Hey HN community! Over the past year, AI copilots like Cursor and Windsurf have fueled a dramatic shift in software engineering workflows. And yet, many technical users in adjacent fields like data science and analytics have been unable to reap the rewards of this revolution. It turns out that the existing tools are a poor match for analytical workloads. Beyond that Cursor and similar tools have very poor support for Jupyter notebooks, data science is a fundamentally different discipline from software engineering and we believe it requires a correspondingly different tool. We're excited to…
2025 · sphinx.ai · its alternatives →
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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 →
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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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I thought it'd be interesting to use Linux PSI (Pressure Stall Information) for an LLM runtime to trim the KV cache. This is mainly useful imo for edge devices like the Jetson Orin super nano kit which have unified memory. I haven't benched much, but plan to do so more over time and see if I can make a real use of it as I run local LLMs. Let me know if it makes sense :P (I of course vibed this idea)
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Lùmen▲9Native Mac app for GRBL laser engravers, no subscription
May 2026 · lumen.dimix.it · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I built an AI-powered UI for macOS that automates tasks on both macOS and in browsers. I didn’t want to pay $200 for OpenAI’s operator, so I made my own using browser-use and macOS-use. It handles simple tasks like scraping data, filling out forms, and using macOS apps. It's not great at working with files yet, but I’m planning to improve that with custom tools for the LLM. The goal is to create a desktop “pet” that takes care of boring stuff—like drafting documents and filling out forms. Check it out and let me know what you think!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Abstract page for arXiv paper 2607.23806: A Frozen 12B Beats Frontier Models on Verified Work: 100% Accuracy, 0 Tokens, Bit-Exact, Forever
Jul 2026 · arxiv.org · its alternatives →
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This is a personal project I've been working on and off for the past few years. It's a set of tools that have allowed me to prototype quickly small (and increasingly bigger) kernels, and create userspace programs to interact with them. Supports riscv64, amd64 and i386. The intel port has been tested and used on real hardware, from big dual-socket Xeon machines to an old X220. It is all C, I have plan to make rust bindings for the kernel library. But again, they're plans at this stage. Porting to new architectures is relatively simple, a basic port to riscv took me a couple of weeks of…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus. While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages. The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself. With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and…
Jun 2026 · tryquincy.live · 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 →