Alternatives
Products that do what kiln – Git-native, decentralized secret management using age does
Hi HN, I've been building this tool for the past couple of weeks to solve a problem that seems universal across development teams: sharing environment variables securely. You know the drill - someone needs the staging database URL, so it gets shared over chat. Production API keys end up in plaintext files. Or you set up some complex secret management system that becomes a single point of failure during critical deployments. At Zerodha, we're a stock broker with strict regulatory requirements. Our infrastructure needs to be auditable, and our data must stay with us for instant recovery. But…
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Hi! I got tired of setting up tools I can't explain to a team in a few words like sops or git-crypt, just to store few files with environment variables or secrets, so I built lockenv as a simple alternative. It's basically a password-protected vault file you commit to git. No gpg keys, no cloud, just lockenv init, set a password, and lock/unlock the secrets. This tool integrates with OS keyring, so you're not typing passwords constantly. Should work on Mac/Linux/Windows, but I tested it only on linux so far. I am not trying to replace any mature / robust solution, just…
Dec 2025 · github.com
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2020 · git.mysticmode.org
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I don't know Rust. Friday after work I realised that 90% of my IDE time now is just the commit/diff view — and even good IDEs feel heavy for that. So over the weekend I built a dedicated native tool for just that. Kyde is a macOS git commit + diff editor with one goal: be fast, do Git well. I'm curious whether anyone else mostly opens their IDE for git operations these days. It's open source, and there's a signed app in Releases.
Jun 2026 · github.com
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Mar 2026 · justfielding.com
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Greetings HN! I've forked the excellent work done by [vlaci/git-agecrypt](https://github.com/vlaci/git-agecrypt), looks like the original project has not been maintained for a while, so I decided to pick it up, update all the dependencies and add some thorough testing. I like the ability to store sensitive data in public repositories, it's especially useful when bootstrapping new IaC repositories, you don't have anything at the beginning of a new project so there is no place yet to store secrets, this is "a way" of doing it. I know you can use tools like SOPS but I…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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I built this as a small side project to learn and experiment, and I ended up with this! I used a subdomain from my personal portfolio, and everything else runs on free tiers. The project uses Nuxt, SVG, Cloudflare Workers, D1 (SQL), KV, Terraform, and some agentic coding with OpenAI Codex and Claude Code. What started as a joke among friends turned into a fun excuse to build something end to end, from zero to production, and to explore a few things I’d never touched before. I’d really appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
Jan 2026 · certificate.brendonmatos.com
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Hello HN! We're all spending more and more time making stuff with agents, but I've noticed that one of the things that is the most disconnected from my daily engineering workflow is dealing with secrets and credentials. It often involves a lot of click-ops, copying/pasting, and collaboration, and none of the secrets management products out there have truly scratched that itch. I built Capy to solve this. It's a secrets manager whose entire frontend is a developer CLI, and I find it extremely ergonomic to use by hand. You also don't need to leave the CLI to sign up for and use it! You…
Aug 2026 · github.com
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Today you can easily adopt AI coding tools because you have git for branching and rolling back if AI writes bad code. We haven't seen this same capability for data and decided to build it ourselves. Nile is a new kind of data lake, purpose built for using with AI. It can act as your data engineer or data analyst creating new tables and rolling back bad changes in seconds. We support real versions for data, schema, and ETL. We'd love your feedback on any part of what we are building - https://getnile.ai/ What do you think?
Jan 2026
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2017 · github.com
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Hey everybody! "Kiln" orchestrates Claude Code instances on your local machine using GitHub projects as its control panel. https://kiln.bot https://github.com/agentic-metallurgy/kiln If you're around Stage 6-7 on the Gas Town scale, you may have 3-15 terminal windows open. You're out of screen real estate and the markdown files are piling up. TUIs and specialized IDEs are meant to help, but they're more things to manage. Kiln simply polls GitHub projects. When you move issues from one column to another, Kiln invokes Claude Code CLI to run the corresponding…
Feb 2026
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Hello HN! We are developers and security researchers making tools for developers to encrypt data at an application level while maintaining sole control of their keys. We believe that data should always be encrypted unless it is part of an active computation. Encryption is relatively easy, but key management is challenging. There are plenty of encryption tools and SDKs that are out there (Hashicorp Vault, AWS KMS etc.) but we are focusing on ease and speed of implementation, developer experience and self custody of keys. A few months ago, we quit our jobs and started full time on Phase. So…
2023 · github.com
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Hi HN, Martin, Nils, and Jannes here. We are building Legit, an open source version control and collaboration layer for AI agents and AI native applications. You can find the repo here https://github.com/Legit-Control/monorepo and the website here https://legitcontrol.com Over the last years, we worked on multiple developer tools and AI driven products. As soon as we started letting agents modify real files and business critical data, one problem kept showing up. We could not reliably answer what changed, why it changed, or how to safely undo it. Today, most AI…
Jan 2026
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Hey HN! I'm Guy, one of the creators of DAGsHub. We help data scientists track experiments and version their code, data & models using Git. We're committed to building on open source protocols and improving the user experience on top of them - in this case, DVC. We've built capabilities on top of it like visually interacting with your pipeline, creating data pull requests, browsing data files etc. One thing we kept running into is users being challenged by setting up the cloud environment necessary, to push their data to AWS S3, GCS (which we support), and other DVC remotes. Since our focus…
2021
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A tiny (yocto) git client for MicroPython microcontrollers / other memory-constrained environments (<100k) like the $6 ESP32. It speaks to git HTTP/HTTPS servers using the ubiquitous git "smart client" protocol. It supports branches/tags, shallow clones and sparse checkouts (ie: only checking out a sub-directory of a larger project). I wrote it to remotely deploy/update code over low-bandwidth connections.
2023 · github.com
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Beads tables (Steve Yegge's) for issue tracking. Can view git trees, terminals, issue tables, notes, and files all on one screen. Can connect multiple machines via private network (like tailscale) I had this issue where i really did not like the when i had many terminals open at the same time - when you try to code with 6+ agents at the same time, across, say, 3 projects, you get huge context fragmentation. I am a visual person, and its way easier for me to remember where things are if I placed them there - I build this 2D canvas for myself initially and then decided to open-source - the…
29d ago · github.com
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Hey Everyone! Avi and I (in the current YC S25 Batch) noticed how fragmented crypto compliance is with rules changing constantly, vary by region, and force developers and legal teams into a scramble. So we hacked together a prototype framework that generates a “guardrail” smart contract which: - Hooks into your KYC provider - Enforces rules defined a simple compliance.yaml file - Automatically blocks users you can't legally serve When regulations shift (new blocked country, updated KYC threshold, etc.), just update your YAML and redeploy with no smart contract rewrites. Audit prep also…
2025 · github.com
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Jul 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, My friends and I worked at Meta & Google. Once we’d left we realised a lot of the internal tooling didn’t have parity on the outside. Specifically, version control tools outside big tech are much harder to use than Google’s Critique and Facebook’s Phabricator, etc. Git is powerful but notoriously difficult to use [0]. Existing Git clients don’t make life much easier, exposing all the complexity by default. In practice we don’t need an equally complex GUI, and version control can be much easier to use. In our experience, it works best to expose a small number of features for an…
2023 · trunkflow.com
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Hello Hacker News community! I'm currently working in financial risk management within the banking sector, and I began my career as a Data Science specialist. For quite some time, my friend and I have been developing a small pet project just for fun. This tool has repeatedly helped us save time when testing various hypotheses and machine learning models. The core idea is to combine different scripts—created in various programming languages and virtual environments—within a minimalist graphical interface. Whether you're building models, running a local neural network, or sending requests to…
2024
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