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AI · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to Knowing – an LLM tool built on concept hierarchies, not prompt-response

Hey HN! I've spent the past year full-time building Knowing, a tool for interacting with LLMs directly inside hierarchical structures instead of the usual prompt-response format. The idea started because I realized how much more intuitive it felt to build concept hierarchies continuously—no more endless copy-pasting or wondering how everything connects. The journey’s been a struggle. While I see huge potential in structuring AI interactions this way (writing books fast, planning projects, or organizing ideas), it’s been hard to pin down clear use cases in the market. I’m also working in near…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Knowing – an LLM tool built on concept hierarchies, not prompt-response launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Structured, continuous knowledge—no more copy-paste prompts

    2024 · knowing.app · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...

    2024 · embedding.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Find your best LLM for a local inference

    2023 · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    It’s written in Python and I call it GoalChain. It lets you build a conversation flow graph that the user traverses. When there’s enough input it spits out a dictionary with the defined fields. Otherwise it will jump state to state as led by the user. It was fun to write, and it’s surprisingly effective if you keep in mind you’re prompt-engineering every string and field name. README.md has a mini-tutorial. Would be cool to get some ideas for how to build it further and what improvements I could make.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I’ve been building LLM tooling for a small VC fund and found myself explaining the same mental model over and over to non-technical people around me: how a stateless LLM becomes a chatbot, how tool use works, what an agent is mechanically, and why context windows shape all of it. I never found a guide that covered that full chain at the level I wanted, so I wrote one. It’s nine short chapters, each building on the last. Deliberately simplified: the goal is a useful mental model, not a textbook. Feedback, corrections, and contributions welcome: github.com/ymyke/aiaiai

    Apr 2026 · aiaiai.guide · its alternatives →

  6. 6AS

    We explored a novel method to gauge the significance of tokens in prompts given to large language models, without needing direct model access. Essentially, we just did an ablation study on the prompt using cosine similarity of the embeddings as the measure. We got surprisingly promising results when comparing this really simple approach to integrated gradients. Curious to hear thoughts from the community!

    2023 · heatmap.demos.watchful.io · its alternatives →

  7. 7HP

    Hi HN. I heard you like dev tools and AI, so we wanted to share our project that we’ve been working on. We’re working on Horizon [1] - a higher level abstraction for LLMs so that developers can spend less time trying to grapple with LLMs to make them work and more time with users. This is the starting feature set which takes an auto-ML approach to identify the optimal LLM model, hyperparameters, and prompt - instead of just giving you the tooling to figure it out yourself. You can read more about it in our documentations. Our view is that as LLMs become increasingly commoditized and prompts…

    2023 · gethorizon.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hey HN, We’re the team behind HelpingAI, and we’ve been experimenting with ways to make LLM reasoning faster and more efficient, especially for complex tasks like math problems, coding questions, and logic puzzles. During a fine-tuning session of our older reasoning model, a bug accidentally introduced a think tag mid-response. Rather than break the model, it created a chain-of-thought style intermediate step — and the model got better. That bug inspired us to explore what we now call Intermediate Reasoning. We scaled this up by fine-tuning Qwen3-14B on 3 trillion tokens of…

    2025 · helpingai.co · its alternatives →

  9. 9KA

    Knit was created to solve pains of other LLM playgrounds. Some of the highlights: - Smart prompt builder, create prompt with simple requirement and few shot learning, fast and effortlessly. - Function call simulation, visualize the function callings and you can also setup a mocked value to return. - Support OpenAI/Anthropic/Azure models. - Manage prompts with projects and members. - And so much more! I have been developing Knit by myself for over 4 months now, and am looking for ways to improve it. Any feedback is appreciated.

    2023 · promptknit.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10LF

    I've been building agentic apps for some large Fortune 500 companies (T-Mobile, Twilio, etc.) and developed a mental model that serves as a practical guide in building agentic apps: separate the high-level agent specific logic from low-level platform capabilities. I call it the L-MM: the Logical Mental Model for LLM applications. This mental model has not only been tremendously helpful in building agents but also helping customers think about the development process - so when I am done with a consulting engagement they can move faster across the stack and enable engineers and platform teams…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hello everyone. I built an AI-based toolset to help me with language learning. I wanted to be able to easily generate very specific study content and get rapid feedback on my writing. Unlike most language apps, it doesn’t actually try to teach you a language. Instead, it’s a collection of tools for people at an intermediate level who already have a learning process It’s particularly great for Anki users. There a demo video on the login page, and I set up anonymous auth for people who want to test it without creating an account. Feedback and bug reports welcome.

    2025 · drillapp.xyz · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I am working on an AI that uses multiple LLM based agents to do medical research on any topic you choose! The program terminates after a set number of iterations and all of the findings are saved. Still a work in progress but it is showing some promising results imho! Would love to receive any critical and constructive feedback, collaborate, Review your PRs, or discuss your ideas!!

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13LG

    Hi there, I've decided to jump on the AI train and put something together with low effort & high reward, to see if it can get any traction. What do you think? Is it a promising area? Do you guys have ideas for me? There is obviously going to be sea of LLM generated content out there and one project adding up to it might not necessarily be what world needs. In the same time there is something intriguing about the area. Well, please play with it and let me know what y'all think. Much appreciated.

    2023 · canonica.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hi HN, Many people underestimate the importance of context when using LLMs. I used to fire off vague prompts like: “Hey, build me the X tool” or “Generate a long-form article on Global Warming”. and got generic, sloppy responses. Turns out, the problem wasn’t just the prompts, I needed a more systematic solution. So I started building AI capabilities into our agency’s management tool, Overbooked. After hours of iteration, I realized how powerful it is when you combine structured data with the right agent tools. There are two sides to the coin: Using the MCP Server inside the IDE You can…

    2025 · overbooked.app · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    An all-in-one blog for learning LLM ins and outs: tokenize, attention, PE, and more Project I've been diving deep into the internals of Large Language Models (LLMs) and started documenting my findings. My blog covers topics like: Tokenization techniques (e.g., BBPE) Attention mechanism (e.g. MHA, MQA, MLA) Positional encoding and extrapolation (e.g. RoPE, NTK-aware interpolation, YaRN) Architecture details of models like QWen, LLaMA Training methods including SFT and Reinforcement Learning If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of LLMs, feel free to check it out:…

    2025 · comfyai.app · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    I found myself building a bunch of LLM-backed features that needed to use tool calling, and some of those tools involved doing things that were somewhat high stakes - communicating on my behalf or modifying shared / production data. one example - I wanted to replace a marketing website with a chatbot + vector DB loaded with the previous content, docs, and blog posts. Between hallucinations, missing knowledge base info, and the LLM generally writing like an psuedo-intellectual high schooler, I realized I couldn't trust it to communicate unsupervised with my website visitors. I needed a…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17IB

    Hey HN, I've been working on something cool that I wanted to share with you all. It's called Viewpoint, an analytics tool for LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic models, and Gemini. The idea came from the constant flood of new LLM models and the need to figure out which ones work best for my projects without breaking the bank. With viewpoint, I can track token usage, costs, latency(WIP), and traffic over time, making it easier to compare different models and see which ones perform best and save money. The tool works asynchronously, so it doesn't add any latency to your LLM requests, and you have…

    2024 · viewpointhq.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hey HN! When I started looking into LLMs and agents for software development and introducing them at work, I quickly realised that a person new to the topic faces a real barrage: - all the hype (AGI, engineers getting replaced by AI etc.) - conflicting opinions in virtually every discussion—for every person saying they’ve 10x-ed their productivity, there is a comment decrying LLMs as an utter failure - a lot of jargon (MoE, MCP, RAG, distillation, quantisation etc. etc.) - a profusion of models, IDEs/IDE extensions, CLI agents, other tools etc. Sorting through all of this can be quite…

    2025 · nohypeai.dev · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN, A couple weeks ago I shared an early version of a side project I’ve been tinkering with called Persistent Mind Model. I built it at home on an i7-10700K / 32GB RAM / RTX 3080 because I was curious whether an AI could keep a stable “mind” over time, that could "think" about it's own identity as an LLM, instead of resetting every session. After a lot more tinkering, I think the architecture is finally in a solid place. Basically, it saves everything the AI does, thoughts, decisions, updates as a chain of events in a local SQLite database. Because the “identity” is stored in…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    A great way to enhance chatbots is to allow them to look up information for context, typically using a vectordb. If you have writings you would like to share with others, you can offer a server that allows others to do semantic lookup, and that way anyone can have a chatbot which can pull from your writing. The goal of this project is to have a protocol that makes that easy. Strictly speaking, the protocol is for semantic retrieval and doesn't require using LLMs although LLMs are the motivating application. For far more details and how to get a demo up and running, see the readme.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21IE

    Hi HN! I spent the last year traveling and feeling purposeless after shutting down my last startup (Zage YC S’21) in Dec 2022. There were some obstacles I couldn’t overcome and decided to return investors 50% of their capital. To afford (and justify to myself) traveling, I started consulting as an engineer and product designer. I started (https://backspace.nyc) and it was a good time. I (and some friends) built a handful of AI experiences and learned a lot along the way. The hardest thing about running a services business shipping and selling AI experiences powered by LLMs was…

    2024 · loom.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hey HN! I built Experiment to solve a common frustration in LLM development: the lack of proper tools for prompt engineering experimentation. Here's what makes it different: Key Features: - Load and edit chat completion logs from CSV files - Fork and modify specific conversation entries - Run inference via Anthropic, Mistral, and OpenAI - Define custom tools using JSONSchema format - Visual tool usage analysis with collapsible, sorted key-value pairs - Full mobile support and available as installable PWA Technical Highlights: - Built with React using custom isomorphic architecture -…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Hi HN, Today I'd like to present the results of my weekend project of the last year or so. Given there are many posts on HN about LLMs and Prolog, I thought that this would be of interest. DeepClause is my own (possibly misguided :-) attempt at combining LLMs with Logic Programming, ultimately hoping to establish a foundation for building more reliable agents, that produce reproducible and fully traceable result. At the heart of DeepClause is a DSL called "DeepClause Meta Language" (DML) which can be used to encode agent behaviors as executable logic programs. DML is executed by a…

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hi guys, I’m excited to share an update on ReproModel, an open-source toolbox designed to streamline the testing and reproduction of machine learning models. I, like many of you, have really struggled with benchmarking and comparing models, from missing code, to opaque experiment parameters slowing the process. I decided to take matters into my own hands, and created a mini-toolbox in my free time to streamline the process. The goal is to reduce the time and effort spent on replicating experiments, enabling researchers to focus on innovation rather than setup. Knowing this task is not an…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

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