AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Magentic – Use LLMs as simple Python functions

This is a Python package that allows you to write function signatures to define LLM queries. This makes it easy to mix regular code with calls to LLMs, which enables you to use the LLM for its creativity and reasoning while also enforcing structure/logic as necessary. LLM output is parsed for you according to the return type annotation of the function, including complex return types such as streaming an array of structured objects. I built this to show that we can think about using LLMs more fluidly than just chains and chats, i.e. more interchangeably with regular code, and to make it…

Magentic is a Python package that lets developers use large language models as standard functions within code. Users define function signatures to create LLM queries, automatically parsing responses according to return… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Magentic – Use LLMs as simple Python functions launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1
Why write code if the LLM can just do the thing? (web app experiment)▲436
I spent a few hours last weekend testing whether AI can replace code by executing directly. Built a contact manager where every HTTP request goes to an LLM with three tools: database (SQLite), webResponse (HTML/JSON/JS), and updateMemory (feedback). No routes, no controllers, no business logic. The AI designs schemas on first request, generates UIs from paths alone, and evolves based on natural language feedback. It works—forms submit, data persists, APIs return JSON—but it's catastrophically slow (30-60s per request), absurdly expensive ($0.05/request), and has zero UI…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
2
Magic Loops – Combine LLMs and code to create simple automations▲248
Howdy! We built this as an experiment in personal-programming, combining the best of LLMs and code to help automate tasks around you. I personally use it to track the tides and get notified when certain conditions are met, something that pure LLMs had trouble dealing with and pure code was often too brittle for. We created it after getting frustrated with the inability of LLMs to deal with numbers and the various hoops we had to jump through to make ChatGPT output repeatable. At the core, Magic Loops are just a series of "blocks" (JSON) that can be triggered with different inputs (email,…
2023 · magicloops.dev · its alternatives →
3
My LLM CLI tool can run tools now, from Python code or plugins▲529
LLM 0.26 is out with the biggest new feature since I started the project: support for tools. You can now use the LLM CLI tool—and Python library—to grant LLMs from …
2025 · simonwillison.net · its alternatives →
4
Fructose – LLM calls as strongly typed functions▲218
Hi HN! Erik here from Banana (formerly the serverless GPU platform), excited to show you what we’ve been working on next: Fructose Fructose is a python package to call LLMs as strongly typed functions. It uses function type signatures to guide the generation and guarantee a correctly typed output, in whatever basic/complex python datatype requested. By guaranteeing output structure, we believe this will enable more complex applications to be built, interweaving code with LLMs with code. For now, we’ve shipped Fructose as a client-only library simply calling gpt-4 (by default) with json…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
5
LLMs can generate valid JSON 100% of the time▲854
Outlines is a Python library that focuses on text generation with large language models. Brandon and I are not LLM experts and started the project a few months ago because we wanted to understand better how the generation process works. Our original background is probabilistic, relational and symbolic programming. Recently we came up with a fast way to generate text that matches a regex (https://blog.normalcomputing.ai/posts/2023-07-27-regex-guide...). The basic idea is simple: regular expressions have an equivalent Deterministic-Finite Automaton (DFA) representation. We…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
6
MonkeyPatch – Cheap, fast and predictable LLM functions in Python▲95
Hi HN, Jack here! I'm one of the creators of MonkeyPatch, an easy tool that helps you build LLM-powered functions and apps that get cheaper and faster the more you use them. For example, if you need to classify PDFs, extract product feedback from tweets, or auto-generate synthetic data, you can spin up an LLM-powered Python function in <5 minutes to power your application. Unlike existing LLM clients, these functions generate well-typed outputs with guardrails to mitigate unexpected behavior. After about 200-300 calls, these functions will begin to get cheaper and faster. We've seen 8-10x…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
7
I wrote an open-source browser alternative for Computer Use for any LLM▲180
Hey HN, I made Browser-Use, an open-source tool that lets (all Langchain supported) LLMs execute tasks directly in the browser just with function calling. It allows you to build agents that interact with web elements using natural language prompts. We created a layer that simplifies website interaction for LLMs by extracting xPaths and interactive elements like buttons and input fields (and other fancy things). This enables you to design custom web automation and scraping functions without manual inspection through DevTools. Hasn't this been done a lot of times? Good question, as a general…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
LLM, a Rust Crate/CLI for CPU Inference of LLMs (LLaMA, GPT-NeoX, etc.)▲45
G'day, HN! I'm one of the maintainers of `llm`. I've been working alongside a trusty group of contributors to bring this project to life, and we're now at a point where we're ready to share it with the world. Large language models (LLMs) are taking the computing world by storm due to their emergent abilities that allow them to perform a wide variety of tasks, including translation, summarization, code generation, and even some degree of reasoning. However, the ecosystem around LLMs is still in its infancy, and it can be difficult to get started with these models. `llm` is a one-stop shop for…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
Recursive LLM Prompts▲97
I've been playing with the idea of an LLM prompt that causes the model to generate and return a new prompt. https://github.com/andyk/recursive_llm The idea I'm starting with is to implement recursion using English as the programming language and GPT as the runtime. It’s kind of like traditional recursion in code, but instead of having a function that calls itself with a different set of arguments, there is a prompt that returns itself with specific parts updated to reflect the new arguments. Here is a prompt for infinitely generating Fibonacci numbers: > You are a…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
10PT
Predictive text using only 13kb of JavaScript. no LLM▲207
2024 · adamgrant.info · its alternatives →
11
PDF to MD by LLMs – Extract Text/Tables/Image Descriptives by GPT4o▲191
I've developed a Python API service that uses GPT-4o for OCR on PDFs. It features parallel processing and batch handling for improved performance. Not only does it convert PDF to markdown, but it also describes the images within the PDF using captions like `[Image: This picture shows 4 people waving]`. In testing with NASA's Apollo 17 flight documents, it successfully converted complex, multi-oriented pages into well-structured Markdown. The project is open-source and available on GitHub. Feedback is welcome.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
12
Bash4LLM+ – A lightweight, dependency-free Bash wrapper for LLM APIs▲60
Bash4LLM is a single-file Bash wrapper for interacting with LLMs from the terminal. I created it because I wanted something simple that worked without installing Python, Node, or any other runtime. It uses only Bash, curl, and jq. You can send prompts, start a small chat, process files line by line, stream output, and save session metadata in JSON format. I tried to make it safe and predictable: no use of the system /tmp, no use of eval. Groq is supported by default, and other providers can be added with dedicated Bash scripts in the extras/providers/ folder. Example: echo…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
13
Prompting LLMs in Bash scripts▲79
https://github.com/elijah-potter/ofc
2025 · elijahpotter.dev · its alternatives →
14
Marvin – build AI functions that use an LLM as a runtime▲127
Hey HN! We're excited to share our new open-source project, Marvin. Marvin is a high-level library for building AI-powered software. We developed it to address the challenges of integrating LLMs into more traditional applications. One of the biggest issues is the fact that LLMs only deal with strings (and conversational strings at that), so using them to process structured data is especially difficult. Marvin introduces a new concept called AI Functions. These look and feel just like regular Python functions: you provide typed inputs, outputs, and docstrings. However, instead of relying on…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
LLMWare – Small Specialized Function Calling 1B LLMs for Multi-Step RAG▲51
Hi, I was a corporate lawyer for many years working with a lot of financial services and insurance companies. In practicing law, I noticed there was a lot of repetition in the tasks I was working on even as a highly paid attorney that could be automated. I wanted to solve the problem of dealing with a lot information and data in a practical way, using AI. This motivated me to start AI Bloks/LLMWare with my husband, who had a deep background in software and is a very early adopter of AI. We have been on this journey with our open source project LLMWare for the past 4 months, producing a…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
Runprompt – run .prompt files from the command line▲134
I built a single-file Python script that lets you run LLM prompts from the command line with templating, structured outputs, and the ability to chain prompts together. When I discovered Google's Dotprompt format (frontmatter + Handlebars templates), I realized it was perfect for something I'd been wanting: treating prompts as first-class programs you can pipe together Unix-style. Google uses Dotprompt in Firebase Genkit and I wanted something simpler - just run a .prompt file directly on the command line. Here's what it looks like: --- model: anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-20250514 output:…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
17
Litellm – Simple library to standardize OpenAI, Cohere, Azure LLM I/O▲62
I built this library because langchain was too bloated and I needed a simple abstraction to call multiple LLM APIs. litellm has two functions - completion(), embedding()
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
18
Replacing my OS process scheduler with an LLM▲77
Replacing the OS process scheduler with an LLM. Contribute to mprajyothreddy/brainkernel development by creating an account on GitHub.
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
Robust LLM extractor for websites in TypeScript▲72
We've been building data pipelines that scrape websites and extract structured data for a while now. If you've done this, you know the drill: you write CSS selectors, the site changes its layout, everything breaks at 2am, and you spend your morning rewriting parsers. LLMs seemed like the obvious fix — just throw the HTML at GPT and ask for JSON. Except in practice, it's more painful than that: - Raw HTML is full of nav bars, footers, and tracking junk that eats your token budget. A typical product page is 80% noise. - LLMs return malformed JSON more often than you'd expect, especially with…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
20
LLM-Term – Simple Rust-based CLI assist tool▲32
Current AI-assisted CLI tools are often part of larger systems and work better on Linux. I built llm-term to address these. It's a Rust-based tool that compiles into a single binary file. You only need to download the binary, add it to your PATH, and configure your OpenAI key to get started. While llm-term offers an option for gpt-4o, it works great with gpt-4o-mini. So it's not costly. I appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
21
Use LLMs to Interact with APIs▲35
Recently featured in a LangChain blog https://blog.langchain.dev/empowering-development-with-flowt... , use LLMs to construct an API first runnable workflow with an IDE experience.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
How to use LLMs to generate accurate SQL for real-world data▲21
Hey HN, We are Zain and Ashish, founders of Vanna AI. We recently embarked on an experiment to see if large language models (specifically LLMs) could help in generating SQL queries for real-world datasets. We initially started this project as a web app but realized that it was most useful and had broadest applicability as a Python package since you can then incorporate it into an existing workflow (Jupyter notebook, Slackbot, etc). We've had some good success with customer datasets but we've generally heard a lot of skepticism so we decided to write a paper about the methodology we're using…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
Misata – synthetic data engine using LLM and Vectorized NumPy▲24
Hey HN, I’m the author. I built Misata because existing tools (Faker, Mimesis) are great for random rows but terrible for relational or temporal integrity. I needed to generate data for a dashboard where "Timesheets" must happen after "Project Start Date," and I wanted to define these rules via natural language. How it works: LLM Layer: Uses Groq/Llama-3.3 to parse a "story" into a JSON schema constraint config. Simulation Layer: Uses Vectorized NumPy (no loops) to generate data. It builds a DAG of tables to ensure parent rows exist before child rows (referential integrity).…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
24
Building an LLM from Scratch in TypeScript▲33
The from-scratch guide to building large language models in NodeJS.
7d ago · book.humanexperiences.io · its alternatives →

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