AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Mole – Deep research agent for your terminal
Doing research with agents is fun until they blow way past budget, jumble the sources, and don't even give you the best possible answer, just sound confident. And if you want to run some research task on local data - you have no idea where your data ends up after the prompt consumes it. So I built this tool: a deep-research agent with an enforced budget, verified quotes, and a privacy boundary for local data. 1. Never spend more than you budgeted (measured overshoot is 0%). 2. Every claim carries a source 3. Data stays local (give a CSV, it'll analyze it without the data ever leaving your…
Mole is a terminal-based research agent that conducts deep investigation tasks while maintaining strict budget control, source verification, and data privacy. It prevents cost overruns by enforcing spending limits… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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The best research agent is open for devs
Dec 2025 · blog.google · its alternatives →
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Scored 65.2% vs google's official 47.8%, and the existing top closed source model Junie CLI's 64.3%. Since there are a lot of reports of deliberate cheating on TerminalBench 2.0 lately (https://debugml.github.io/cheating-agents/), I would like to also clarify a few things 1. Absolutely no {agents/skills}.md files were inserted at any point. No cheating mechanisms whatsoever 2. The cli agent was run in leaderboard compliant way (no modification of resources or timeouts) 3. The full terminal bench run was done using the fully open source version of the agent, no…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Tilde started from a simple observation: AI agents are only as useful as the environment they can work in. Giving an agent a prompt is easy. Giving it the right files, credentials, tools, context, and execution environment, safely and repeatably, is much harder. Over the past year, we learned a lot
May 2026 · tilde.run · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Agent capable of doing deep research for you independently
2025 · openai.com · its alternatives →
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SciSpace Agent ▲521Only AI agent automating research with 150+ academic tools
2025 · scispace.com · its alternatives →
- 7Agent 37▲401
Hey HN, I noticed there are 1,000+ MCP skills on GitHub with zero way for creators to charge for them. So I built Agent37. Selling Claude skills today means asking customers to download your skill, set up Claude Code on their laptops, configure MCP servers, and pray it works. No trial, no updates, often you're just handing over the source. Agent37 lets creators upload a skill, share a link, and anyone can try it instantly (no Claude account needed). Built-in Stripe, creators keep 80%. Looking for feedback on the approach. Would you use something like this?
Mar 2026 · agent37.com · its alternatives →
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Learn how MCP-Agent powers Deep Research Agents with simple orchestration, external memory, and scalable workflows. Open-source on GitHub.
2025 · thealliance.ai · its alternatives →
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Epho▲156Hey folks, Burak here. Epho is an API that allows running Claude Code, Codex or Opencode in a sandbox in the cloud. It abstracts away sandboxes, and allows running coding agents with a single HTTP request. Epho came out of our own struggles with building our own AI analyst: - Sandboxes give you bare machines; you need to configure them for agentic workloads. - Each agent behaves differently, and you need to build integrations with each of them. - Sandbox providers are not very reliable, which means you need to figure out a multi-provider strategy to avoid failures. - Logging, artifacts,…
Aug 2026 · epho.io · its alternatives →
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Context Gateway▲220We built an open-source proxy that sits between coding agents (Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) and the LLM, compressing tool outputs before they enter the context window. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFZ6MPrwjw#t=9s. Motivation: Agents are terrible at managing context. A single file read or grep can dump thousands of tokens into the window, most of it noise. This isn't just expensive — it actively degrades quality. Long-context benchmarks consistently show steep accuracy drops as context grows (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 eval goes from 97.2% at 32k to 36.6% at 1M…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hermes Desktop▲215An open source terminal agent that builds its own skills
Jun 2026 · hermes-agent.nousresearch.com · its alternatives →
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Trails▲81Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…
Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · its alternatives →
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Nexus▲95Nexus is the Cursor for your data — no more uploads for tweaks, no more downloads for edits. Just seamless, AI-powered collaboration to build and analyze your connected data. With Nexus, you can do in-depth analysis, focused edits, and selective analysis all through simple prompts. We've also launched on product hunt today, so would appreciate everyone's support there!: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/nexus-12
2025 · trynexus.io · its alternatives →
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I've been building computer-use tools for a while, and I quietly launched this about a month ago (122 Stars on GH). I figured it was worth sharing here. Over the last few months, a lot of computer-use agents have come out: Codex, Claude Code, CUA, and others. Most of them seem to work roughly like this: 1. Take a screenshot 2. Have the model predict pixel coordinates 3. Click x,y 4. Take another screenshot 5. Repeat That works, but it's slow, expensive in tokens, and fragile. If the UI shifts a few pixels, things break. And the model still doesn't know what any element actually is. But the…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Claro runs the AI agents that operate on your data
Apr 2026 · getclaro.ai · its alternatives →
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I was experimenting with building a local dataset generator with deep research workflow a while back and that got me thinking. what if the same workflow could run on my own files instead of the internet. being able to query pdfs, docs or notes and get back a structured report sounded useful. so I made a small terminal tool that does exactly that. I point it to local files like pdf, docx, txt or jpg. it extracts the text, splits it into chunks, runs semantic search, builds a structure from my query, and then writes out a markdown report section by section. it feels like having a lightweight…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A CLI agent that keeps working when you close your laptop
Apr 2026 · devin.ai · its alternatives →
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Single-agent LLMs suck at long-running complex tasks. We’ve open-sourced a multi-agent orchestrator that we’ve been using to handle long-running LLM tasks. We found that single LLM agents tend to stall, loop, or generate non-compiling code, so we built a harness for agents to coordinate over shared context while work is in progress. How it works: 1. Orchestrator agent that manages task decomposition 2. Sub-agents for parallel work 3. Subscriptions to task state and progress 4. Real-time sharing of intermediate discoveries between agents We tested this on a Putnam-level math problem, but the…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, we're Kiran and Vijay! Over the past two years, we have built a columnar storage engine for observability: logs, metrics, and traces. Today, it's exciting for us to show what we've built on top of that foundation: LLM Agent Observability. Given how non-deterministic agents are, storing all traces without sampling was critical for us. But these traces tend to be in the MBs, sometimes GBs - we needed to store them inexpensively. We also needed the queries and analyses to be fast. To meet both these goals, we store them in S3 in our own parquet-like file format, and query them using AWS…
Jul 2026 · oodle.ai · its alternatives →
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Minimal kernel to make any AI coding agent stateful. Clone, point your agent, go. - oguzbilgic/agent-kernel
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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We now write most of our code with agents. For a while, PRs piled up, causing review fatigue, and we had this sinking feeling that standards were slipping. Consistency is tough at this volume. I’m sharing the solution we found, which has become our main product. Continue (https://docs.continue.dev) runs AI checks on every PR. Each check is a source-controlled markdown file in `.continue/checks/` that shows up as a GitHub status check. They run as full agents, not just reading the diff, but able to read/write files, run bash commands, and use a browser. If it finds…
Feb 2026 · docs.continue.dev · its alternatives →
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I'm Josh, founder of Synth. We've been working on coding agent optimization with method like GEPA and MIPRO (the latter of which, I helped to originally develop), agent evaluation via methods like RLMs, and large scale deployment for training and inference. We've also worked on patterns for memory, processing live context, and managing agent actions, combining it all in a single stack called Horizons. With the release of OpenAI's Frontier and the consumer excitement around OpenClaw, we think the timing is right to release a v0. It integrates with our sdk for evaluation and optimization but…
Feb 2026 · github.com · 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 →