Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model
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…
Needle is a 26-million-parameter open-source model designed for function calling and tool use on consumer devices like phones and watches. It achieves fast performance at 6000 tokens per second for prefill and 1200 for… 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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Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
Aug 2026 · cactuscompute.com · its alternatives →
- 2IR
2023 · sagittarius.greg.technology · its alternatives →
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Needle 2.0▲582Vibe-automate workflows and earn passive income
Mar 2026 · needle.app · its alternatives →
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We built a model router that plugs into coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) and intelligently sends requests to the best model to serve them. Here's a quick demo of running it locally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKhAyivtfM. At Weave, we write most of our code with AI, and it's been getting more expensive. This came to a head when Opus 4.7 was released and, thanks to its tokenizer changes, our costs shot up. We knew we didn't need Opus for everything but we didn't want to lose out on the intelligence for the cases where you really need it. So we decided…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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AI Toolbox 3.0▲434AI Toolbox (formerly ChatGPT Toolbox): folders, search, bulk export, and prompt chaining for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. 40,000+ users. Start free.
Jul 2026 · ai-toolbox.co · its alternatives →
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Ollama v0.19▲410Massive local model speedup on Apple Silicon with MLX
Apr 2026 · ollama.com · its alternatives →
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The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol. Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day. A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship…
Mar 2026 · georgelarson.me · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! I'm Baha, creator of Mysti. The problem: I pay for Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus, and Gemini but only one could help at a time. On tricky architecture decisions, I wanted a second opinion. The solution: Mysti lets you pick any two AI agents (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini) to collaborate. They each analyze your request, debate approaches, then synthesize the best solution. Your prompt → Agent 1 analyzes → Agent 2 analyzes → Discussion → Synthesized solution Why this matters: each model has different training and blind spots. Two perspectives catch edge cases one would miss. It's like pair…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I built Axe because I got tired of every AI tool trying to be a chatbot. Most frameworks want a long-lived session with a massive context window doing everything at once. That's expensive, slow, and fragile. Good software is small, focused, and composable... AI agents should be too. Axe treats LLM agents like Unix programs. Each agent is a TOML config with a focused job. Such as code reviewer, log analyzer, commit message writer. You can run them from the CLI, pipe data in, get results out. You can use pipes to chain them together. Or trigger from cron, git hooks, CI. What Axe is: - 12MB…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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MiniMax M2.5▲194The first open model to beat Sonnet made for productivity
Feb 2026 · minimax.io · its alternatives →
- 11
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 →
- 12OS
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Fast and efficient models optimized for coding and subagents
Mar 2026 · openai.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, Henry and Roman here - we've been building a cross-platform framework for deploying LLMs, VLMs, Embedding Models and TTS models locally on smartphones. Ollama enables deploying LLMs models locally on laptops and edge severs, Cactus enables deploying on phones. Deploying directly on phones facilitates building AI apps and agents capable of phone use without breaking privacy, supports real-time inference with no latency, we have seen personalised RAG pipelines for users and more. Apple and Google actively went into local AI models recently with the launch of Apple Foundation Frameworks…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Qwen3.6-35B-A3B▲124The open sparse MoE model for agentic coding
Apr 2026 · qwen.ai · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, we built world-model-optimizer, an open source tool to continually improve a specialized model for an agent. It does this by simulating production tool responses through text world modeling (similar to QwenAgentWorld, summary here https://x.com/silennai/status/2073887455884058814). We can then use this to train a router for frontier, OS, and local models (use defaults or pick which ones to optimize against). wmo ingests agent traces, builds the simulation, embeds the traces, runs different models you choose against the simulation scenarios, and then uses a KNN…
Jul 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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I wrote this tool during an internship at Narf Industries in 2023. It's a REPL that allows for quickly developing, testing, and fuzzing for HTTP request smuggling attack payloads. I started the internship having never worked with web servers, and have now found over 100 HTTP implementation bugs. I attribute this mostly to the ease of experimentation in the Garden. REPL-oriented fuzzing is just a really good interface for finding parsing bugs. It's pretty neat to able to run a differential fuzzer, categorize and display all the discovered discrepancies, then let a human pick through them and…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi all! This morning, we released a new Apache 2.0 licensed model on HuggingFace for detecting hallucinations in retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems. What we've found is that even when given a "simple" instruction like "summarize the following news article," every LLM that's available hallucinates to some extent, making up details that never existed in the source article -- and some of them quite a bit. As a RAG provider and proponents of ethical AI, we want to see LLMs get better at this. We've published an open source model, a blog more thoroughly describing our methodology (and…
2023 · vectara.com · its alternatives →
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We recently started to use agents to update some documentation across our codebase on a weekly basis, and everything quickly turned into cron jobs, logs, and terminal output. it worked, but was hard to tell what agents were doing, why something failed, or whether a workflow was actually progressing. We thought it would be more interesting to treat agents as long-lived workers with state and responsibilities and explicit handoffs. Something you can actually see and reason about, instead of just tailing logs. So we built Clawe, a small coordination layer on top of OpenClaw that lets agent…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Enables small-to-large self-hosted ai models to use local source code when running tool-calling agentic workloads. We actively data mine 20,900+ (2+ TB) popular github repos using large and small ai models to create reuseable: json, markdown and parquet files for local-first tool-calling models. - d
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Needle▲12Enterprise-driven, adaptive, automated GenAI Framework
2024 · softwebsolutions.com · its alternatives →
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Last week I benchmarked my open-source Deep Research tool against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. I caught OpenAI fabricating 4-5 citations that don't exist. Gemini reduced real hazard ratios by 30-40%. So I built ASK Mode: every answer gets automatically verified against a second round of sources. Each claim marked [OK], [??], or [NO]. - ~400 verified answers for $1 - 2-3 minutes per query - No RLHF nannying - it answers what you ask - Full verification report with every response The gap between chat (unverified, stale training data) and deep research (20+ minutes) needed filling.…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Code▲20Hey HN, Today we're launching Code, a community-driven, open-source coding agent for your terminal. It's a fork of OpenAI's codex with a focus on developer ergonomics and local control. Key features: - Browser integration – attach to your Chrome via CDP or use a built-in headless browser. You can browse pages, run the CLI in a browser session, and even take screenshots from the terminal. - Multi-agent commands – /plan, /solve and /code orchestrate multiple models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to propose and implement solutions, with consensus or race options. - Diff viewer – see…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots alternatives
- I Remade the Fake Google Gemini Demo, Except Using GPT-4 and It's Real alternatives
- Needle 2.0 alternatives
- Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor alternatives
- AI Toolbox 3.0 alternatives
- Ollama v0.19 alternatives
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 →