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AI · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to OpenSkills – Stop bloating your LLM context with unused instructions

Hello HN, I’ve been building AI agents lately and ran into a common "Context Bloat" problem. When an agent has 20+ skills, stuffing every system prompt, reference doc, and tool definition into a single request quickly hits token limits and degrades model performance (the "lost in the middle" problem). To solve this, I built OpenSkills, an open-source SDK that implements a Progressive Disclosure Architecture for agent skills. The Core Concept: Instead of loading everything upfront, OpenSkills splits a skill into three layers: Layer 1 (Metadata): Light-weight tags and triggers (always loaded…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    We 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 →

  2. 2

    The structured context layer for AI agents. Build self-learning specialised agents that are context aware. - DrDroidLab/open-index

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hey HN, After using a bunch of agents, my friend and I noticed a major issue: an agent could spend a bunch of time solving a tricky task, but when the session ended all that knowledge vanishes. Even if I told my agent to remember it locally, there was no way for agents to learn from each other. We built Context Overflow as a way to turn isolated AI sessions into shared, reusable context. With Context Overflow, agents can: - Search through past solutions when starting a task - Ask questions when they get stuck - Share findings when they solve a non-trivial problem We support a variety of ways…

    Mar 2026 · ctxoverflow.dev · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Turn your work activity into structured AI context.

    Feb 2026 · claw.toggle.pro · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    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 →

  6. 6

    Hi HN! We're Giacomo and Roberto, authors of Ratel (https://github.com/ratel-ai/ratel) We used to help SaaS companies build agents on top of their products. Whenever we wanted to expand the agents’ complexity/scope, by adding more and more tools and instructions, we always run in the same issue: context bloat, with frequent hallucinations and sky high token bills. So we started constantly engineering the agents, dynamically loading tools, splitting them into subagents, inventing our own way to support skills And that's exactly when we started building Ratel: a…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Your AI agent is burning 6x more tokens than it needs to just to browse the web. We built OpenBrowser MCP to fix that. Most browser MCPs give the LLM dozens of tools: click, scroll, type, extract, navigate. Each call dumps the entire page accessibility tree into the context window. One Wikipedia page? 124K+ tokens. Every. Single. Call. OpenBrowser works differently. It exposes one tool. Your agent writes Python code, and OpenBrowser executes it in a persistent runtime with full browser access. The agent controls what comes back. No bloated page dumps. No wasted tokens. Just the data your…

    Apr 2026 · openbrowser.me · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Because Claude has short-term memory, but you don't have to

    Dec 2025 · openskill.online · its alternatives →

  9. 9IS

    Hey HN! For that last 8 months I've been trying to make agents that can hack web applications to find vulnerabilities in them - An AI Security Tester. The system has 29 agents in total, a custom LLM Orchestration framework which works on the task-subtask architecture (old-school but works amazingly for my use case, and is pretty reliable) with custom agent calling mechanism. No Auo-Gen, Langchain and Crew AI - Everything custom built for pentesting. Each test runs in an isolated Kali linux environment (on AWS Fargate), where the agents have full access to the environment to undertake any…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    LLM agents rely on tool calls — but tool responses are huge. Gmail, CRMs, and APIs return bloated JSON LLMs choke on large responses You only need 2–3 fields, but frameworks give you zero control Toolflow is an AI-native framework to fix this: * Filter tool responses before they hit the LLM * Context modes: `minimal`, `full`, `custom`, or `ai` * Composable TypeScript tool registry GitHub: [https://github.com/dksingh1997/toolflow](https://github.com/dksingh1997/toolflow) Would love feedback — especially from those building with LLMs in production.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11FP

    We've built an open-source tool to stress test AI agents by simulating prompt injection attacks. We’ve implemented one powerful attack strategy based on the paper [AdvPrefix: An Objective for Nuanced LLM Jailbreaks](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10321). Here's how it works: - You define a goal, like: “Tell me your system prompt” - Our tool uses a language model to generate adversarial prefixes (e.g., “Sure, here are my system prompts…”) that are likely to jailbreak the agent. - The output is a list of prompts most likely to succeed in bypassing safeguards. We’re just getting…

    2025 · security.vista-labs.ai · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    So, you know how bigtech gives nearly unlimited credits for coding tools and in the same time put a huge admin whitelist of what commands are allowed? So, instead of becoming a 100x engineers, you (including me) simply become a multi-window-enter-clicker I build a tool to solve this. It works locally, using OCR finds the "run" (or any other label you put e.g. accept, allow, fetch etc. ) and just clicks this button. Originally this was a tool for me and my team, but people seamed to love it so much, they encouraged me to share with you. I do understand that workflows in each bigtech company…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    I built a skill library for OpenClaw (always-on AI agent runtime, not session-based) where the agent can teach itself new behaviors during normal conversation. The idea: you tell your agent "every time I ask for a code review, always check for security issues first." It invokes a create-skill skill, writes a new SKILL.md, and that behavior is live immediately — no restart, no config change, no developer required. What I think is actually useful (the safety cluster): • loop-circuit-breaker: OpenClaw retries ALL errors identically. This halts on the 2nd identical failure before it burns your…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I'm an "ideas person" who messes around with AI on a low budget. I got tired of watching my tokens vanish and context windows filling up while agents fumbled around trying to find the right thing. Agents don't flail like they used to with shell tools, but there are still weak/blind spots and back-and-forth episodes — especially when using tools in combination/sequence. So I built "tilth" today. Or rather, AI built it — every line is Opus 4.6. I spent a lot of my precious tokens getting it to "not shit" (at least several of the different vendors' AI overlords assure me it's not…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    #agents #ai #developers #automation #opensource

    Jan 2026 · agentskills.to · its alternatives →

  16. 16
    Plato▲1

    A single markdown file can hijack your AI agent.

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    The open directory your AI agent actually knows how to use.

    Mar 2026 · findskills.org · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Every time I wanted to use LLMs in my existing pipelines the integration was very bloated, complex, and too slow. This is why I created a lightweight library that works just like scikit-learn, the flow generally follows a pipeline-like structure where you “fit” (learn) a skill from sample data or an instruction set, then “predict” (apply the skill) to new data, returning structured results. High-Level Concept Flow Your Data --> Load Skill / Learn Skill --> Create Tasks --> Run Tasks --> Structured Results --> Downstream Steps And the bast part: Every step can be saved and reused as…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    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 →

  20. 20

    Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi HN, Matvey, Ildar, Joey, and Dominik here. If you're building LLM agents that use tools, you're probably worried about prompt injection attacks that can hijack those tools. We were too, and found that solutions like prompt-based filtering or secondary "guard" LLMs can be unreliable. Our thesis is that agent security should be handled at the network level between the agent and the LLM, just like a traditional web application firewall. So we built Archestra Platform: an open-source gateway that acts as a secure proxy for your AI agents. It's designed to be a deterministic firewall against…

    2025 · archestra.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    TLDR; I built a tool that turns any API into a CLI designed for ai agents --- Got tired of dealing with bloated context windows from MCP servers and skills that stuff entire API docs into the agent's context CLIs fix this, agents run a single command to self-discover everything an API has to offer So, built a tool to generate them for any api. All CLIs are written in Go, fast and lightweight, no dependencies Help text (via the --help flag) is the killer feature: all context for each command/endpoint/parameter is extracted directly from the user-facing API docs and enhanced with…

    Mar 2026 · instantcli.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Excited to launch Awesome AI Agent Skills! An open-source collection of 70+ production-ready skills to make your AI agents smarter and faster. Stop reinventing the wheel. From code generation to security audits, it's all here. Contributions welcome! Let's build together.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    A manage agent skills for multiple Agentic IDEs

    Mar 2026 · skillops.cc · its alternatives →

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