Alternatives
Products that do what Prompt-refiner – Lightweight optimization for LLM inputs and RAG does
Hi HN, While building RAG agents, I noticed a lot of token budget was wasted on formatting overhead (HTML tags, JSON structure, whitespace). Existing solutions felt too heavy (often requiring torch/transformers), so I wrote this lightweight, zero-dependency library to solve it. It includes strategies for context packing, PII redaction, and tool output compression. Benchmarks show it can save ~15% of tokens with negligible latency overhead (<0.5ms). Happy to answer any questions!
- 1
- 2IB
After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
- 3CS
Hi HN! Token cost has started to become a high topic of concern to all of us. I tried a few (awesome) tools such as rtk, caveman, and the recent (hillarious but effective) ponytail. What they usually do, is in-line token reduction, e.g. try to compress requests / responses as much as possible. But then it hit me (and I’m sure others had similar ideas) - just like we have routers that pick the right model, why not have something that will also narrow down the amount of available tools, skills and mcps based on repo/context? People usually accumulate skills, agents, MCP servers,…
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 4AE
Hi all, Sharing a repo I was working on for a while. It’s open-source and includes many different strategies for RAG (currently 17), including tutorials, and visualizations. This is great learning and reference material. Open issues, suggest more strategies, and use as needed. Enjoy!
2024 · github.com
- 5IL
LLM Application development is extremely iterative, more so than any other types of development. This is because in addition to all the activities involved in regular application development, we also need to make the LLM Application accurate and reduce hallucination. To improve performance, we need to trial and error various combinations of LLM models, prompt templates (e.g., few-shot, chain-of-thought), prompt context with different RAG architecture, try different agent architecture, and more. There are thousands of permutations to try. We need to be able to easily experiment with these…
2024 · palico.ai
- 6A1
I've seen a lot of comments about how complex frameworks like LangChain can be. Over the holidays, I wanted to see how minimal an LLM framework could get if we stripped away everything non-essential. The result is an LLM framework in just 100 lines of code. These 100 lines capture what I see as the core abstraction of most LLM frameworks: a nested directed graph that breaks down tasks into multiple LLM steps, with branching and recursion to enable agent-like decision-making. From there, you can layer on more advanced features like agents, RAG, task decomposition, and more. I’ve intentionally…
2025 · github.com
- 7PA
Hey HN! We just launched PromptL: a templating language built to simplify writing complex prompts for LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude. Why PromptL? Creating dynamic prompts for LLMs can get tricky, even with standardized APIs that use lists of messages and settings. While these formats are consistent, building complex interactions with custom logic or branching paths can quickly become repetitive and hard to manage as prompts grow. PromptL steps in to make this simple. It allows you to define and manage LLM conversations in a readable, single-file format, with support for control flow and…
2024 · promptl.ai
- 8NL
Built this because I was tired of every AI tool shipping my data to someone else server n0x runs the full stack LLM inference via WebGPU, autonomous ReAct agents, RAG over your own docs, sandboxed Python execution via Pyodide all inside a single browser tab. No account No keys No backend Models download once, cache in IndexedDB permanently. Biggest challenge was context window budgeting for the agent loop and making the WASM vector search non-blocking. Happy to talk architecture. GitHub: https://github.com/ixchio/n0x | Live demo: https://n0x-three.vercel.app
Mar 2026 · n0xth.vercel.app
- 9WB
Hi HN, Our research team just released the best performing and most efficient reranker out there, and it's available now as an open weight model on HuggingFace. Reranker v2 was designed specifically for agentic RAG, supports instruction following (our v1 was the first to introduce this), and is multilingual. Along with this, we're also open source our eval set, which allows you to reproduce our benchmark results. By releasing these datasets, we are also advancing instruction-following reranking evaluation, where high-quality benchmarks are currently limited. Please give it a try and let us…
2025 · huggingface.co
- 10HP
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
- 11EL
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
- 12AO
Hi HN, We built one of the largest RAG set-ups that exist toady with Usul.ai (6B tokens). We started by using langchain and llamaindex, they were able to get us to a prototype in a couple of days, but took 3 months of taking pieces apart and optimizing them to make it perform well at such large scale. We put all of these learning into an MIT licensed open-source project — Agentset. Our goal to let people get production quality RAG w/o having to understand or optimize the underlying pieces. It supports 22 file formats, agentic search, deep research, citations, and a UI out of the box.…
Oct 2025 · github.com
- 13LC
Hi HN, I'm building Librarian (https://uselibrarian.dev/), an open-source (MIT) context management tool that stops AI agents from burning tokens by blindly re-reading their entire conversation history on every turn. The Problem: If you're building agentic loops in frameworks like LangGraph or OpenClaw, you hit two walls fast: Financial Cost: Token usage scales quadratically over long conversations. Passing the whole history every time gets incredibly expensive. Context Rot: As the context window fills up, the LLM suffers from the "Lost in the Middle" effect. Response latency…
Feb 2026 · uselibrarian.dev
- 14TL
Little tool that I made to understand how (un)reasonable my prompts are.
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 15TA
In this post, we document the results of some experiments comparing vanilla Graph RAG (just a single pass of text2cypher) vs. a router agent Graph RAG approach that can call vector search tools alongside text2cypher. The routing agent uses an LLM to decide which vector search tool to call, depending on the terms identified in the question, and it works quite well. The results show that recent frontier LLMs like `gpt-4.1` and the trusty workhorse `gemini-2.0-flash` produce great quality Cypher reliably and reproducibly, with some prompt engineering to ensure that the graph schema is formatted…
2025 · blog.kuzudb.com
- 16RA
A friend and I spent a month throwing together a visual rule engine product– wanted to share it with HN today. I've been building automation tooling for a few years at prefix.app and one of the messier things both to support and to teach users was around encoding logic in their automations– most folks get a hold of the basic concepts quite easily, but every (visual) automation tool out there seems to have their own way of actually pulling it all together. For small decisions those work great! But for bigger decisions and more complex logic we don’t think it makes much sense to be embedding…
2022 · rulebricks.com
- 17GB
Hey HN, We’re excited to share PySpur, an open-source tool that provides a graph-based interface for building, debugging, and evaluating LLM workflows. Why we built this: Before this, we built several LLM-powered applications that collectively served thousands of users. The biggest challenge we faced was ensuring reliability: making sure the workflows were robust enough to handle edge cases and deliver consistent results. In practice, achieving this reliability meant repeatedly: 1. Breaking down complex goals into simpler steps: Composing prompts, tool calls, parsing steps, and branching…
2024 · github.com
- 18SC
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality. So we built Semble. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and…
May 2026 · github.com
- 19WW
Over three months ago, I posted my book on HN and got tremendous +ve reponse. I am happy to inform that I have published the book to leanpub as per the comments I got on HN itself! It is pay as you go model, and the minimum is $0 because I wanted to contribute back to the FOSS Community
2016
- 20LS
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 21PP
Hello HN! We’ve been working hard on Vanna, our RAG framework for SQL generation and we’ve been updating our documentation. Please have a look — we have a ton of Jupyter notebooks for any combination of desired use cases. At it’s heart, we have abstractions that help you: - “train” a RAG “model” i.e. add metadata for the retrieval augmentation system to reference when constructing the LLM prompt (yes, we know that the terms “train” and “model” are somewhat confusing and we’re open to changing those terms if you can suggest better ones) - “ask” questions, which will generate SQL, run it,…
2023 · github.com
- 22CA
Hi HN, I've been working with LLMs in production for a while both as a solo dev building apps for clients and working at an AI startup. The one thing that always was a pain was to pay OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic a few dollars a month just for me to say "test" or have a CI runner validate some UI code. So I built this server called ChunkBack, that mocks the popular llm provider's functionality but allows you to type in a deterministic language: `SAY "cheese"` or `TOOLCALL "tool_name" {} "tool response"` I've had to work in some test environments and give good results for experimenting…
Nov 2025 · github.com
- 23SB
*Motivation* Hi hackers, I'm Asif. I know we dislike premature standardization, but hear me out. LLM Application development is extremely iterative, more so than most other types of application development. We need a process that allows us to iterate faster. LLM Development is highly iterative due to the activities that come with regular software development, as well as the need to make the LLM Application accurate and reduce hallucination. To improve hallucination, we need to trial and error various combinations of LLM models, prompt templates (e.g., few-shot, chain-of-thought), prompt…
2024 · github.com
- 24RA
2024 · github.com
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →