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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to RewardHackBench: Using sandboxes to stop agents from cheating

hey all, happy to share research i've been working on for islo.dev in recent months. ever since the cheating agents (https://debugml.github.io/cheating-agents/) paper came out, revealing reward hacking was 4x more prevalent than previously estimated, i've been looking into how we can deal with the issue the common approach (taken by the tbench team) is post hoc trajectory analysis. i've been interested in the idea of reframing the problem as an endpoint security problem and tackling it via sandbox i hope you find it interesting, and thanks to the islo.dev team for…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    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 →

  2. 2
    Agent 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 →

  3. 3

    Hola HN! Long time lurker, sometimes commentor, first time poster here. I’ve been working alongside my two co-founders and a few colleagues on a project I’m excited (and a little nervous) to share with you all! Like many of us, I’ve lived a tortured existence with AI coding (is it vibes?) over the past few months - I think November was a big moment with this. But, one thing I’ve noticed after building orchestration layer after orchestration layer is that the thing I always came back to was “what the hell is Claude Code actually doing?” Perhaps it’s because of the time Claude Code got…

    Jun 2026 · backplanes.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    We build AI agents to find vulnerabilities in other AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own offensive agent Nyx. But we realised that hacking an AI is about have as wide a distribution of attacks as possible, especially those which aren't in the distribution of the models. So we are launching playground as a platform to crowdsource agent jailbreaks. And although hacking AI is super fun and we are sure people will do it for free, we want to reward those who help us push forward the offensive frontier of AI. So we are committing $100K in prizes over…

    Jul 2026 · playground.fabraix.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I made this for myself, and it seemed like it might be useful to others. I'd love some feedback, both on the threat model and the tool itself. I hope you find it useful! Backstory: I've been using many agents in parallel as I work on a somewhat ambitious financial analysis tool. I was juggling agents working on epics for the linear solver, the persistence layer, the front-end, and planning for the second-generation solver. I was losing my mind playing whack-a-mole with the permission prompts. YOLO mode felt so tempting. And yet. Then it occurred to me: what if YOLO mode isn't so bad?…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hey HN! We just launched open sign up on Buildstash. It's a platform for managing and sharing software binaries. I'd worked across game dev, mobile apps, and agencies - and found every team had no real system for managing their built binaries. Often just dumped in a shared folder (if someone remembered!). No system for versioning, keeping track of who'd signed off what when, or what exact build had gone to a client, etc. Existing tools out there for managing build artifacts are really focused on package repository management. But miss all the other types of software not being deployed that…

    2025 · buildstash.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Trails▲81

    Hey 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 →

  8. 8

    A living map of indie hackers around the world

    Mar 2026 · nomaddot.verifiedtools.info · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    I want to share a new dataset of 331 reward-hackable environments. These are real environments used in Terminal Bench and adjacent benchmarks. I first got interested in this because, as a reviewer of Terminal Bench, I noticed a lot of our tasks were hackable. I also noticed that many contributors to the benchmark do so because it provides credibility when selling environments to labs. Hence, TBench tasks are, in my opinion, held to a higher quality standard than those being used today for RL. No one is spending hours manually reviewing the $1B in tasks being purchased by major labs. As far…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10OC

    Hi Hacker News! My Co Co-op Matt and I are on a work term and were given the task of building a webapp that could make $20 in four weeks as our onboarding challenge. We're in the final stretch here and would sure appreciate HN's thoughts (we realize we kind of did this backwards, building something first before talking to people who might use it, but hey! We're leaning.). So basically, we tried to apply game dynamics to retaining visitors to websites by offering a reward (ie. discount coupon / premium content, etc.) for meeting various 'objectives' (ie. pages to visit). We call it ScavSite…

    2011 · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Contribute to vrn21/bouvet.com development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    For at least a few years (since before COVID), in my circle everbody wants an AI tool that finds vulnerabilities in binaries. I have my reservations about such a tool because of my perception that AI is overhyped, so I decided to build one myself to see how useful it could be (or not). I was actually kinda surprised how well it worked for my collection of binaries with known CVEs. It definitely has false positives and negatives, as any static analysis tool would, but I think its actually somewhat usable. I dont think the results are super actionable, but interesting nonetheless. I still…

    2025 · pwnscan.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    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 →

  14. 14

    We build runtime security for AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own guardrails. But we kept finding the same types of vulnerabilities because we think about attacks a certain way. At some point you need people who don't think like you. So we open-sourced it. Each challenge is a live agent with real tools and a published system prompt. Whenever a challenge is over, the full winning conversation transcript and guardrail logs get documented publicly. Building the general-purpose agent itself was probably the most fun part. Getting it to reliably use…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    If you're interested in exploring what LLM-based agent systems these days actually do to solve certain benchmarks such as SWEBench or WebArena, we created a small leaderboard with our team, that allows to view a lot of public and OSS agent results including all the runtime traces (the step-by-step reasoning behind the scenes). Looking at traces is actually quite interesting, as they reveal a lot about the inner working and shortcomings of current agent system, e.g. see https://explorer.invariantlabs.ai/u/invariant/webarena--SteP... for an example trace.

    2024 · explorer.invariantlabs.ai · its alternatives →

  16. 16ET

    Hey Hacker News, For the last 2 months, I've been working on a testing agent to free developers from the endless maintenance of end-to-end tests. You just push up a PR, and our agent analyzes the code changes and automatically visits the preview to test things out like a real human! We also support describing tests in English (or even in the PR description), and we'll go through your site whenever you want via a GitHub action to test and make sure various core flows continue to work as expected. We are looking for early testers and are giving out a generous free tier! Just sign up on the…

    2025 · playmatic.ai · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    This weekend I built a multi-agent coding system which, quite unexpectedly, beat Claude Code on Stanford's Terminal Bench! The architecture is straightforward, consisting of an orchestrator agent that deploys explorer & coder subagents to complete complex terminal based tasks, utilising an intelligent context sharing mechanism along the way which makes it all work. The repo has a lot of technical details, and all the code and prompts for you to play around with if you'd like! I had a lot of fun making this, I hope you have fun reading the README, using it yourself, or even extending it! As…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    I’ve been cautiously (and nervously) playing with openclaw and a number of other claw and code agents for a while now, but trying out different ones was tricky so I wanted a simple way to switch out channel ownership… then I wanted more. Security is hard, and I wanted to make it easier. This is FAR from polished, and no claims that I’m a “security expert” but I tried to think and research a bit on different threat models (I think of 2 broad ones for agents, external adversaries and internal agentic failures) and try and offer best in class protection on both, while also not having any…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey HN, wanted to share this cli and skill I built @ Steel (I'm the founder) I was trying to set up openclaw on railway and quickly bumped up against issues with a lack of browser access, a core component of the system. Agents like OpenClaw and CC are super good at using browsers but, similar to code sandboxes, they should be able to control these browser in the background, in parallel, without getting blocked by captchas. So I reworked agent-browser, the most popular cli for browser agents, to navigate Steel cloud browser sessions to they can run at scale and unhindered. It's a relatively…

    Mar 2026 · twitter.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20HA

    Hello HN! Here's my November Startup Sprint project (coded in two days). http://hackerlunch.com It allows you to post your lunch plans and lets other hackers join you. I built this because I often see HN users are interested in meeting each other if they are in the same area. I am not a coder, so this version is very rough. If people use it, I will work with others to build a more polished version. I would love some feedback. What do you think? Is this something you will be using?

    2010 · hackerlunch.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    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 →

  22. 22OS

    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…

    Jan 2026 · its alternatives →

  23. 23IS

    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 →

  24. 24

    Hi HN, This is a project I've been working on since the beginning of 2025 full time, without funding. Coding agents have fundamentally changed the way we write software. When you let an agent write code, pull dependencies, and run scripts, you are delegating trust while still keeping the responsibility. You shouldn't have to choose between moving fast with agents and maintaining basic control over your host machine. Normally, we just inspect the final result, treating the app like a black box. Most security tools only sandbox the app runtime and ignore the build phase. CapaKit is my attempt…

    Jun 2026 · capakit.com · its alternatives →

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