Alternatives
Products that do what Rowboat – Open-Source Claude Cowork with an Obsidian Vault does
Claude Cowork just launched, bringing agentic AI to everyday work. Rowboat is an open-source alternative that builds knowledge that persists over time. A quick demo is here: https://youtu.be/T2Bmiy05FrI It connects to Gmail and meeting notes (Granola, Fireflies) and organizes them into an Obsidian-compatible vault. Plain Markdown files with backlinks, organized around things like people, projects, organizations, and topics. As new emails and meetings come in, the right notes update automatically. Rowboat is also the primary interface for this vault. You can read, navigate,…
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Claude’s desktop app is brilliant, but for our own daily work we kept wanting it to be less like a chat app and more like a full-fledged work app. Rowboat is our attempt at that, including the ability to build your own work surfaces inside Rowboat (more below). Our repo is https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat, and there’s a demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et5yQABJ3xI In a previous startup, we built a deep-learning product for enterprise support reps, including teams supporting P&G brands. Models took live notes, suggested replies, and…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, Nick here. We’re launching OpenKnowledge (https://openknowledge.ai/), a “what you see is what you get” markdown editor that has direct integrations with Claude, Codex, and other agents. Available as MacOS app or Web UI+CLI. Fully free/local and OSS. We built this because we wanted a Notion-like experience for writing and sharing markdown files across our team. Obsidian is the best alternative we tried, but found it doesn’t have a true WYSWIG UI and it didn’t integrate well with Claude/Codex outside of community plugins. So we built OpenKnowledge. It takes…
Jun 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN! Today we're launching Agent Vault - an open source HTTP credential proxy and vault for AI agents. Repo is at https://github.com/Infisical/agent-vault, and there's an in-depth description at https://infisical.com/blog/agent-vault-the-open-source-crede.... We built Agent Vault in response to a question that been plaguing the industry: How do we give agents secure access to services without them reading any secrets? Most teams building agents have run into this exact problem: They build an agent or agentic system and come to realize at some point…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN, A few months ago, I tried to automate some of my work with the popular AI agent OpenClaw, and then I quickly realized how difficult it is to get it to work with APIs and third-party services securely, which is essential for a lot of work-related tasks. Then I realized OpenClaw is more of a personal assistant and it was not designed to get actual work done as a coworker. So I started to build Valmis, an alternative to OpenClaw that works with more than 100 apps and services, with security being the priority. Valmis addresses the security issue by designing a proxy system: dockerized…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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I'm Tyler - the solo operator of Quanta Intellect based in Portland, Oregon. I recently participated in Nous Research's Hermes Agent Hackathon, which is where this project was born. I've used agents extensively in my workflows for the better part of the last year - the biggest pain point was always the browser. Every tool out there assumes a human operator with automation bolted on. I wanted to flip that - make the agent the primary driver and give the human a supervisory role. Enter: Vessel Browser - an Electron-based browser with 40+ MCP-native tools, persistent sessions that survive…
Mar 2026 · quantaintellect.com
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Here's something I realized: the most AI-native knowledge base isn't a SaaS product with an API. It's a folder of markdown files on your disk. Obsidian stores everything as plain .md files. That means Claude Code (or any AI tool) can grep, read, write, and traverse your entire knowledge base with zero setup. No API keys. No OAuth. No middleware. Just local file I/O. The only missing piece was sync. I wanted my vault on iPhone (iCloud), on Mac (local), and on GitHub (backup + version history) — without paying $4/mo for Obsidian Sync. cc-md is ~400 lines of bash. iCloud handles Apple…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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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
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Hi, I'm Karl. Greg and I spent the last year building Nimbalyst, an open-source local desktop workspace for working with coding agents. We want to give agents and humans one place to work together with maximum bandwidth and context, instead of Obsidian for plans, Excalidraw for diagrams, Codex app or Conductor for session management, and Linear for tasks. So we integrated: - Visual editors for markdown, diagrams, mockups, data models, CSV, code, and your own custom extensions - Red/green diff review with per-block accept/reject when an agent makes changes - Session manager with…
May 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, my name is Maria, and I’m a co-founder of Maritime. We started Maritime at MIT to build infrastructure for companies that need to run thousands of isolated AI agents for their customers. Imagine you set up an agent like OpenClaw, or a personal assistant agent with a custom framework, and want to give a separate version of it to every customer/friend. Each customer needs their own agent running in an isolated microVM, with persistent state, secrets, triggers, and sleep/wake behavior. Building such scalable and secure infra will take you months and will cost hundreds of…
19d ago · maritime.sh
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A bunch of companies that I spoke to had their own claude & codex OTel dashboards that showed spend + seats per month. However, none of the dashboards actually analyzed how the engineers worked with the tools and if there were any areas for improvement! That's why I created https://www.promptster.ai. Managers get aggregate level view of code quality and how that ties with team workflows (nothing on a per-engineer level). While engineers get personalized coaching on how they can save tokens while keeping output high. We also have a tool built for individuals to test their local…
Jul 2026
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Obsidian plugin that connects to CLI agents you already have installed. No built-in LLM integration, no API keys to configure in the plugin. It spawns your tool as a child process, pipes vault context into each prompt, and streams responses into a chat panel. Supports Claude Code, Opencode, and any custom binary via a generic adapter. Adding a new agent is a single file. Free, proudly Open Source (MIT licensed). Would love feedback on this for anyone that that tries it out.
Mar 2026 · github.com
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Hi everyone! Hope you had a great day so far, and maybe its about to get just a little bit better (thanks Winter ;) So I had way to many terminal windows flying about when using Claude, and kept losing track of which terminal / session / project im in right now. So I built a solution for that, presented it to my team, and now we're using our new tool all the time, and developing it to be the most helpful agents organization tool we can think of. Unfortunatelly, Claude Code only for now, will do Codex soon tho. What it does for you: Main features: - Overview of your projects, with…
Aug 2026 · episko.dev
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Hey everyone, We're excited to introduce MarinaBox, an open-source toolkit for creating isolated desktop/browser sandboxes tailored for AI agents. Over the past few months, we've worked on various projects involving: 1. AI agents interacting with computers (think Claude computer-use scenarios). 2. Browser automation for AI agents using tools like Playwright and Selenium. 3. Applications that need a live-session view to monitor AI agents' actions, with the ability for human-in-the-loop intervention. What we learned: All these scenarios share a common need for robust infrastructure. So,…
2024 · github.com
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Hi HN, I am Erik Bethke, game dev that has been making online games for 30+ years (Starfleet Command, GoPets, FarmVille, Mafia Wars). For the last 3 years I have been building Bike4Mind and now I have to put my big boy pants on and 'go to market'. Ugh, it would be so much more cozy to fire up a few more agents and fix a few more bugs, polish some more UX - or hey how about a new feature that does Q, R or S? What is Bike4Mind? I started Bike4Mind to be the home of a bunch of AI augmented game development tools, and over time have just kept adding features. It is a full cognitive workbench we…
Jul 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN! I am super excited (and slightly nervous) to introduce AgentServe! AgentServe is a framework to make hosting scalable AI agents as easy as possible. With 4 lines of code AS wraps your agent (any framework) in a FastAPI and connects it to a Task Queue (celery or redis). Why Should You Care? Standardized Communication Pattern: AgentServe proposes that all agents should communicate with each other and the outside world with “Tasks” that can be submitted in a sync or async way. This simple API wil enable Framework Agnostic: No favorites. OpenAI, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI are all…
2024 · github.com
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One coding agent orchestrator UI for Claude and Codex, but actually feels nice. Free, open-source, MIT licensed. Why I built it: - I wanted a lightweight UI as nice as the Codex app, but without the complexity and the custom diffs on the side - I want files and diffs open straight in my editor! - And I wanted both agents - Anthropic + OpenAI — in one place How it works: - No API keys, no OAuth, no separate billing — it just uses whatever you're already logged into. So your Claude Max and ChatGPT/Codex subscriptions both work out of the box. - Talks to Claude Code via the Claude Agent…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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I've been building AI products for a while. For this one I made a deliberate choice: none of the 16 tools use AI. Meeting cost calculators, freelance rate calculators, PRD generators, runway calculators, sprint retro boards — these problems don't need a language model. They need a well-designed form and correct arithmetic. Built on Nuxt 4 + Vue 3, fully static, runs in your browser. No account required to use anything. Optional Firebase auth only kicks in if you want to save output. Irony worth naming: Claude Code was my pair programmer throughout. The choice wasn't anti-AI — it was about…
Mar 2026 · viztools.app
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