Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Safe and lightweight VMs for Coding agents
Run agents in lightweight and safe VMs. Contribute to skerrysoft/safeagent development by creating an account on GitHub.
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.
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Open Agentsfree▲161OpenAgents - The collaboration OS for AI agents. Contribute to openagents-org/openagents development by creating an account on GitHub.
Apr 2026 · open-agents.dev · its alternatives →
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Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop - clawkwork/clawk
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Deploy any Agent Skill as an API via POST /run. The open-source multi-model alternative to Claude Managed Agents, Microsoft Foundry & Mistral/Koyeb — works with any LLM. - skrun-dev/skrun
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I've built this to make it easy to host your own infra for lightweight VMs at large scale. Intended for exec of AI-generated code, for CICD runners, or for off-chain AI DApps. Mainly to avoid Docker-in-Docker dangers and mess. Super easy to use with CLI / Python SDK, friendly to AI engs who usually don't like to mess with VM orchestration and networking too much. Defense-in-depth philosophy. Would love to get feedback (and contributors: clear & exciting roadmap!), thx
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Replicas▲239Hey HN! I'm Connor, creator of Replicas. I'm a heavy Codex/Claude Code user, and I wanted to hand off tasks to agents like I would to an engineer - kick something off before work, let it scaffold while I'm at lunch, even come back to a ready PR. The problem: existing alternatives use workspace VMs that are black boxes. I have no access to any of them - they can't run tests, read logs, or use tools like the Playwright MCP (which I use to verify agents actually fixed what they claim to fix). Replicas gives agents real cloud workspaces where they can: - Run your test suite and read the…
Jun 2026 · replicas.dev · its alternatives →
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Grass▲293Gives your coding agent a dedicated VM that's ready 24/7
Apr 2026 · codeongrass.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, we built SuperHQ, an open source app that runs AI coding agents in isolated microVM sandboxes instead of directly on your machine. Each agent gets its own VM with a full Debian environment. You mount your projects in, writes go to a tmpfs overlay so your host is never touched, and you get a diff view to accept or discard changes. API keys never enter the sandbox. We also just launched remote.superhq.ai which acts as a remote control for SuperHQ, allowing you to access your workspaces and agents from anywhere.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Run a coding agent in a sandboxed environment. Contribute to sin-ack/agent-run development by creating an account on GitHub.
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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LangGraph orchestration scaffold (Python) + restricted tool runner (Rust) with batching and run traces. - christianmeurer/Lula
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I've been looking for a way to run LLMs safely without needing to approve every command. There are plenty of projects out there that run the agent in docker, but they don't always contain the dependencies that I need. Then it struck me. I already define project dependencies with mise. What if we could build a container on the fly for any project by reading the mise config? I've been using agent-en-place for a couple of weeks now, and it's working great! I'd love to hear what y'all think
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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We just open-sourced the internal system we built at Assembled for running coding agents as a team. Coding agents worked well for individual engineers, but the surrounding workflow was a bit of a mess. We generally found that many engineers had different MCP connections and context for their agents, personal automations running that other people couldn’t access, and very little introspection for what a human’s input into the coding agent looked like. So we built an internal system that converted coding agents into shared team infrastructure. The system runs Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, and…
Jun 2026 · its alternatives →
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Self-hosted virtual machines for background coding agents.
Jun 2026 · bastion.computer · 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 →
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The only way to go fast is full YOLO mode in your coding agent. I've got the local sandbox figured out (pro tip: Incus VMs work great) but I wanted to keep my agents from doing things like inadvertently blowing up my cloud services or chasing a prompt to POST to some random website. I struggle most with this on my side projects where my permission model isn't quite as robust as it is at the office. I started with a firewall on the Incus container but every time the agent needed access to something new, I was poking more holes in it - and it didn't differentiate between HTTP verbs. I've been…
Jul 2026 · trollbridge.dev · its alternatives →
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Coding agents craft arbitrary code so securing them is more complicated than red-teaming. We post trained a cyber-security small llm, changed how it reasons and supplemented our controls using program analysis techniques such as inline reference monitoring to outperform GPT5.5-xhigh on hard benchmarks like LinuxArena and SleightBench. Free product available at harden.run and full benchmarks in the blog post.
Aug 2026 · harden.run · its alternatives →
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Enable LLMs to Program Themselves. Contribute to Osly-AI/Pocket-Flow-Framework development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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There's been some interesting work lately with BrowserAI (runs LLMs in the browser using WebGPU) enabling local, private AI processing. Now, the team has released BrowserAgent - a no-code tool built on top of it. BrowserAgent lets you create custom AI workflows using a drag-and-drop interface, all within your browser. This means personalized web summarizers, research assistants, or content generators can all run locally with no cloud costs and full data privacy. Check it out here - https://browseragent.dev Key features include: - No-Code Workflow Builder: Design custom AI agents…
2025 · browseragent.dev · its alternatives →
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Tool-agnostic TypeScript library for observing coding agent sessions. Built-in Cursor provider, extensible to Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. - vtemian/agentprobe
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Manage a swarm of coding agents. Contribute to penberg/swarm development by creating an account on GitHub.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Link: https://docs.trysoma.ai/ For the past ~9 months I’ve been building Soma, an open-source AI agent & workflow runtime written in Rust, with a TypeScript SDK (Python coming soon). It’s not a framework; it’s meant to sit underneath whatever agent/tooling code you already write (Vercel AI SDK, LangChain, custom code, etc.). It provides features around your framework + a better DX for building agents. I’ve tried to take a Next.JS model: open-source, good DX, self-deployable. I originally set out to build a vertical back-office/operations product for SMEs. I needed a…
Dec 2025 · docs.trysoma.ai · its alternatives →
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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 →