Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Simstack, SSH escape room for developers
I built a realistic prod system under heavy pressure where you SSH in and solve real problems. You get your own server (real box) and have to fix various things up under fire. a friend told me it reminded them of DOOM for SREs, another called it a "flight simulator" because you can do anything (and reboot if you crash). someone else said it was like "an escape room for engineers", in that you have to find your own way around an unfamiliar box and solve puzzles. idk, maybe it's fun. try it! how it works: you get two Hetzner servers: a traffic generator (real traffic from NYC taxi data highly…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]: > If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos. Hopefully I did that? Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub: https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize! [0]…
2024 · lanparty.house · its alternatives →
- 2
Hey! I built a playground called Advent of Distributed Systems (https://aods.cryingpotato.com/) where you can work through the Fly.io distributed systems challenges (https://fly.io/dist-sys/1/) directly in your browser. Running challenges like this directly in the browser has often been the best way for me to get the activation energy to start them since it bypasses all the annoying dev environment setup that has to happen as a precursor to working on it. The coding environment was built with another project I'm working on called Cannon…
2023 · aods.cryingpotato.com · its alternatives →
- 3SA
Hello all :) I made this BBS for fun and thought you all would enjoy it. It's not perfect, but it's been a fun exercise! see it: https://asciinema.org/a/Emg6SWrXMV6cehfQxrw1GRu75 try it: ssh -p 2223 shhhbb.com host it: https://github.com/donuts-are-good/shhhbb/releases/latest why? Every year I challenge myself in some new way, this year it is to push one project per week. You might recognize my static site generator [0] or my releaser for go [1] from previous posts as one of these weekly projects. If you want to join me in doing this, it's…
2023 · donuts-are-good.github.io · its alternatives →
- 4IM
Run `ssh devzat.hackclub.com` to try it out! The repo is here: https://github.com/quackduck/devzat (golang). It has markdown and emoji support, DMs, channels, and it can show images too. You can send code, and it gets syntax highlighted (you can change the theme). You can ping people like so: @user and it sends them a \a, which should play an audible sound if the terminal allows it. There's inbuilt games and rainbow names and a lot of other small things I don't remember right now. You might find the auth system interesting: it's based on a hash of ssh pubkey (bans use…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 5AA
This is a weekend project that spiraled out of control. I was originally trying to get Claude to play a ROM of the SNES SimCity. I struggled with it and that led me to Micropolis (the open-sourced SimCity engine) and was able to get it to work by bolting on an API. The weekend hack turned into a headless city simulation platform where anyone can get an API key (no signup) and have their AI agent play mayor. The simulation runs the real Micropolis engine inside Cloudflare Durable Objects, one per city. Every city is public and browsable on the site. LLMs are awful at the spatial stuff, which…
Feb 2026 · hallucinatingsplines.com · its alternatives →
- 6TC
Looking to get some feedback from the Hacker News community. I wrote the book with a focus on penetration testers and red teamers, but there are great examples for network admins, developers, and blue team defenders as well. You can pick up a copy for free here through May 19, 2019: https://gumroad.com/l/the_cyber_plumbers_handbook/hackernews... Please note, because it's hosted on Gumroad, it does require an email. If you don't want to give out your actual email, check out an anonymous email service. I give it away to students for free, so if you know of one that…
2019 · its alternatives →
- 7
Viberia▲146Hey HN, This is my take on the agent harness. Everything on an isometric map. Agents are grouped into "buildings" that run in a sequence or a loop; e.g., the CodeForge has an agent that writes a PRD, another one that implements, and a third that reviews. Everything is customizable, you build your own buildings/teams however you want. It's a Tauri app, really light (about 8x less energy than the closest competitor I benchmarked, so it actually runs from a coffee shop on battery). It's macOS only for now, but ping me if you are willing to test the Windows or Linux version. I've been…
May 2026 · getviberia.com · its alternatives →
- 8
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 →
- 9SS
I've been playing with trying to get the most out of regular terminal (ansi) graphics rendering for an mmorpg game for a bit of fun. Thought that I might take a quick detour and make a streetfighter style game that turned out better than I thought it would. Type "ssh sshfighter.com" in your terminal to play Visit the website https://sshfighter.com to watch replays etc (tv feature is cool) My friends and I have been working on bot models for a bit of fun, you can queue against them if you want to and they have their own leaderboard. look at /bots if you want to make your own.…
Aug 2026 · its alternatives →
- 10
This is a project I made over the weekend. What if when you SSH'd into a machine, instead of giving you a user login, it would provision a new microVM just for you? It's like a little SimCity for VMs. This turned out to be a lot of fun, and I've wanted to make my own custom SSH server for a while now, with its fancy progress bars and color animations. The hardest part was definitely debugging VM setup, boot, and networking though! Compiling the Linux kernel with all the right configs was difficult. For a while I had issues with silent hangs on boot due to lack of available system entropy, on…
2025 · ekzhang.substack.com · its alternatives →
- 11
SecurSSH▲57SSH access for developers. Secure, European, done right.
May 2026 · securssh.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Hi HN, I’m one of the devs behind StarDesk, a P2P-first remote desktop we’ve been building for ~1 year. We started this partly out of frustration: some popular RDP tools haven’t seen meaningful updates in a long time, and long-standing issues are often left unaddressed. As devs, we really dislike software that stagnates once it “works well enough”. StarDesk is our attempt to do it differently. What we focus on: -P2P by default (relay as fallback) -Low RTT + low jitter > chasing max bitrate -Encoder / input path tuned for real-time interaction -Modern E2EE (TLS/DTLS) UX-wise, setup…
Jan 2026 · stardesk.net · its alternatives →
- 13MS
A little over a year ago I gave away over 4,600 copies of my intro to SSH tunneling book, The Cyber Plumber's Handbook, for free over a 48 hour period to the awesome folks here on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946941). Since then, I've been getting a lot of feedback about creating an interactive lab where SSH tunneling and port redirection techniques can be practiced in real scenarios. With a bit more time during the quarantine, I finally found the time to launch the lab portion. For the HN family, I'm offering the book and 2 weeks of lab time for 50% off…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 14
I didn't realize Universe Sandbox ran on MacOS, and I was in the mood to play around a bit. Some functions it's got: - Random system generation - Sonification is super fun too - Habitability Simulation (Just for fun, don't cite this please) - Replacing, spawning, deleting objects I've had tons of fun building this, so I hope someone else can share the joy. It's free and runs in the browser. I'd love to hear any feedback. I think this is at a state where I might leave it as it is, but if people are interested in other features, maybe I'll keep working on it. I've kept saying I'll stop working…
Dec 2025 · luna.watermelonson.com · its alternatives →
- 15
wsgrok▲7I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.
Jan 2026 · wsgrok.com · its alternatives →
- 16AM
For the past few months, I’ve been hacking together Hive: a retro-style virtual workspace for devs who love building in public. It’s a bit rough but already has some cool features: - AI-powered presence to represent you when you’re offline. - Live video streaming to showcase your work in real time. - VS Code integration to broadcast your status live. - GraphQL API for full customization and hackability (such as using your own agents) - Web3 donations to support and get support from other builders. In this demo, you can claim a desk by walking up to it and pressing E, then personalize it with…
2024 · joinhive.devmode.digital · its alternatives →
- 17
Hello HN: I love the randomness of the universe. I've been spending some time creating a Craps simulator to help experience this love without having to shell out like a real degenerate. For others similarly fascinated: I would love to hear any and all feedback you've got on this. It's meant to be unique in the sense that it's a community-oriented, infinite simulation.
Feb 2026 · infinitecraps.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Hi HN! I've been hacking on this side project for the last month or two with the goal of making it dead simple to use cloud GPUs. I ran into this problem personally during the phd, and built my own tooling around it. I always thought it'd be fun to try to turn that tooling into a more general product... and bitbop.io is the result! All you have to do is run `ssh bitbop.io`, and you get your own personal dev GPU workstation in the cloud. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
2024 · twitter.com · its alternatives →
- 19
Hi HN! This is my first game — something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a small browser game built with Phaser 3, React, and the phaser template (https://github.com/phaserjs/template-react-ts/). I made it in 2 days (like 8 hours in total real time) using gemini-cli. About 90% of the code was generated with AI, but I learned a lot by making fine tweaks. It only works on PC since it’s a typical WASD + R (reload) shooter. I’d love feedback on: - Gameplay (is it fun, too hard?) - Ideas for new features Thanks in advance! ps: I used cubes as a prototype, but now I kind of…
2025 · cubic-zombies.pages.dev · its alternatives →
- 20
I'm building a cozy multiplayer game engine (very early stages - just a few days in!) combining Elixir, Go, and Godot to achieve sub-50ms latency while maintaining a warm, welcoming feel. My architecture uses Elixir/Phoenix for fault-tolerant session management, Go for high-performance game state sync (1ms tick rate), and Godot for client-side prediction. I've implemented lock-free data structures, SIMD-optimized physics, and binary protocols with delta compression. Quick note: the website/login aren't functional yet - this is a work in progress! Here's my technical deep-dive into…
2024 · tappygames.itch.io · its alternatives →
- 21
- 22
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 →
- 23
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 →
- 24
Navigate the filesystem. Survive. Battle rogue processes from /home to /dev/null. Play over SSH!
Jan 2026 · dev-dungeon.com · 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 →