AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Skales – I built a desktop AI agent a 6-year-old can use
Solo dev from Vienna. Skales is a local-first AI desktop agent for Windows, macOS, and Linux. v9.0.0 just shipped with Agent Skills (SKILL.md import from Claude Code, Codex, Copilot), autonomous coding (Codework), multi-agent teams (Organization), Computer Use, and 15+ providers including Ollama offline. No Docker, no terminal. Download, install, done. My 6-year-old built a Snake game with it. BSL-1.1, free for personal use. DevKit: https://github.com/skalesapp/devkit
Skales is a local-first AI desktop agent for Windows, macOS, and Linux that requires no installation complexity—users download and run it immediately. It supports autonomous coding, multi-agent teams, computer use, and… 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 4 we have checked on their own sites, 4 of them free or with a free tier.
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Local AI that acts. Not chats. Installs in 30 seconds. 🦎
Mar 2026 · skales.app · its alternatives →
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Skillkit▲252It's an open-source project that lets you create, translate, and work with multiple agents at the same time, and more.
Feb 2026 · agenstskills.com · its alternatives →
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Claude Opus 4.7 is Anthropic's most capable generally available model, released April 16, 2026. It outperforms Opus 4.6, GPT-5.4, and Gemini 3.1 Pro on key benchmarks including agentic coding, multidisciplinary reasoning, scaled tool use, and agentic computer use. It is benchmarked below Claude Mythos Preview — which remains restricted to Project Glasswing partners. https://vucense.com/ai-intelligence/ai-tools/claude-opus-4-7...
2025 · anthropic.com · its alternatives →
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Hello HN, I don't post on here much, but wanted to get some eyes on a new project I'm just launching. I think we definitely need one more AI code agent.. I'm a long-term C++ dev, and over 30+ years I've created some successful audio dev tools (JUCE, the Tracktion DAW, the Cmajor DSP language). All of these came from me getting annoyed with something I had to use, and deciding to have a go at my own take on whatever it was. So Juggler is my attempt at an AI code agent, after spending too many hours loving what the models could do, but hating the CLI experience, and having some opinions of…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Tessl▲260I'm Guy, the founder behind Snyk — now building Tessl, a package manager for agent skills. We’ve recently witnessed that most teams still treat skills as static artifacts: markdown files, created or copied from repo to repo. This approach offers a strong initial boost, but quickly creates debt: - Skills are duplicated, and updates never roll out. - Poor quality skills go unseen, misguiding agents instead of helping. - Skill knowledge grows stale, and don’t keep up with the systems and practices they describe. Without a way to evaluate skills, teams have no clear way to understand how good a…
Feb 2026 · tessl.io · its alternatives →
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I've been building computer-use tools for a while, and I quietly launched this about a month ago (122 Stars on GH). I figured it was worth sharing here. Over the last few months, a lot of computer-use agents have come out: Codex, Claude Code, CUA, and others. Most of them seem to work roughly like this: 1. Take a screenshot 2. Have the model predict pixel coordinates 3. Click x,y 4. Take another screenshot 5. Repeat That works, but it's slow, expensive in tokens, and fragile. If the UI shifts a few pixels, things break. And the model still doesn't know what any element actually is. But the…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Dropstone 3free tier, from $15/mo▲206I’ve been trying out Dropstone, a new IDE with a self-learning AI that actually adapts to how you code. Unlike Cursor or Claude, it runs locally, has no token limits, and gets better the more you use it. What impressed me is that it learns from your edits and naming patterns while keeping everything private on your own system. It even explains its reasoning for every suggestion and has quick undo and fallback options that keep you in flow. It genuinely feels like coding with an assistant that remembers you.
Feb 2026 · dropstone.io · its alternatives →
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Hi! I’m Nathan: an ML Engineer at Mozilla.ai: I built agent-of-empires (aoe): a CLI application to help you manage all of your running Claude Code/Opencode sessions and know when they are waiting for you. - Written in rust and relies on tmux for security and reliability - Monitors state of cli sessions to tell you when an agent is running vs idle vs waiting for your input - Manage sessions by naming them, grouping them, configuring profiles for various settings I'm passionate about getting self-hosted open-weight LLMs to be valid options to compete with proprietary closed models. One…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Boxes.devfree tier, from $19/mo▲112Hi HN, we’re Nick and Drew, and we’re building boxes.dev – the first cloud-only agentic dev environment (ADE) that gives every Codex and Claude Code agent its own cloud computer. We’re two engineers who previously built Gem (co-founder/CTO and first hire), and we spent the last year coding almost exclusively using Codex and Claude Code. It’s been a huge change to how we code, and it’s been exhilarating seeing the models keep getting better – but we eventually realized that developing on localhost was holding us back: - Git worktrees are clunky to set up and use for parallelizing work -…
Jun 2026 · boxes.dev · its alternatives →
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Code graph and memory for your coding agents, in one Rust program. For Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and any MCP client. - Graphicle-AI/graphicle
9d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
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One memory, not one per tool. Cog gives AI agents a shared, structured memory layer using plain-text files — portable across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Copilot, and more.
Mar 2026 · lab.puga.com.br · its alternatives →
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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 →
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We recently started to use agents to update some documentation across our codebase on a weekly basis, and everything quickly turned into cron jobs, logs, and terminal output. it worked, but was hard to tell what agents were doing, why something failed, or whether a workflow was actually progressing. We thought it would be more interesting to treat agents as long-lived workers with state and responsibilities and explicit handoffs. Something you can actually see and reason about, instead of just tailing logs. So we built Clawe, a small coordination layer on top of OpenClaw that lets agent…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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When we asked developers from large engineering teams, almost everyone is using Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot. But adoption is still inconsistent. Some of us would have 15 agents running in Claude Code at the same time; some would still refuse to use any of them and write code manually. There's a fragmented AI development problem: - Five developers building similar features, and all of them start from scratch - No way to share "here's how we prompt AI to follow our architecture" - No trail of how the AI changes were generated - People leave the company, so does the their knowledge Aviator…
2025 · aviator.co · its alternatives →
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AgentGrid▲77Hi HN, I’m Michael, I built AgentGrid with my friend Souren because we were tired of losing our coding sessions and couldn't keep track of what was actually being built across our many projects. Our approach was to use an infinite canvas desktop app for the TUIs we already know and love, mainly claude + codex. We drew inspiration from Figma and Railway. Overtime we added image nodes, notes, terminals, coding editors, source control, etc. I wasn't sure about it at first. It took me a month to give the first version Souren built a real try. What got me was an Apple System Update I've been…
Jul 2026 · agentgrid.sh · its alternatives →
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Velane▲95n8n is built for humans dragging nodes on a canvas. That breaks down at B2B scale (embedding in a product, multi-tenant scalability, etc). n8n does have an MCP server so agents can create workflows too, but it outputs raw JSON. That's fine for n8n's engine, but painful for a coding agent (or a human reviewing its output) to read, write, diff, or debug. I'm building an alternative where workflows are authored by a coding agent in [a more dev-legible format] instead of JSON blobs, and execute it at scale.
Jul 2026 · velane.sh · its alternatives →
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Claude Code is amazing for individuals but terrible for teams. I spent the last six months building my perfect mix of MCP servers, subagents, commands and skills. Claude Code writes 100% of the code now, but sharing this with my team? Painful. 1. Blog posts and workshops don't work (and don't scale) 2. Committing tools to N repos means N PRs. A tool changes? N more PRs. 3. Same tools, different files or folders for each AI assistant; not everyone uses Claude Code It is like 1999 all over again; FTPing files up to prod and versioning with ".bak" suffixes. So I built sx. It is your team's…
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Skeezo▲10The agent-native macOS IDE that drives your installed Claude Code — parallel agent lanes, team chat, multi-repo workspaces, and automation. No API key.
Sep 2026 · skeezo.dev · its alternatives →
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Agent OS by AIUtilfree▲2Run, review, and remember work across AI coding agents
Aug 2026 · agentos.aiutil.com · its alternatives →
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Open-source AI agent platform — own it, run any model
Jul 2026 · ibl.ai · its alternatives →
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Matrix OSfree tier▲26Matrix OS is an AI-native operating system: self-creating, self-healing, and self-expanding. The Claude Agent SDK is the literal kernel: CPU => Claude Opus 4.6 RAM => Context window (1M tokens) Kernel => Main agent + 26 IPC tools Processes => 5 sub-agents Disk => ~/apps, ~/data, ~/system Syscalls => Read, Write, Edit, Bash Drivers => MCP servers IPC => File coordination Break something, the healer agent repairs it. Need a new capability, the OS writes its own agents and skills. Describe an app, it appears as a file you own. The bigger vision is Web 4: OS + messaging + social +…
Sep 2026 · matrix-os.com · its alternatives →
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Skarta▲3Build agents in Python. Ship them on a Rust runtime.
May 2026 · github.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 →