AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Urlx – an agent-made Rust replacement for curl/libcurl
Recently several AI labs have published experiments where they tried to get AI coding agents to complete large software projects. - Cursor attempted to make a browser from scratch: https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents - Anthropic attempted to make a C Compiler: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler A few weeks ago I posted xmloxide, an agent-made Rust replacement for libxml2 made by pointing Claude code at the libxml2 test suite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201816 curl is arguably the most widely deployed…
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 3 we have checked on their own sites, 3 of them free or with a free tier.
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Recently several AI labs have published experiments where they tried to get AI coding agents to complete large software projects. - Cursor attempted to make a browser from scratch: https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents - Anthropic attempted to make a C Compiler: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler I have been wondering if there are software packages that can be easily reproduced by taking the available test suites and tasking agents to work on projects until the existing test suites pass. After playing with this concept by having…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, We’ve been building browser agents for a while. In production, we kept converging on the same pattern: deterministic scripts for the happy path, agents only for edge cases. So we built Demonstrate Mode. The idea is simple: You perform your workflow once in a remote browser. Notte records the interactions and generates deterministic automation code. How it works: - Record clicks, inputs, navigations in a cloud browser - Compile them into deterministic code (no LLM at runtime) - Run and deploy on managed browser infrastructure Closest analog is Playwright codegen but: - Infrastructure…
2025 · notte.cc · 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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display.dev▲183Last week's post from Thariq "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML" went viral in X. He made a good point about HTML being the more expressive and human friendly alternative to markdown files. I completely buy in where he's coming from, I've been asking Claude Code to create me HTML files to better understand what we're planning and building together. What Thariq didn't address was the part of sharing and collaborating on these HTML artifacts (he proposed uploading to S3). While I've been heavy user of HTML artifacts to share quarterly plans, implementation specs, technical guides and…
May 2026 · display.dev · 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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🔥 Open Source Browser API for AI Agents & Apps. Steel Browser is a batteries-included browser sandbox that lets you automate the web without worrying about infrastructure. - steel-dev/steel-browser
2024 · 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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I originally was just messing with pi-autoresearch. Gave it a sample task to build the most portable coding agent. First cut was 6 KB of shell. Great for one-shots, unusable interactively. I was shocked it actually worked. Started building up -- adding features — but with a self-imposed rule: no new dependencies, and sub 500 LOC. This thing had to be truly portable. Just sh, curl, awk. System primitives only. Which means I did some genuinely disgusting things in awk, including JSON parsing and the OpenAI Responses tool loop with reasoning items carried across turns. It's now ~400 lines. In…
Apr 2026 · pu.dev · its alternatives →
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HTTP client/libcurl TUI front end in Rust, with request + key storage - PThorpe92/CuTE
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, Zidan here. I’ve been experimenting with AI-assisted debugging and noticed a recurring gap: most tools optimize for agent-led exploration (ex: giving claude code a browser to click around and try to reproduce an issue). But in many cases, I've already found the bug myself. What I actually want is a way to hand the agent the exact context I just saw - without retyping steps, copying logs, or hoping it can reproduce the behavior. So we built FlowLens, an open-source MCP server + Chrome extension that captures browser context and lets coding agents inspect it as structured, queryable…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →
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Hey HN! First time showing something here, but I've been furiously working over the holidays on Feather, a from scratch reimplementation of TCL designed for embedding in modern applications. It's starting out as a faithful reimplementation of TCL without I/O, OOP features, or coroutines. TCL has a special place in my heart because the syntax is so elegant for interactive use, and defining domain specific languages. My motiviation is twofold: faster feedback loops for AI, and moldable software for users. It turns out giving AI agents access to the runtime state of your program makes for…
Dec 2025 · feather-lang.dev · its alternatives →
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We’ve published a set of open-source reference implementations on how to build production-grade Agentic AI applications on AWS. What’s in the repo: • Agentic RAG, memory, and planning workflows with LangGraph & CrewAI • Strands-based flows with observability using OTEL & Arize • Evaluation with LLM-as-judge and cost/performance regressions • Built with Bedrock, S3, Step Functions, and more GitHub: https://github.com/aws-samples/sample-agentic-frameworks-on-... Would love your thoughts — feedback, issues, and stars welcome!
2025 · github.com · 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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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'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 →
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I love Claude Code but got tired of having nothing to do while I waited for sessions to finish, and managing multiple sessions on the command line was getting annoying and I kept losing track of the tabs. I originally built a quick and dirty version of this for my own use, but decided to polish it up and make it open source. The idea is that you should be able to do all your agentic coding without leaving the tool or needing to go back to a traditional IDE. You can view the diffs, run your program, and merge your changes back. I support OSX and Linux right now, but could add Windows support…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN, I'm one of the creators of Nanobrowser, an open-source Chrome extension that lets you automate web tasks using AI agents. We were inspired by the potential of tools like OpenAI's Operator, but we wanted something that was: -Open-Source:You can see the code, modify it, and contribute to the project. -Browser-Based:No complex setups or server deployments. It runs directly in your browser. -Customizable:You can tailor the agent's behavior to your specific needs. -BYO LLM:Bring your own large language model API key (OpenAI, Anthropic,or even local models), No vendor lock-in. -Privacy…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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ADK-Rust▲6Hey everyone! I'm excited to share ADK-Rust - a production-ready implementation of Google's Agent Development Kit in Rust. Why Rust? After working extensively with adk-python in developing an ai agent factory at zavora.ai, I wanted to bring the same powerful agent development patterns to the Rust ecosystem, targeting use cases where: Performance is critical - Rust's zero-cost abstractions and memory safety Deployment size matters - Single binary with no runtime dependencies Systems-level integration - Embedded systems, edge computing, IoT Concurrency at scale - Rust's async/await with…
Dec 2025 · adk-rust.com · its alternatives →
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At Laminar (https://github.com/lmnr-ai/lmnr) we're building open source AI observability platform in Rust. We obsess over instrumentation DX for our Python and TS SDKs and in this new blog we outline how we made the most seamless way of instrumenting recently released claude agent sdk
Dec 2025 · laminar.sh · its alternatives →
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project: https://github.com/dashn9/rusty-browser Finished working on a browser automation system via natural language and API calls. This is how it's different than the likes Vercel browser, browser use, stage hand. e.t.c. Handles identity / proxy management for you. Handles server management with the aid of github.com/dashn9/serverless-flux enabling serverless browser computing. Spin as much AI browser process as possible. Extremely useful for startups and companies that wants to keep this internal. Has less memory footprint and much faster (for obvious…
Apr 2026 · rustybrowser.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN. I'm the founder of Phoenix Labs (ex TikTok, Applied AI) and we're open sourcing our internal tooling today which is like a toolchain / meta-harness for CLI agents useful for really scaling eng and creative work. We are a very small team who's building a very ambitious product so we had to find ways to squeeze every ounce of efficiency that we could get our hands on. Harness strengths of different models (Claude, GPTs) and CLI-harnesses (Claude Code, Codex), safe/robust browser integration to speed up UX/QA testing, teams cli to speed up security reviews and parallelize…
May 2026 · agents-cli.sh · 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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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 →