Alternatives
Products that do what VAEN – Package and import portable AI coding-agent Harnesses does
Hi HN, I built VAEN (an open source CLI) because I kept running into a boring problem with AI coding-agent workflows: the setup becomes useful, but then it is hard to move. A good, useful agentic harness consists of more than just instructions: skills, mcp servers and more. There should be a better way to share those than just .MD files, and that is why I created VAEN. What works: create a yaml, run the CLI commands as per the repo, and get a .agent file that you can share and extract. Think of how awesome it could be if anyone could use a very useful agentic harness, and share it with one…
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HarnessRouter▲238Bring the world's best AI agents into your app, with one API
Jul 2026 · harnessrouter.ai
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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
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13,000+ MCP servers, skills & plugins for AI coding agents
Jul 2026 · codexmarketplaces.com
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Hey HN. I built an AI agent harness over the past few months and I'm open sourcing it today. Some context on why. I've been building with Claude Code daily using this harness. It orchestrates multiple AI agents as a team, with a dashboard, chat, kanban board, the works. I used it to build a full SaaS product (MyUpMonitor, https://myupmonitor.com) in about 24 hours of focused coding. Then yesterday Anthropic announced Mythos and decided to keep it behind closed doors. Meanwhile I'm paying for Claude and I can't access their best model. I don't think that is nice at all... So I'm…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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I've been running Claude Code and Codex together every day. At some point I figured out you can use tmux to let them talk to each other, so I started doing that. Once they could coordinate, I kept adding more agents. Before long I had a whole team working together. But any time I rebooted my machine, the whole thing was gone. Not just the tabs. The way they were wired up, what each one was doing, all of it. Nothing I'd found treats your agent setup as a topology, as something with a shape you can save and bring back. So I built OpenRig, a multi-agent harness. A harness wraps a model. A "rig"…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, I recently open sourced a small tool (Remuda) that I built at work to remove some of the friction of launching and managing agents and figured HN might be interested. I also wrote a post on the company blog that goes into more detail about why I built it and showcases its features: https://www.yendo.com/blog/remuda-an-agent-orchestrator
Jun 2026 · github.com
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I put together a directory of agentic coding tools & things like autonomous app builders, CLI agents, VSCode copilots, and multi-agent dev platforms. Most of these tools can plan, scaffold, and write code with minimal input. Some are polished, some experimental. I wanted a way to compare them all in one place. You can filter by autonomy level, LLMs used, pricing, open source, etc. It’s a compact UI—works on mobile, has dark mode, and no signups or fluff. Would love feedback: Are there tools I’ve missed? Anything that should be organized differently? Info you wish was included? Cheers.
2025 · aisnoop.org
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Hello all, I'm a software developer. Over the last few months more and more of my work has turned into using coding agents instead of typing the whole code myself. Usually a few claude sessions at once, sometimes codex, one per feature or per revealed bug. I ran them in a split terminal for a few weeks, and quickly spotted two main problems. The first is that I couldn't easily tell which agent was stuck waiting on me and which was still working, so I'd cycle through sessions and checking on them. The second one: agents sharing a single branch step on each other. Two of them could be editing…
Jul 2026 · shikigami.dev
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We kept hitting the same wall building voice AI systems. Pipecat and LiveKit are great projects, genuinely. But getting it to production took us weeks of plumbing - wiring things together, handling barge-ins, setting up telephony, Knowledge base, tool calls, handling barge in etc. And every time we needed to tweak agent behavior, you were back in the code and redeploying. We just wanted to change a prompt and test it in 30 seconds. Thats why Vapi retell etc exist. So we wrote the entire code and open sourced it as a Visual drag-and-drop for voice agents ( same as vapi or n8n for voice).…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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Around 3 months ago, we were thinking why none of the iPhone apps running an LLM are built as a full harness (as in inference + agentic loop + context management + tools + MCP servers and etc.). It became more interesting when we noticed even the new Siri is not fully on device (and not available in EU for that matter). Having built a few agentic products around a custom harness in the past, we thought this shouldn't be that hard. well, we underestimated how "dumb" a 4B model can be, especially when it comes to tool calling. :D We tried 8 different models and we settled on Qwen 3.5 4B and we…
18d ago · orvena.app
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Hi HN. This is a script I have been using for some time for coding tasks, which I have polished a bit and published. The motivation behind this script was to have an agent with persistent session which I can use from the shell like a regular command. It _can_ also be scripted, although I don't use it in such a way. The script uses a minimal prompt, which just tells it to use standard unix tools to do everything. I was surprised at how well it worked, when using a good model. Qwen3-coder is on openrouter, and it works well with the minimal instructions. I also tested qwen2.5-coder with ollama…
2025 · github.com
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We are a small group of undergrads interested in building human in the loop coding agents. We dream of a world where building complex agent workflows feels as simple and creative as playing with legos. When we were building stuff we needed a tool that made it easy to try out different code embedding models so that we could see which ones worked best in different scenarios and understand their strengths and weaknesses. So to speed that process up we made PurpleSearch an 'instant' search engine for your local codebases. This tool lets you quickly deploy any open source embedding model on…
2025
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Hi HN, I built a desktop client for DeepSeek Harness (DeepSeek's open-source coding agent). V1 wraps the official Harness Web UI in an Electron shell with some desktop additions — installer, system tray, built-in browser panel (visible Edge, so you can watch the agent browse), and a sandboxed terminal. One-click install, just need an API key. V2 is in development — replacing the upstream Web UI with a custom workbench built for desktop. Source available under PolyForm Perimeter. Would love feedback on what you'd want from a desktop coding agent client.
8d ago · github.com
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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
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TLDR; I built a tool that turns any API into a CLI designed for ai agents --- Got tired of dealing with bloated context windows from MCP servers and skills that stuff entire API docs into the agent's context CLIs fix this, agents run a single command to self-discover everything an API has to offer So, built a tool to generate them for any api. All CLIs are written in Go, fast and lightweight, no dependencies Help text (via the --help flag) is the killer feature: all context for each command/endpoint/parameter is extracted directly from the user-facing API docs and enhanced with…
Mar 2026 · instantcli.com
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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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Hey HN, I'm Mo. I've been building Paseo, an open source environment for running Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode across desktop, mobile, web, and CLI. It started last September as a push-to-talk voice interface for Claude Code. I wanted to talk to an agent while going on walks. Then I wanted to see what it was doing. Then text it when I couldn't talk. Then review diffs, run multiple agents, and manage work across machines. After a lot of iteration, it turned into a broader environment. The basic model is: - A daemon runs on your machine (MacBook, desktop, VPS, etc.). - Clients connect to it…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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