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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Xmloxide – an agent-made Rust replacement for libxml2

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…

Xmloxide is a Rust replacement for libxml2, the widely-used C library for parsing, creating, and manipulating XML and HTML documents. The project was generated by having an AI coding agent work through the existing… 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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    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…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Axel▲271

    Todoist for AI coding agents

    Feb 2026 · axel.build · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN! We just launched Verdent, an AI coding agent that actually plans before it codes, tests its own work, and delivers production-ready results without you having to clean up after it. tl;dr Check out the website [1] and read the story [2] - The problem: Current AI tools dump code and leave you to debug. You ask for "build a login endpoint" and get a passwordless JWT mess that doesn't fit your project. We've talked to hundreds of engineers who are frustrated with having to micromanage AI output. - What we built: Verdent works more like a senior engineer. It asks clarifying questions…

    2025 · verdent.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Replicas▲239

    Hey 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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    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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    Last 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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    Anvil▲175

    Run a fleet of parallel Claude Codes

    Mar 2026 · anvil.fm · its alternatives →

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    Open-source alternative to Codex & Claude Code

    May 2026 · shiori.ai · 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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    🔥 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▲112

    Hi 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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    Hello! We just released freeact (https://github.com/gradion-ai/freeact), a lightweight agent library that empowers language models to act as autonomous agents through executable code actions. By enabling agents to express their actions directly in code rather than through constrained formats like JSON, freeact provides a flexible and powerful approach to solving complex, open-ended problems that require dynamic solution paths. * Supports dynamic installation and utilization of Python packages at runtime * Agents learn from feedback and store successful code actions as…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Hi HN, I’m Hiroki, founder of Epismo. Every day, people share “must-use” prompts, but copying a single prompt rarely reproduces real outcomes. The missing piece is the workflow: task decomposition, step order, intermediate artifacts, and quality checks. So I built Workflow Hub, an open library of human-AI workflows you can clone and run. Each workflow includes step definitions, inputs, expected artifacts/outputs, and verification checks, so you can copy the whole process, not just a prompt. You can clone a workflow, customize it, then execute it in Epismo with the best agent for each…

    Apr 2026 · epismo.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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    Code graph and memory for your coding agents, in one Rust program. For Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and any MCP client. - Graphicle-AI/graphicle

    7d ago · github.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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    Single-agent LLMs suck at long-running complex tasks. We’ve open-sourced a multi-agent orchestrator that we’ve been using to handle long-running LLM tasks. We found that single LLM agents tend to stall, loop, or generate non-compiling code, so we built a harness for agents to coordinate over shared context while work is in progress. How it works: 1. Orchestrator agent that manages task decomposition 2. Sub-agents for parallel work 3. Subscriptions to task state and progress 4. Real-time sharing of intermediate discoveries between agents We tested this on a Putnam-level math problem, but the…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    I built XML-Lib, a deliberately over-engineered XML playground that tries to bundle the whole document flow into one repo.

    Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Aether▲26

    Since coding agents like Claude Code and Codex came out, I've been pretty obsessed with them. It's hard not to when you're getting a 20x discount on inference. I've also been frustrated by them a lot. I hated walking around with my laptop lid open while connected to a hotspot on my phone, having to tediously accept commands so I don't lose my root directory, and running out of RAM when running multiple agents that were spinning up dev servers in different worktrees at once. A lot of people would say existing cloud agents are the solution to this, as none of the above problems apply to any…

    Jul 2026 · runaether.dev · its alternatives →

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    Hi HN! I left AWS a few months ago and created CodinIT, a local, open-source AI app builder made with remix + Electron. The motivation: I tried one of the popular cloud-based AI app builders, but when I pulled down the app to run locally, it just didn’t work especially with the monthly costs needed to build something half decent without being limited. So I created CodinIT, an app builder that runs fully on your computer, making it easy to switch between CodinIT and coding tools like Cursor or Claude Code. Source code: https://github.com/codinit-dev/codinit-dev Download…

    Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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    Hey Everybody, We are really excited to release the 1st version of H2LooP studio today.https://h2loop.ai/ H2LooP Studio helps system software engineers generate code from technical specs, debug issues, and understand complex code in C, C++, Go, and Rust. Under the hood, it uses the H2LooP Data Engine to create instruction-tuned datasets from data sheets and source code. Models are what they eat. We create high-quality, pre-vetted domain-specific training data (telecom, IoT, automotive, consumer electronics) at scale for fine-tuning small language models. We leverage both LLMs…

    2024 · h2loop.ai · its alternatives →

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    Hey 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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    Hi y'all. Been working on something that should've been made a long time ago imo. It compiles codebases into O(1) hashmaps that the agent queries to discover the structure of your code/answer questions/write code. It also does complete static analysis checks on any writes the agent makes. Don't take my word for it though. Here are the benchmarks: https://benzi.fly.dev/benchmark. on 2/20 tests, Claude Code (mostly Sonnet on one task) regressed or timed out. Benzi didn't because of course, it has a map it can query and not get lost in the sauce. On the other 18 it…

    Aug 2026 · benzi.fly.dev · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    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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