nowfound

AI · May 19, 2026

Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks

Hi HN, I'm Antoine Zambelli, AI Director at Texas Instruments. I built Forge, an open-source reliability layer for self-hosted LLM tool-calling. What it does: - Adds domain-and-tool-agnostic guardrails (retry nudges, step enforcement, error recovery, VRAM-aware context management) to local models running on consumer hardware - Takes an 8B model from ~53% to ~99% on multi-step agentic workflows without changing the model - just the system around it - Ships with an eval harness and interactive dashboard so you can reproduce every number I wanted to run a handful of always-on agentic systems…

Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks launched on May 19, 2026 with 687 votes, #8 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 1% of May 2026

In plain words

Forge is an open-source reliability layer for self-hosted language models performing multi-step tool-calling tasks. It improves performance on agentic workflows by adding guardrails like retry nudges, step enforcement, and error recovery without modifying the underlying model itself. Designed for smaller models running on consumer hardware, Forge includes an evaluation harness and dashboard to track results. It's built for developers who want to run autonomous systems locally without relying on cloud-based models.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

A Python framework for self-hosted LLM tool-calling and multi-step agentic workflows - antoinezambelli/forge

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN, I'm Antoine Zambelli, AI Director at Texas Instruments. I built Forge, an open-source reliability layer for self-hosted LLM tool-calling. What it does: - Adds domain-and-tool-agnostic guardrails (retry nudges, step enforcement, error recovery, VRAM-aware context management) to local models running on consumer…

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • TensorBlock Forge2025 · tensorblock.co · ▲378

    Hey HN, We just recently launched Forge – an AI model API platform that lets you access and call AI models from multiple providers in one place. Find it on our website: https://tensorblock.co/forge Some key features: Unified API Key – Store multiple provider API keys and access all with a single Forge API key. OpenAI API Compatible – Drop-in replacement for any application that uses OpenAI’s API. Advanced Security – Strong Encryption for API keys with JWT-based authentication. Client Management – Easy key and user management via included command-line interface. Open-source –…

  • Forge AgentJan 2026 · rightnowai.co · ▲113

    Swarm Agents That Turn Slow PyTorch Into Fast GPU Kernels

  • Progress AI ObservabilityAug 2026 · telerik.com · ▲168

    Hi HN! We’re the team behind Fiddler, and we recently built an Agent Cache feature. It works by capturing an LLM request/response pair and, once caching is enabled, serving subsequent matching calls locally so duplicate requests never hit the provider. It’s meant to reduce three pains that show up together in agent development: token cost, feedback-loop latency, and output non-determinism. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

  • WhiskerMar 2026 · whisker.spatialkittens.com · ▲94

    Create and edit CAD models into production-ready prototypes

  • Forge2025 · ▲16

    Your First AI-Powered CAD Software

  • Open-source playground to red-team AI agents with exploits publishedMar 2026 · github.com · ▲30

    We build runtime security for AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own guardrails. But we kept finding the same types of vulnerabilities because we think about attacks a certain way. At some point you need people who don't think like you. So we open-sourced it. Each challenge is a live agent with real tools and a published system prompt. Whenever a challenge is over, the full winning conversation transcript and guardrail logs get documented publicly. Building the general-purpose agent itself was probably the most fun part. Getting it to reliably use…

More ai this month

the category →
  • Video model that turns script into viral social media videos

    AI · 19d ago · spira.ai

  • The browser where Claude Code and Codex work beside you

    AI · 19d ago · rill.love

  • Kolibri is Aleph Alpha

    AI · 21d ago · tej.as

  • Paintings by AI models: programs run through a simulation of oil paint.

    AI · 22d ago · stillwet.art

  • Beam.win▲379

    Run AI agents on one Mac and use its windows on another

    AI · 5d ago · beam.win

  • Route requests to the right LLM for cost, latency & quality

    AI · 23d ago · fastrouter.ai

Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

Launched alongside, May 2026

the whole month →
  • Brew ▲900

    Like Claude design for email marketing

    AI · May 2026 · brew.new

  • Parallel agents, diff reviewer, and multi-model comparisons

    Dev tools · May 2026 · kilo.ai

  • StoreClaw▲806

    Grow your store profits with agents that know how to sell

    AI · May 2026 · storeclaw.ai

  • Give your agent a real number and voice to make calls.

    AI · May 2026 · pollyreach.ai

  • Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…

    Life & fun · May 2026 · github.com

  • 🌱 Private, quiet space for thinking. Simple app for .md files. - zakirullin/files.md

    Dev tools · May 2026 · github.com