Mole – Deep research agent for your terminal
Doing research with agents is fun until they blow way past budget, jumble the sources, and don't even give you the best possible answer, just sound confident. And if you want to run some research task on local data - you have no idea where your data ends up after the prompt consumes it. So I built this tool: a deep-research agent with an enforced budget, verified quotes, and a privacy boundary for local data. 1. Never spend more than you budgeted (measured overshoot is 0%). 2. Every claim carries a source 3. Data stays local (give a CSV, it'll analyze it without the data ever leaving your…
Mole – Deep research agent for your terminal launched on August 14, 2026 with 100 votes, #385 of 23,274 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Mole is a terminal-based research agent that conducts deep investigation tasks while maintaining strict budget control, source verification, and data privacy. It prevents cost overruns by enforcing spending limits, requires every claim to include its source, and keeps local data on the user's machine rather than sending it to external services. The tool works with most large language models and is available as free, open-source software.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A deep-research agent with an enforced budget, verified quotes, and a privacy boundary for local data. - lajosdeme/mole
In the maker’s words, at launch
Doing research with agents is fun until they blow way past budget, jumble the sources, and don't even give you the best possible answer, just sound confident. And if you want to run some research task on local data - you have no idea where your data ends up after the prompt consumes it. So I built this tool: a…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
OSS Agent I built topped the TerminalBench on Gemini-3-flash-previewApr 2026 · github.com · ▲393Scored 65.2% vs google's official 47.8%, and the existing top closed source model Junie CLI's 64.3%. Since there are a lot of reports of deliberate cheating on TerminalBench 2.0 lately (https://debugml.github.io/cheating-agents/), I would like to also clarify a few things 1. Absolutely no {agents/skills}.md files were inserted at any point. No cheating mechanisms whatsoever 2. The cli agent was run in leaderboard compliant way (no modification of resources or timeouts) 3. The full terminal bench run was done using the fully open source version of the agent, no…
Tilde.run – Agent sandbox with a transactional, versioned filesystemMay 2026 · tilde.run · ▲205Tilde started from a simple observation: AI agents are only as useful as the environment they can work in. Giving an agent a prompt is easy. Giving it the right files, credentials, tools, context, and execution environment, safely and repeatably, is much harder. Over the past year, we learned a lot
Building a Deep Research Agent Using MCP-Agent2025 · thealliance.ai · ▲91Learn how MCP-Agent powers Deep Research Agents with simple orchestration, external memory, and scalable workflows. Open-source on GitHub.
EphoAug 2026 · epho.io · ▲156Hey folks, Burak here. Epho is an API that allows running Claude Code, Codex or Opencode in a sandbox in the cloud. It abstracts away sandboxes, and allows running coding agents with a single HTTP request. Epho came out of our own struggles with building our own AI analyst: - Sandboxes give you bare machines; you need to configure them for agentic workloads. - Each agent behaves differently, and you need to build integrations with each of them. - Sandbox providers are not very reliable, which means you need to figure out a multi-provider strategy to avoid failures. - Logging, artifacts,…
TrailsJan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · ▲81Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…
More ai this month
the category →
Paintings by AI models: programs run through a simulation of oil paint.
AI · 21d ago · stillwet.art
PixVerse R2▲381A real-time world model you can explore and change
AI · 30d ago · world.pixverse.video
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, August 2026
the whole month →- TL
Life & fun · Aug 2026 · louisabraham.github.io
Clipto MCP▲655Hey HN, We recently built Clipto. It’s a tool that lets you search over terabytes of video, audio, and images on your computer, without relying on the cloud. Motivation: we probably all had this similar experience, we know a moment exists in a video or audio, but finding it takes hours scrubbing the timeline. You can send all the media to process in the cloud, but it’s slow, expensive and raises privacy concerns. So we decided to build our own on-device media search engine. How it works (high level): 1. We ingest video, audio, image; normalize formats via ffmpeg; run content analysis to…
Work · Aug 2026 · clipto.com
Hello HN! I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color space that made it easy. I've built a color picker and procedural generation algorithm based on the space as well as a bunch of other fun js features and demos throughout the page that use the equations. If you find it interesting, I have lots of explanations of how I built it and what properties the space has. The methodology might be a bit shaky, but hopefully the result is as helpful for…
Life & fun · Aug 2026 · toneyalexander.github.io
Astute▲606Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · Aug 2026 · company-app.joinastute.com