Preloop
Hey HN, I’m Yannis, co-founder of Preloop. We’ve built a proxy for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that lets you add human approval gates to your AI agents without changing your agent code. We’re building agents that use tools (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.), but we were terrified to give them write-access to sensitive systems (Stripe, Prod DBs, AWS). We didn't want to rewrite our agents to wrap every tool call in complex "ask_user" logic, especially since we use different agent runtimes. We built Preloop as a middleware layer. It acts as a standard MCP server proxy.You point your agent to…
Preloop launched on January 23, 2026 with 121 votes, #261 of 14,585 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
What it does
AI agents are powerful, but one wrong action could be catastrophic. Preloop is an agentic automation platform with built-in human approval layer. AI agents automate routine work across your systems, and when they attempt risky actions (deployments, refunds, data changes), Preloop intercepts and routes them for approval via mobile, Slack, or Teams before execution. You can use Preloop for automation only, approval gates only, or both together depending on your needs.
Open-source control plane for Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, and any MCP agent. Per-agent budgets, MCP firewall, human approvals, audit trails. Self-hostable.
Preloop is the open-source AI agent control plane. It combines an MCP firewall for tool access, an AI model gateway for cost and attribution, policy-as-code with CEL, human-in-the-loop approvals (mobile, watch, Slack, Mattermost), runtime session observability, and audit trails in a single self-hostable platform. The `preloop agents discover` command imports compatible local agent configs and transparently rewrites Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Hermes, OpenClaw, and OpenCode to route through Preloop without SDK changes. Teams use Preloop as an open-source alternative to AWS Bedrock AgentCore, a unified MCP gateway and AI gateway, and a way to collect machine evidence for EU AI…from preloop.ai
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, I’m Yannis, co-founder of Preloop. We’ve built a proxy for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that lets you add human approval gates to your AI agents without changing your agent code. We’re building agents that use tools (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.), but we were terrified to give them write-access to…
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