Colin, a context engine for keeping agent skills fresh
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Hi HN — I'm the creator of FastMCP and wanted to share a new project we've open-sourced called Colin.I obviously love MCP, but I also use skills extremely heavily in my day-to-day work. Being exposed to both has made me very aware of a tension:- Anything with dynamic information, I ship over MCP. This takes work to set up and requires conversational boilerplate to refresh in every conversation.- Anything behavioral, I put in skills. They're lightweight, used automatically, and feel great. But I would never put dynamic information in a skill because keeping it up to date is a pain. And yet the idea of having an agent skill that includes relevant and timely data is so appealing!So: think of Colin as a skills-native templating engine. The goal is to compile context documents from dynamic sources (GitHub, Linear, Notion, MCP servers, etc.) in a way that makes them easy to automatically update. Colin traces dependencies to determine staleness and has intelligent caching to minimize the burden of recompiling. It's general purpose, but it turns out to be extremely useful for writing skills that contain dynamic knowledge and need to stay current.We've just released it. It's experimental and early, but it's a direction I'm actively exploring and would love feedback.Here's a post with more background, if interested: https://www.jlowin.dev/blog/colin
HN · launched Jan 26, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 65%) · 0 views
Niche: ai agent memory infrastructure · 350 launches, 11 in the last 7 days ▼ -58% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- AI-native
- Commercial product
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More like this: all 350 launches in ai agent memory infrastructure →
Could you build this?
Yes Colin is an open-source context/skill manager for MCP agents, which is fundamentally a stateful Python library and MCP server managing schemas and dynamic prompts.
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Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 948 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #606 of 949 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 87 days after the earliest competitor.
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