CATT 0.2.1: Test agents/services against a Muse/Instinct-alike, in CI
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
Hey HN, we recently open sourced our Consumer Agent Testing Tool to help teams iterate against proprietary assistants like Muse and Instinct. We built this to reduce our own frustrations with building an MCP/API for these agents to consume.The problem: testing against these tools is hard! Agent memory + account statefulness make reproducibility, in the ways required for repeatable/reliable outcomes, between agents and the APIs/MCPs they interact with very challenging.The solution: CATT lets devs test their services against a surrogate Muse or Instinct agent (not affiliated with either of these companies). Testers define starting conditions, approvals, and success conditions for their service's state. CATT then records the full interaction (incl. tool calls, responses) so it can diff what happened from what the agent reports. Runs can be tested in local builds or via CI, with or without LLM backing.CATT is designed to emulate the important parts of personal assistant interactions. Its got:- Tool calls and command-line tool access - Simulated approvals for service actions - Outcomes tracking and comparison - Optional MCP profile based on an unofficial Muse templateThere are limitations to how much we know about different assistant specific behaviors so the tool labels its assumptions as `documented`, `unofficial`, `assumed` or `unknown` for developer review. We'll do our best to keep the tool updated as new insights about the internal workings of these assistants come to light. It is an area of active research and interest, a good example is this recent report on how Instinct uses Exa for web search [0].Are you building a connector or MCP? If yes, we'd like to hear from you! Have you had assistants behave incoherently, use stale information, or procalim success without evidence? What else should we add tests for?The best way to get started is...to point your coding assistant at the repo and ask it to integrate the tool with your CI or local testing pipeline!Hope it's helpful![0]: https://www.sunbeam.ai/thoughts/instinct-is-using-exa-for-we...
HN · launched Oct 22, 2026 · 9 upvotes (top 52%) · 0 views
Niche: ai agent evaluation platforms · 182 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Observability & eval
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 182 launches in ai agent evaluation platforms →
Could you build this?
Partial A CI test harness for agents is vibe-codeable, but meaningful testing against proprietary assistants like Muse and Instinct requires access to those systems or realistic simulations of them, which a solo builder may not have.
What it would actually take: The harness, scenario runner, and CI integration are standard software work. The hard part is faithful test coverage of closed assistants, which needs API or partner access, representative conversation data, and a way to judge outputs reliably.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 510 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #268 of 511 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 352 days after the earliest competitor.
- Testera · ph · 2026-11-03 · 62 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Product analytics (and evals) for agent sessions on your MCP · hn · 2026-08-03 · 42 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Knowledge for Agents · ph · 2026-10-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Spec27 · hn · 2026-04-30 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Agent.reviews · hn · 2026-10-07 · 72 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- MCPJam · hn · 2026-09-17 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Open-source simulation testing infra for voice agents · hn · 2026-09-10 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- pr-evidence · github · 2026-09-26 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.42
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.