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Ratel, give agents unlimited tools and skills without context bloat

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Hi HN! We're Giacomo and Roberto, authors of Ratel (https://github.com/ratel-ai/ratel)We used to help SaaS companies build agents on top of their products. Whenever we wanted to expand the agents’ complexity/scope, by adding more and more tools and instructions, we always run in the same issue: context bloat, with frequent hallucinations and sky high token bills. So we started constantly engineering the agents, dynamically loading tools, splitting them into subagents, inventing our own way to support skillsAnd that's exactly when we started building Ratel: a library to let your agent keep its full catalog of tools and skills, but progressively disclosing only the few that actually matter for each turn. Now you can grow your agent's capabilities without breaking it or taking out a loan for itPeople are already using it in production, with a user cutting their token cost up to 81% in the first month without compromising the accuracyWe support both keyword and semantic retrieval, all in-process and without any additional infra. Open source, framework-agnostic, exposes OpenTelemetry metrics, available for Typescript and PythonBenchmarks: https://benchmark.ratel.shSome cool things we did with this:• One team's agent had up to 300+ tools dynamically loaded into context. Ratel cut their token cost 81% in month one. • Another team split into several subagents instead, one agent per task. It worked, until the swarm got slow and expensive. We fixed this with our skills.We're both here all day. Tear it apart, especially if you're an AI or SWE running agents in production

HN · launched Jul 16, 2026 · 23 upvotes (top 26%) · 0 views

Niche: ai agent development platforms · 598 launches, 22 in the last 7 days ▼ -29% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Agent / copilot
  • Developer
  • AI-native
  • Commercial product

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes It is an LLM tool-orchestration library that uses vector embeddings or intent classification to dynamically inject only relevant tool schemas into prompt contexts.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: MCP (Model Context Protocol) tool search, RAG solutions with additional infrastructure, Custom in-house tool retrieval systems

Concerns raised: Self-learning loops implementation complexity, Latency performance at scale, Adoption friction across frameworks, Whether it's just static RAG retrieval

Feature requests: More languages support, Framework adapters to lower adoption friction, Deeper retrieval algorithms, Custom memory and integration capabilities

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 415 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #125 of 416 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 254 days after the earliest competitor.

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