Skillsync and AutoBot Post Agent Workflow Tools on Hacker News

In the Skillsync launch post, the founders said most work now exists as conversations scattered across different agents. The sessions are stored locally, but each agent uses a different format, so users cannot switch tools without starting over. As users invest in skills and memories, they become locked into a single provider and agent. Skillsync acts as a universal converter, moving an entire session, including messages, reasoning and tool calls, so a user can continue where they left off.

Skillsync collects sessions in one place and makes them searchable. It shows what each session carries, including loaded skills that an agent is actually using, which makes stale context easier to identify. Users can create shared workspaces to sync sessions across a team and build closed-loop systems. The company says everything runs locally except when a user shares to a workspace.

The core is an open-source Rust engine called txcript, which translates a session from one agent’s on-disk format into another’s, mapping conversation, reasoning and tool history. The founders described it as ffmpeg or pandoc for agent sessions. A local-first desktop app sits on top of the engine, surfacing sessions that are normally scattered across tool folders and presenting the conversation, reasoning and tool calls in a readable interface. Skills and memory are stored as portable, human-readable markdown that the user owns and are exposed to any agent over MCP for search and selective retrieval. Sessions and translation run on the local machine; the only data that leaves is what is explicitly shared into a team workspace.

The founders said agent lock-in is often invisible until it becomes expensive. Once sessions are portable, they said, those sessions can become something to build on: spotting patterns in how a user works, handing a session to someone else, or letting a non-technical teammate pick up where an engineer left off. Before Skillsync, Nars and Nishant built an open-source payment orchestrator that let merchants route across many processors instead of being locked into one; it has more than 30,000 GitHub stars. They said they came to YC with a different idea, but living inside coding agents showed them the same lock-in problem from the other side.

Skillsync’s posted use cases include moving a session between Claude Code, Codex and Cursor mid-task, including when a user hits a usage limit on one and wants to continue on another; thinking through a problem in a browser Claude chat and then handing the whole thread to Claude Code or Codex to build; and sharing research sessions with a team so teammates and their agents can build on each other’s work. It is available as a Mac app, CLI and MCP. The launch appeared in two Hacker News submissions, one showing 10 points and 2 comments and the other 4 points and 0 comments.

In a separate Show HN post, the creator of AutoBot said he wanted to manage long-horizon agentic workstreams by voice, put his phone down and have a harness manage completion, extending into full computer use. He said the project grew out of an attempt to build a personal Jarvis. The creator reported an OSWorld score of 32.41%, which he said moved Sol Max from fourth to first and beat Opus 5, and an AssistantBench score of 50.70%. He described AutoBot as similar to Hermes and OpenClaw but without needing a weekend and virtual machines, with deep personalization and strict privacy rules that store data on an encrypted disk.

AutoBot is an MIT-licensed harness that lives within a project. Native voice lets the user discuss tasks, check progress and steer work. A local ledger tracks unfinished outputs and the evidence needed to call them done. Memory is intended to drive more autonomy over time and, according to the creator, “defrags and locks in learning nightly,” while a heartbeat system persists execution. The creator said he is not selling anything and invited others building similar tools to compare notes. The AutoBot post had 4 points and 0 comments at the time it was captured.

Editor's Summary Skillsync and AutoBot were both posted to Hacker News on Sept. 17, 2026, addressing different parts of agent-based work: session portability and voice-driven long-running execution. Skillsync emphasizes local storage, an open-source translation engine and team workspaces, while AutoBot emphasizes local ledgers, memory and encrypted on-disk data. Both projects are early-stage and draw limited comment activity in the posts captured.