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  3. /Show HN: Dexto – Connect your AI Agents with real-world tools and data
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  2. /Discussion
  3. /Show HN: Dexto – Connect your AI Agents with real-world tools and data
Last activity 18 days agoPosted Oct 28, 2025 at 12:07 PM EDT

Dexto – Connect Your AI Agents with Real-World Tools and Data

shaunaks
41 points
12 comments

Mood

excited

Sentiment

positive

Category

other

Key topics

AI Agents
Orchestration Layer
Llms
Debate intensity20/100
Hi HN, we’re the team at Truffle AI (YC W25), and we’ve been working on Dexto (https://www.dexto.ai/), a runtime and orchestration layer for AI Agents that lets you turn any app, service or tool into an AI assistant that can reason, think and act. Here's a video walkthrough - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ1qbI6MU6g

We started working on Dexto after helping clients setup agents for everyday marketing tasks like posting on LinkedIn, running Reddit searches, generating ad creatives, etc. We realized that the LLMs weren’t the issue. The real drag was the repetitive orchestration around them:

- wiring LLMs to tools - managing context and persistence - adding memory and approval flows - tailoring behavior per client/use case

Each small project quietly ballooned into weeks of plumbing where each customer had mostly the same, but slightly custom requirement.

So instead of another framework where you write orchestration logic yourself, we built Dexto as a top-level orchestration layer where you declare an agent’s capabilities and behavior:

- which tools or MCPs the agent can use - which LLM powers it - how it should behave (system prompt, tone, approval rules)

Once configured, the agent runs as an event-driven loop - reasoning through steps, invoking tools, handling retries, and maintaining its own state and memory. Your app doesn’t manage orchestration, it just triggers and subscribes to the agent’s events and decides how to render or approve outcomes.

Agents can run locally, in the cloud, or hybrid. Dexto ships with a CLI, a web UI, and a few sample agents to get started.

To show its flexibility, we wrapped some OpenCV functions into an MCP server and connected it to Dexto (https://youtu.be/A0j61EIgWdI). Now, a non-technical user could detect faces in images or create custom photo collages by talking to the agent. The same approach works for coding agents, browser agents, multi-speaker podcast agents, and marketing assistants tuned to your data. https://docs.dexto.ai/examples/category/agent-examples

Dexto is modular, composable and portable allowing you to plug in new tools or even re-expose an entire Dexto agent as an MCP Server and consume it from other apps like Cursor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hZMFIO8KZM). Because agents are defined through config and powered by a consistent runtime, they can run anywhere without code changes making cross-agent (A2A) interactions and reuse effortless.

In a way, we like to think of Dexto as a “meta-agent” or “agent harness” that can be customized into a specialized agent depending on its tools, data, and platform.

For the time being, we have opted for an Elastic V2 license to give maximum flexibility for the community to build with Dexto while preventing bigger players from taking over and monetizing our work.

We’d love your feedback:

- Try the quickstart and tell us what breaks - Share a use case you want to ship in a day, and we’ll suggest a minimal config

Repo: https://github.com/truffle-ai/dexto

Docs: https://docs.dexto.ai/docs/category/getting-started

Quickstart: npm i -g dexto

Dexto is a runtime and orchestration layer for AI Agents that simplifies connecting LLMs to real-world tools and data, and the community is enthusiastic about its potential to streamline AI development.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Moderate engagement

First comment

3h

Peak period

6

Day 1

Avg / period

2.4

Comment distribution12 data points
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Based on 12 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    Oct 28, 2025 at 12:07 PM EDT

    30 days ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    Oct 28, 2025 at 3:22 PM EDT

    3h after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    6 comments in Day 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    Nov 9, 2025 at 5:51 AM EST

    18 days ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (12 comments)
Showing 12 comments
ra
29 days ago
1 reply
What's your pricing model?
shaunaksAuthor
29 days ago
1 reply
Its currently open for self-hosting but you can reach out to us if you need help deploying it on your own infra and we can help with a custom setup
ra
29 days ago
1 reply
Oh, sorry more out of interest from a business perspective.

Back in the day a toolkit like this would have either been an OSS + services and support play (like spring.io) or an "enterprise alternative" like Weblogic was to Apache.

... I'm wondering how this sort of play scales today?

shaunaksAuthor
29 days ago
1 reply
Oh yes ofc! We are adopting the same OSS + services model, we currently have our Dexto cloud platform in alpha and are onboarding projects on a case-by-case basis. We plan to launch the self-serve version shortly.

Our other product available at www.trytruffle.ai supports creating and deploying stateless agents which are great for simpler use cases.

We plan to launch a similar cloud offering for dexto but with deeper support for long-running agents that handle more complex tasks and integrate more deeply across orgs and apps with support for on-prem setups.

ra
28 days ago
1 reply
Awesome. Can you explain what you mean by simpler use cases? e.g. one shot classification?
shaunaksAuthor
27 days ago
1 reply
Some of the use cases we showcase are RAG agents, Youtube or any URL summarizer, imagegen tools, email summarizers, etc.

Any use case where you might want to run an LLM+tool in a loop for a multi-step but single-trigger task - but without persistence. It works similar to the ai-sdk but you get the entire agent as a hosted, shareable endpoint.

ra
24 days ago
thanks for this!
borisandcrispin
27 days ago
1 reply
Just tried it. I think this has a lot of potential and I'm planning to revisit in a few months. Right now I'm running into issues with the orchestrator itself, both bugs and difficulty adapting it to my use case. I found myself spending more time fighting the framework than building my actual agent.
rahulrk11
27 days ago
Hey! I'm one of the founders, what issues did you run into? Any feedback here would be very helpful, thanks!
mrdarkie
29 days ago
does anyone have a Mumbai-based SaaS orchestrator for my orchestrators?
robmao
18 days ago
It's sort of like Claude Agent Skills but I feel dexo better, I saw some agent use MCP server as backend and unlike Agent Skills install on the client.
boxerab
29 days ago
From the site: "Join developers building intelligent applications with Dexto. Open source, local-first, and ready for production."

Note that this code is licensed under "Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2)", so not open source according to OSI.

View full discussion on Hacker News
ID: 45734696Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 1:08:48 PM

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