AI tool comparison
AI-SPM vs Kampala
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Developer Tools
AI-SPM
Open-source runtime security control plane for AI agents in production
50%
Panel ship
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Community
Paid
Entry
AI-SPM (AI Security Posture Management) is an open-source control plane for AI agent security in production environments. Built by indie developer dshapi and posted to Hacker News, it addresses a real gap: most LLM systems now have tool access and decision-making power, but almost no runtime oversight layer to catch when things go wrong. The system works as a gateway between your application and the LLM, enforcing three main controls: prompt injection detection (including obfuscated variants that bypass naive pattern matching), structured tool call validation against defined policies using Open Policy Agent (OPA), and sensitive data leakage prevention (PII and model output filtering). An Apache Kafka and Apache Flink streaming pipeline provides real-time audit trails and anomaly detection. The creator's key insight is that tool misuse — not model jailbreaks — is the primary risk vector in production AI agents. A rogue or compromised agent that escalates tool permissions or exfiltrates data through sanctioned channels is far harder to catch than a classic prompt injection. AI-SPM is early, minimal traction, and needs real-world stress testing. But as AI agent deployments mature from demos to production, runtime security tooling like this becomes non-optional.
Developer Tools
Kampala
MITM proxy that reverse-engineers any app into a stable, callable API
75%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
Kampala, built by Zatanna AI (YC W26), is a macOS proxy tool that sits between your applications and the internet, intercepts every HTTP/HTTPS request, and automatically reverse-engineers the underlying API. It traces authentication chains — tracking tokens, cookies, and session state — and replays flows on demand, preserving original TLS fingerprints so services can't distinguish API calls from the real app. The key insight is that almost every app that lacks a public API still has a private one — and it's usually more stable than the UI. Kampala targets automation engineers, QA teams, and AI agent builders who need reliable machine-readable access to apps that haven't opened their APIs. Setup is a local MITM cert install; no cloud proxy involved. Currently macOS-only with a Windows waitlist. The team emerged from YC's Winter 2026 batch with backing from Y Combinator. Pricing is in early access, with a free tier planned for solo developers and paid plans for teams building production automations.
Reviewer scorecard
“The OPA-based policy enforcement for tool calls is exactly the kind of control plane enterprises need before deploying agents in production. This is early but points in the right direction. If you're building agents with database or API access, you need something like this or you're flying blind.”
“This is the tool I've been building in-house at three different companies and never had time to productize properly. The auth chain tracing alone — tracking token refresh flows and session state automatically — would have saved me hundreds of hours. If it works as advertised, it's an instant ship for anyone doing integration work.”
“One developer, one HN post, minimal engagement. The Kafka + Flink stack for a security gateway seems like significant over-engineering for most teams. And the creator openly admits that pattern-based injection detection is easily bypassed — so the core feature has known weaknesses. Not production-ready.”
“Terms of service violations are a real concern here. Most apps explicitly prohibit automated access through their private APIs, and companies like LinkedIn and Instagram have sued over exactly this pattern. The MITM cert requirement also opens a broad attack surface. Wait for a clearer legal stance before building production systems on this.”
“AI agent security is a category in its own right that barely existed a year ago. Every week there's a new story about an agent doing something unintended in production. AI-SPM is an early but important stake in the ground for what a mature runtime security layer for agentic systems should look like.”
“The long-term story here is about AI agents needing reliable access to every app humans use. We can't wait for every SaaS to ship an official API. Tools like Kampala are how AI agents will integrate with the existing software ecosystem for the next five years, until MCP-style universal interfaces catch up.”
“This is deeply infrastructure-layer stuff that doesn't touch my workflow at all. Important for the ecosystem but not something I'd evaluate or deploy.”
“For social media automation and cross-platform content workflows this is a game-changer. Building automations for platforms with limited or expensive APIs has always required fragile browser scraping — having a stable API layer extracted from the real app traffic is a much better foundation.”
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