Compare/Kampala vs Skrun

AI tool comparison

Kampala vs Skrun

Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.

K

Developer Tools

Kampala

MITM proxy that reverse-engineers any app into a stable, callable API

Ship

75%

Panel ship

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.

S

Developer Tools

Skrun

Deploy any agent skill as a production REST API in one command

Mixed

50%

Panel ship

Community

Paid

Entry

Skrun is an open-source tool that wraps agentic skills — the discrete, reusable capabilities you build for AI agents (web search, data extraction, file transformation, API calls) — into deployable REST APIs with a single command. The idea is that skills you build for one agent context shouldn't be locked to that agent's runtime. With Skrun, you define a skill once with a standard function signature, and get a hosted endpoint with automatic request validation, retry logic, rate limiting, and an OpenAPI spec generated automatically. The project addresses a real architectural tension in the current AI tools ecosystem: agent skills are written in a dozen different formats (LangChain tools, MCP tools, function call JSON, OpenAI tool specs) and are essentially stranded assets — they only work within their specific orchestration framework. Skrun normalizes this by wrapping any skill definition format and exposing it as a framework-agnostic HTTP endpoint that any agent or pipeline can call. This appeared on Hacker News with a small but thoughtful discussion focused on the "skills as microservices" architectural pattern. Critics noted that adding HTTP round-trips to every tool call introduces latency; proponents argued that the composability and reusability benefits outweigh the cost. The early version focuses on stateless skills; stateful/conversational skill deployment is on the roadmap.

Decision
Kampala
Skrun
Panel verdict
Ship · 3 ship / 1 skip
Mixed · 2 ship / 2 skip
Community
No community votes yet
No community votes yet
Pricing
Free (early access)
Open Source / Hosted from $9/mo
Best for
MITM proxy that reverse-engineers any app into a stable, callable API
Deploy any agent skill as a production REST API in one command
Category
Developer Tools
Developer Tools

Reviewer scorecard

Builder
80/100 · ship

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.

80/100 · ship

The framework portability angle is the real value prop — I have dozens of custom tools built for Claude that I can't reuse in other contexts without rebuilding them. If Skrun actually normalizes this cleanly across tool formats, that's a genuine pain solver.

Skeptic
45/100 · skip

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.

45/100 · skip

Wrapping every agent skill in an HTTP call is a latency antipattern — a skill that takes 50ms locally becomes 120ms+ through a hosted endpoint with cold starts. For skills called hundreds of times per agent run, this adds up fast. I'd want colocation support before using this in production.

Futurist
80/100 · ship

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.

80/100 · ship

Skills-as-services is the right architectural direction as agent ecosystems mature. The future is marketplaces of composable agent capabilities that any orchestrator can call — Skrun is early infrastructure for that world.

Creator
80/100 · ship

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.

45/100 · skip

Too deep in infrastructure for my workflow, but the auto-generated OpenAPI spec is a nice touch for anyone who needs to share custom skills with a team without writing documentation manually.

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