alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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Hi!
I’m working on:
- DietPDF ( https://github.com/Zigazou/dietpdf-haskell ) an intensive PDF optimizer which tries to reduce PDF size as best as it can while preserving visual quality. It relies on a lot of tricks to achieve this goal (minification, precision reduction, deletion of superfluous operations, concatenations, filter combination etc.). At the present moment, I'm trying to implement CCITT Fax encoding/decoding.
I'm working on Skyscraper for Bluesky, which is an independent Bluesky client for iPhone, iPad, and the first Bluesky client for Apple Vision Pro.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/skyscraper-for-bluesky/id67541...
Been a side project for a few months, as I wasn't enjoying the official client, and wanted something that fit my particular tastes (scroll position permanence, greater emphasis on hashtags, support for Shortcuts, and a more iOS-native look and feel).
Launched 3 weeks today, and already nearing 100 subscribers (nearly all annual, but month-to-month also available). Been very fun seeing users start using the app each and every day!
Still working on my LPFM radio station, www.kpbj.fm. We launched our regular online stream and have secured a site for our transmitter.
The transmit site is in the Verdugo hills and will need to be off grid. We're going to need about $20k to get the entire transmit system setup (including a solar/battery backup system).
I've also been working on our web infrastructure. The site is built with Haskell and HTMX. The stream is Icecast, and stream scheduling is done using an internal schedule system in the web app and LiquidSoap (so no external tools like airtime, libretime, or azuracast).
I'm building a safer Agent system for SMBs.
The biggest problem is internal knowledge and external knowledge systems are completely different. One reason internal knowledge is different it is very specific business context and/or it's value prop for the business that allows charging clients for access.
To bridge this gap, the best approach is to train agents to your use case. Agents need to be students -> interns -> supervised -> independent before they can be useeful for your business.
https://github.com/rush86999/atom . it's still in alpha.
I’ve been working on something we call the Functional Universe (FU), a modeling framework and experimental codebase that treats systems as sequences of irreversible functional transitions, rather than objects evolving against a global clock.
It started as a computational experiment, but it’s been interesting how naturally it lines up with ideas from QM (aggregation vs collapse), relativity (proper time), and distributed systems (event-driven causality). Still very much a work in progress, but already useful as a way to think clearly about time, causality, and scheduling in real systems.
- Concept>> https://github.com/VoxleOne/FunctionalUniverse/blob/main/doc...
- Code >> https://github.com/VoxleOne/FunctionalUniverse/tree/dev
Delving deep into novel ways to extend Excel and make it more accessible. Perhaps different approach to copilot in that AI is only used during authoring, the yielded output being a standalone artifact.
The result is https://xllify.com
It embeds Luau which tames the very old school C SDK. This means that the same code can run as native add-ins on Windows (XLL) and the more modern-but-far-slower web engine, thanks to WASM. Luau is safe and fast.
The exact same bytecode runs in both styles of add-in. You get the performance of native with no extra work. Many approaches for writing custom functions are unacceptably slow, particularly when their inputs come from fast moving realtime data feeds.
I know Luau is perhaps a left-field choice. However, coupled with a coding assistant and bringing that lightweight conversational dev experience right into Excel (xllify Assistant is an add-in itself) this is perhaps less of a barrier.
Currently working on:
To show newbies how to use vim. Currently its not complete and has major issues. So if you want to try give it a go, but please hold your judgement as not all shortcuts have been added.
Most parents I've met understand the internet can be a dangerous place for children but aren't sure what to do about it. Some avoid it altogether, but most give up and resign themselves to whatever happens. What I wanted most was just to have some visibility into what my kids were experiencing, so I built LivingRoom App for iPhone and iPad. It sends occasional screenshots to parents. My hope is that when we shine a light on the online world, we will be free to use the internet as a tool for learning, creativity and connection. https://livingroomapp.com/
I continue with my suite of mobile apps for parents:
* https://screenspy.app - observe what youd child is doing on desktop PC. Roblox or homework?
* https://weblock.online - a VERY restricted, whitelist-first mobile browser for kids, use it instead of Safari. I want to feel calm when my children browse the web.
I built meepr recently. It's basically twitter v1, but the hashtag system is gated, it builds a knowledge base of what you talk about and how deeply, and then enables you to post into/create hashtags, think of twitter meets reddit meets quora? Feel free to follow me and share with your friends. No recommendations, no algorithmic timeline, no ads etc. Just regular old micro-blogging with a small twist. https://meepr.co/je
The other thing I built but am less interested in personally just through should exist, is something like MoltBook but for more formal topics like the sciences. -> https://ideas.gd/
I'm working on PC Part Picker for hi-fi stereo gear. https://buildhifi.com
Some technical highlights:
- Graph-based signal flow: Products become nodes, connections are edges inferred from port compatibility (digital, analog, phono, speaker-level domains)
- Port profile system: Standardized port definitions (direction, domain, connector, channel mode) enable automatic connection inference
- Rule engine: Pluggable rules check completeness, power matching, phono stage requirements, DAC needs, and more
It's getting close. I'll do a show HN on it sometime soon.
https://github.com/stacktape/stacktape
An alternative to tools lik sst.dev or serverless framework, or a PaaS services like Render.com or Flightcontrol.
Deploys to user's own AWS. IaC-first. Has a PaaS-like console UI.
The best features: auto-generates IaC config by scanning your code. Has built-in EC2 runner which is 2-6x faster than AWS CodeBuild.
We've now also implemented dev mode, which is similar to SST. It deploys parts of the stacks that can't be locally emulated (lambda functions, cognito, etc.) with fast re-deploy, and emulates everything else (containers, SQL databases, Redis, DynamoDb, etc.) locally. This means testing/developing is pretty much free, and you have the fastest feedback loops possible.
Whole Stacktape, and dev mode in particular is also very optimized for coding agents with `--agent` flag.
To try it, run `npx stacktape init`
EDIT: Changed the link to github. Stacktape core is now open-source.
After around 15 years working with clients and helping them wrangle their WordPress sites, I stopped working with WordPress as a primary platform for building sites.
A while back I've switched to a more modern stack and have fully abandoned WordPress.
Having that background, however, I've come to know (way too well) many of the frustrations and security problems with the WordPress ecosystem. As a result, I started a service to help business owners break free from WordPress on to a more modern Next.js-powered stack that's faster, lighter weight, and easier for them to manage.
Brand new but should be fun!
A simple HN-like web app that indexes security (and security adjacent) write-ups.
Imagine you, as a security researcher (or any other persona in the security field), wanted to see what prior works are available around bypassing v8 sandbox using webasm, or if what’s been done or found targeting deserialization in Go.
Using this web app, you can search the indexed and tagged write ups.
Also adding MCP support to it so your agents can search too.
Hopefully going live soon.
P.S: I said HN-like, but tbh it’s just the UI that looks a bit like HN (I’m not a good designer, so got heavy inspiration from HN listing style), otherwise there’s no other overlap in functionality yet.
I built a mobile app for golfers who don't like using their phones while they play. Take a picture of your scorecard after the round and it reads/saves the scores and stats (and allows you to post to the USGA if you keep your handicap).
I'm a self-taught coder who first built this 7(!) years ago but couldn't figure out the OCR part. Started again 9 months ago on Replit (starting with Agent 2 which was okay, then eventually starting to absolutely crank with Agent 3) and it works really well now.
Would love feedback from any golfers! golfrise.com
Over the last few weeks I’ve been building Pointless (https://pointless.cards), a Planning Poker webapp that’s both frictionless (no sign up) and actually fun!
I’m trying to embody the experience of a JackBox game into a Scrum ceremony that should be lightweight but is often painful and tedious. I’ve also gotten to learn a lot about Cloudflare Durable Objects building this and have been delighted with how easy they (and PartyKit) make building multiplayer apps like this.
It’s completely free (I plan to keep it that way) and full of easter eggs and delightful jokes at the expense of Jira and modern software development, of course. If your team is following Scrum and could use a bit more joy in the process you should check it out!
Working on https://github.com/wiseprobe/patchpal , an open-source agentic coding assistant in Python.
While it's true that the agentic coding assistant space is crowded (Claude Code, Aider, Opencode, Codex, etc.), we needed something supporting both local and cloud models that we could easily modify/extend for custom workflows.
Being able to access the agent through both a terminal and a Python API/REPL has come in handy.
Recent releases includes custom tools, agent skills, and built-in support for Ralph Wiggum loops.
Im working on ebpfence https://github.com/CucumisSativus/ebpfence
I want to create a tool that would automatically block the stealers from stealing your previous credentials or crypto wallets. I had this idea after the Shai-Hulud attack
It's an experimental side project, but so far it looks very promising.
I'm juggling two projects:
Offline first, no tracking PWA for intermittent fasting and mindful eating. It helped me lose another 3 kg in January. Spiked a native iOS version, but I really like the simplicity of just the PWA. Not sure what's next!
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Having done a lot of back and forth with LLMs and at the end throwing away learnings from a conversation felt so wasteful - reposit allows you to /share a summary of the valuable learning from your LLM chat for others to discover.
At the beginning of researching a problem, your agent can search reposit just like Context7 for docs. This way, even if you opt out of sharing your data with your LLM provider (as it's all or nothing), you can choose to publicise a solution to your problem with very little effort.
I'm working on extracting valuable learnings from open-source community projects as a starting point now (with attribution), as it probably needs a larger database to be valuable for users to install and use.
You can also self-host it and share privately within the company.
I'm a solo dev founder working on Potniq (https://potniq.com) - a business travel tool that tells you exactly when to leave based on your entire itinerary.
I used to work in devrel, and traveled a lot for events, and I always struggled skipping things like workouts, looking at the time on the last day of a conference trying to check whether it's time to leave yet - so this gives me the opportunity to build a tool I would have loved to use.
Currently I'm working on a LLM-powered booking email parser, that ingests forwarded booking confirmations and adds flights, hotels, etc. to your itinerary.
I'm still plugging away on my PostScript interpreter. Right now I'm working on the clip and eoclip operators which has turned out to be much more complex than I expected. Mostly because I am not using any 3rd party libraries nor any AI generated code.
On the house front I'm just about to install an IKEA kitchen.
Building better quality cadastral data on all of Italy for a client, pretty fun postgis work. Fuzzy string matching of government records, OSM, proprietary data and aerial remote sensing data ran through an ML pipeline.
Working on migration from Modal to a single nvidia jetson, to do low-cost monitoring of toxic emissions at the local tata steel plant. Ran this pro bono for the last 2 years, the fun is in getting this as cheap as possible but still with good accuracy
Building a SSTV ios app - you can encode images in sound and transmit these over (ham) radio. The ISS regularly broadcasts these too. And building a multi-user IRC-like chatroom over audio. Hook up your mac or ipad to a voice radio channel, and chat over very slow (31 baud) but very resilient links.
I’m building Historic, a private AI video journal for founders.
You record short morning, evening, or ad hoc sessions, and it transcribes and indexes them into a searchable archive of your thinking. It uses simple Apple Fitness–style rings to encourage consistency, plus monthly insight reports and suggested “build in public” posts.
I built it because notes apps weren’t capturing my thinking in full fidelity. Using Reflect I averaged ~65k words per year. With Historic I logged ~85k words in one month.
Your thoughts are already your most valuable asset. Historic just makes them accessible.
Built ShelfSwap (https://shelfswap.io). I enjoy reading, but books are getting expensive, and many of us already have shelves of good books we’re done with. This is a simple platform to swap physical books and connect with other readers.
I used this as a real end-to-end project to sharpen my backend skills in Go (API design, data modeling, deployment), while also experimenting with AI-assisted development. It’s live, and I’ve already made a few organic connections through it.
Dots Journal, a privacy focused lifestyle tracker for iOS.
I’ve been suffering from migraines for the past few years and wanted a dead simple way to log when they happen, as well as any other contributing factors I could think of. Inspired by the simplicity of spreadsheets, I built a grid of events, and as you tap on cells, you log “dots”. Those dots, over time, reveal patterns.
I’ve already identified several contributing factors to my migraine triggers using it. It’s been so genuinely useful I wanted to share it with others hoping they might also benefit.
The next big release is coming out later this week which includes visualizations, charts, and on-device analysis of your journal to provide insights.
I am building QuietReads (quietreads.com) - a single-player book tracking app with an AI assistant.
I got tired of the gamification and social elements of Goodreads, StoryGraph and others. I don't care too much about reviews, but do care about engaging deeply with what I am reading.
Lot's to do still: - Refining the experimental MCP integration so I can bring my bookshelf into my AI assistants - OCR to build notes from screenshots - Voice notes
I wrote a little about why I am building the app here: quietreads.com/about Thoughts on building the app: https://thinking.luhar.org/2026/01/building-at-the-speed-of-...
Working on MacOS app that detects an active meeting in one of the commonly used apps and then turns on a LED "presence" light. The purpose to let others know that you are "on air" at this moment.
Current release candidate supports detecting Teams Meeting and Slack Huddle.
I’m building lightweight-css to teach kids aged 8+ the fundamentals of programming using the web and JavaScript.
Link to Github: https://github.com/joshuamabina/lightweight-css
I'm working on ArkWatch (https://watch.arkforge.fr) - a monitoring API that you can use with just curl, no signup required.
The insight: most solo founders need basic "alert me when this changes" monitoring, but existing tools force you through signup flows, credit cards, dashboards you'll never use. So I made it dead simple:
curl "https://watch.arkforge.fr/api/check?url=https://your-site.com&[email protected]"
I built this because I kept forgetting to monitor my own stuff. Now it's live and I'm trying to get my first 5 beta testers. The challenge is marketing - I'm a developer, not a growth hacker. Learning as I go!
What's been your biggest challenge with your current project?
I've been working on a security model and architecture to make a hardened rewrite of OpenClaw. I've got a first pass of prompt injection and secret exfiltration protection and an agentd that gives network vm/sandbox access, reads the accessibility tree and can take screenshots of apps or regions of the desktop. I also have full policy control in place with OPA so you can manage everything the agent can do in one place.
The goal is a milspec, zero-trust autonomous agent that can be completely locked down. I'm also tying the agent's heartbeat into activitywatch so it can be a good personal assistant and do stuff for you pre-emptively based on your stated goals and session activity.
We ran into the annoying Envoy 503 bug in our prod and needed some quick tools to help figure out what was going on with TCP connections and HTTP requests.
https://github.com/vishnugt/TCPFinMonitor. Live - https://keepalive.gt.ms/
This tool tracks TCP FIN packet timing to see how upstream connections are closing and how keep-alives behave. It helped me spot when connections were closing too early or timing out, which was causing those 503 errors.
https://github.com/vishnugt/hyperbin
A fast, minimal httpbin clone written in Rust. It’s way faster(20x throughput) than the usual httpbin and useful for testing HTTP clients and debugging requests without extra noise.
These aren’t polished, just some stuff I needed to iron out the issue.
https://github.com/purplefish-ai/factory-factory - creating an IDE for managing a swarm of claude agents, and more importantly, increasingly baking workflows into them (e.g. design -> build -> review -> push -> address comments).
i've been wondering and thinking about new SAAS i can make. I've found several issues with my works as an agency owner.
Been hard for me to run an agency and my little SAAS on a country that is not support Stripe as the payment gateway.
Is it would be a great idea to create a payment gateway software?
https://github.com/tldev/posturr
Posturr is a macOS app that blurs your screen when you slouch. I’ve always had bad posture at my desk, so I wanted to figure out a way to check myself. This idea is not radically new, but the methods by which Posturr reminds, e.g. blurring screen, colored border, is unique and effective.
Recently released to the App Store at: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/posturr-posture-monitor/id6758...
vibebin is a self-hosted platform for running persistent, isolated AI coding sandboxes on a single VPS using Incus/LXC containers:
https://github.com/jgbrwn/vibebin
It automates installing and managing Incus, Caddy, and SSHPiper, provides a TUI for container lifecycle and quick actions, a web admin (built/compiled on the container) for toggling and updating AI coding tools (Shelley, Claude Code, OpenCode, etc.), and a background sync daemon that keeps Caddy routes and container metadata in sync.
Each container exposes coding tool web UIs on isolated ports and supports direct SSH/VS Code Remote access, so you can run multiple independent coding agents against real project files without exposing your local machine.
The project emphasizes simplicity and recoverability for running agents locally: containers are persistent, optionally routed via reverse proxy with basic auth, and tracked in an SQLite DB so setups auto-heal after restarts. It’s written in Go, includes an install script for one-line deployment, targets modest VPS specs (4–8GB RAM recommended), and bundles helpers for DNS and provider automation.
Ideal if you want a lightweight, opinionated way to host multiple isolated AI dev environments on your own server instead of relying on hosted agent platforms.
This is the first time I have seen a post like this on Hacker News.
And I just launched Writtte yesterday, a writing platform for drafting articles with built-in grammar checking and AI-based refactoring with custom styles, and for the first time, with a better copy/paste mechanism for other platforms like Medium, and Substack :D
I'm making a suite of simple Windows tray apps that do just one thing. They often have existing equivalents but I think my version is better and/or simpler ;-) All work starting with Win7.
The first three are:
- miniWake: keeps the computer awake
Alternatives: Powertools; USB mouse jigglers
Features: installs without admin rights; triggers invisible mouse events; turns off at LOCK, turns back on at LOCKOFF (saves battery); manual turn off or on via double-click on the icon
- miniRec: records system audio + microphone to mp3/wav
Alternatives: various utilities like Voicemeter, AudioRouter, or some DAWs
Features: does not require any special driver; installs without admin rights; light on resources; "invisible" to third parties (video meetings); auto turn off after 5 minutes of silence (configurable)
- miniCron: system scheduler as a service
Alternatives: NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager; Splinterware
Features: launches any program at any given time (cron like but without cron syntax); kills the current task when the service is stopped; reads and logs stdin/stderr; very light on ressources and very simple
Two others are in the works.
Hi, I’m splitting my time between multi-cloud governance and optimizing my "vibe coding" workflow: Kexa (https://kexa.io)
An open-source multi-cloud governance framework powered by a YAML rule engine. We just reached a milestone by adding Database (DB) support.
The goal is to allow developers to audit configuration and compliance directly within DB instances, alongside standard cloud resources (AWS, GCP, Azure, K8s). We’re focusing on keeping the YAML rules as agnostic as possible so the same logic can apply across different environments without rewriting everything. rtk (https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk)
This is a "scratching my own itch" project born from using Claude-code. While vibe coding, I got frustrated watching the agent spam ls -al or cat repeatedly just to "orient" itself.
It creates two main issues:
The Token Tax: It burns through tokens for info the agent already has.
Context Pollution: The context window fills up with redundant noise.
Working on either a self hosted, or self "provisioned" document extraction platform. Trying to make it as flexible as possible, so businesses
I worked with manufacturing companies, and the amount of manual document extraction and manipulation, particularly from accounting documents, was always a large burden.
The goal is upload a document → extract structured fields via LLM → generate new documents from templates. Has a dashboard, with an API, along with a webhook, very much a WIP.
Maintain my blog
https://matula.itch.io/kings-dont-stack
Klondike solitaire game using Godot. The goal is to better understand Godot's inner workings, and not using any LLMs... outside of whatever Google searches automatically popup when I have questions.
Secondarily, decompiling the DuckTails Gameboy ROM with PHP... then seeing about using PHP to create a GameBoy game. For no reason than to see if it can be done.
A platform to efficiently work with any data right in the browser. Like interactively visualizing millions or rows, and at the same time augmenting the data with domain-specific capabilities. For instance, the cheminformatics plugin automatically recognizes molecules and provides proper rendering, substructure search etc. Sort of a Swiss Army knife for scientific data.
Not really a new idea, been working on it for many years already :)
I'm working on a search engine for clinical trials around the world.
I was frustrated by the process of searching for clinical trial info using the clunky and slow registry websites. So I aggregated all trials around the world and made the search faster. Additional features:
- You can watch a trial and get email updates
- Sometimes a trial is done and a paper published, but no updates to the official page. I try to find these papers and link them
- I try to link trials with the same drug together, showing the drug going through different phases
A specialized programming language for 3D geometry generation + manipulation called Geoscript as well as a Shadertoy-inspired web app for building stuff with it: https://3d.ameo.design/geotoy
There have been lots of cool technical challenges through the whole process of building this, and a very nice variety of different kinds of work.
I'm working towards using the outputs from this language to build out levels and assets for a browser-based game I've been dabbling with over the past few years.
Ive been working on Kettle, it is a language for quantum-classical computing
I find quantum mechanics fascinating and wanted a better way to play with it. Linear types prevent copying qubits, effects track what's quantum vs pure. The type system catches mistakes that would otherwise blow up at runtime.
Runs on a local simulator (with various qubit types modelled) or IBM hardware (sort of). Still a research and learning language for me - I break things regularly.
If any real quantum physicists are lurking, Id love to hear what Ive got wrong!
BrowserBox embedding API plus a bunch of other side projects. BrowserBox is a remote isolated browser with a variety of DLP, NIST 800-53 controls and FIPS 140-3 encryption at rest. It can function as a fully automated embeddable browserview for AI workflows, isolated sandboxes, generic whitelabeled RBI and multiple other use cases. It's a heavy target of abuse by non state actors in sanctioned countries so I had to add ID verification to get a trial key.
I am working on a e-commerce and pos solution. More like shopify/saleor/woocommerce etc. with ready to start for small businesses selling physical and online and in-store products and services.
The platform itself is built on elysiajs/bun and tanstack and is completely hosted in EU and the payment processor is a EU based entity and we have an ISV partnership.
Since we recently moved out of the city and into the mountains of Switzerland, I had a niche problem... agreeing with my buddies which is the best ski field to meet at when we all live in different towns. So I made a little web app to help:
This was a fun little project I did over the Christmas holidays but only finished off recently. Basically I precalculated the public transport time between the most populated towns in Switzerland to every ski field (about 350 of them!) and then built a little web app around it using Django.
You can choose to prioritise shortest (lowest time overall) versus fairest (smallest variance in group members).
Totally free to use. Next steps are to integrate it with live snow conditions/open lifts...
Claude did help a lot with the FE part. The biggest part was actually finding the best public transport stop for each ski field - that was a very manual process trawling through skimap.org images and Anreise info on ski resort websites.
I'm still working on my Web Server Library .NET Core, the rewrite is almost finished (beta version)
Orchestera (https://orchestera.com/) - Fully managed Apache Spark clusters in your own AWS account with no additonal compute markups, unlike EMR and Databricks.
Currently implemented the following:
- Automated scale in / scale out of nodes for Spark executors and drivers via Karpenter
- Jupyter notebook integration that works as a Spark driver for quick iteration and prototyping
- A simple JSON based IAM permissions managementent via AWS Parameter Store
Work-in-progress this month:
- Jupyterhub based Spark notebook provisioning
- Spark History Server
- Spark History Server MCP support with chat interface to support Spark pipeline debugging and diagnostics
Open to feedback and connecting. Docs at https://docs.orchestera.com/