alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
I build Seaquel, the database client I've always wished I had. It's open source, works offline and doesn't track what you do.
It has a visual query builder and separate SQL tutorial.
Since about two years I'm working on a new systems programming language [1] that is supposed to be nearly as fast as C, memory safe, and as concise and easy to learn as Python. Right now I'm trying to integrate Perceus, the ref-count optimization of Keka.
I am working on some math education tools. One is free and open-source, the other is paid.
Free Math Sheets is a tool to generate math worksheet PDFs (and the answer keys if required). Currently it supports K-5 but I want to expand it to higher levels of math (Calculus, Physics, you name it!). You select a bunch of different options and then generate it. All in the front-end. No back-end or login in required. https://www.freemathsheets.com
If you are interested in helping out or forking it, here is the github repo github.com/sophikos/free-math-sheets
The paid project is Numerikos. I am going for something in between Khan Academy and Math Academy. I like the playfulness and answer input methods from Khan Academy (but it is linear, doesn't have a good way to go back and practice, etc.). I like Math Academy's algorithm (but it has multiple choice answers, yuck! and is easy to get stuck and doesn't have a good way to explore on your own). Currently Numerikos supports 4th and 5th grade math lessons and practice. The algorithm is based on mastery learning like Numerikos, but you can also see a list of all the skills and practice whatever you want. I am also working on a dashboard system where you can build your own daily/weekly practices for the skills you care about. Next up is 6th grade math and placement tests.
Very small app for framing photos on Mac/ipad/iphone. I know some web alternatives. But when i wanted to add borders to photos I took to upload to IG i used imagemagick. I want to make something stylish(no tacky borderds), also usable for batch processing. I have prorotype and need to fix some issues.
I'm building a microreading service that let's me get long books read with small chunks of time that I have - https://lauselt.ee Currently I've added some public domain Estonian books in there and tbh I do get a lot more reading done during the day. Basically you can use your 1-5 min breaks (waiting for a bus, during the commercials, waiting for food etc) to open the book quickly where you left off and read by scrolling small chunks of texts at a time. Duolingo style streak to create the habit of reading every day. Also the ability to upload your own book and it will automatically be split into these small chunks.
Working on improving AI Nexus - my custom LLM frontend that exposes all AI Models in a single interface: https://getainexus.com/
I've been working on my local server mocking tool Decoy: https://decoy-app.com/
I've built it earlier and also did a Show HN, now I am going through some of the steps that get recommended to me such as creating Product Hunt launches, etc. But I am struggling a bit with the concept of PH. What is the audience? People into new apps? It all feels a bit desperate to be honest and this app is just a hobby side project, I am not.
So if anyone knows of a good way to get some attention to my useful fun tool, please let me know.
I've been plugging away on MadHatter (https://madhatter.app), a web tool for knitting/crochet projects. It works best on desktop!
Why? Many yarncrafters painstakingly build spreadsheets, or try to bend existing general purpose pixel editors to their will. It's time consuming & frustrating.
Along the way, I've solved a bunch of problems:
- Automatic decreases (shapes the hat) / overstitching markers (shows when multiple colors are used in the same row)
- Parameterized designs, like waves, trees, geometric shapes. No more manually moving an object by a couple of pixels, it's a simple click & drag.
- Color palette merging (can't delete a color if you already use it in a pattern!)
- Export to PDF (so you can print it or stick it on a tablet)
- Repeat previews (visualize the pattern as it repeats horizontally)
If you drag a shape near the right edge of the canvas, you'll see it "wrapping around" onto the right edge.
This reflects the 3D reality of a hat!
https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop a sqlite centric coding agent. it does a few things differently. 1 - context is completely managed in sqlite 2 - it has a "mail model" basically, it uses the git email workflow as the agentic plan => code => review loop. You become "linus" in this mode, and the patches are guaranteed bisect safe. 3 - everything is done in a javascript control plane, no free form tools like read / write / patch. Those are available but within a javascript repl. So the agent works on that. You get other benefits such as being able to persist js functions in the database for future use that's specific to your codebase.
Give it a try!
Continuing to make fantastic progress on Breaka Club, where we teach kids to code, be creative and make games:
https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids
The recent Netflix Games edition of Overcooked with K-Pop Demon Hunters is cool, but not nearly as cool as kids coding and playing their way through Overcooked levels in our custom educational mod for Overcooked:
I'm also maintaining GodotJS, strongly typed TypeScript bindings for Godot, which is used to build the Breaka Club RPG (see first link):
https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS
And last week I also put together the first release of MoonSharp in ~10 years; Lua runtime for Unity. That's not for Breaka Club though, I also consult for Berserk Games on Tabletop Simulator:
I'm currently working on https://FaunaMap.app (web/Android/iOS) which lets nature enthusiasts see which birds, mammals, reptiles, etc. can be expected at any location worldwide using the past 20 years of GBIF observation data. It features an interactive global sightings map, color-coded to quickly spot recent rarities nearby. Public birding hides from OSM and a hotspots heatmap are included for trip planning. Users can quickly log large numbers of observations in the field. Observations with images appear in an Instagram-like feed for interaction with other users. Personal species life lists (global, per country, and custom locations) are also included. Feedback is very welcome :)
I'm building two things, both game related.
Over the last year I've been hacking on Table Slayer [0] a web tool for projecting DnD maps on purpose built TV-in-table setups. Right now I'm working on making hardware that supports large format touch displays.
Since I also play boardgames, this past month I threw together Counter Slayer [1], which helps you generate STLs for box game inserts.
Both projects are open source and available on GitHub. I've had fun building software for hobbies that are mostly tactile.
Happy March everyone,
I am working on Entangle, https://entangle.cloud something for me to learn and play with LLMs and AI.
It is not ground breaking but let your website to have an AI chat bot / agent with minimal integration effort. Also was a good way for me to learn how to keep things safe, prevent prompt injection etc.
Looking for feedback and feel free to give it a try, happy to try it with your project documentation or developer docs.
I’m learning Godot and writing a basic game for my kids.
Coding agents are amazing and make me (feel) productive, but they really suck the fun out of programming.
I’m sure it’s possible to create a Godot-based game with an LLM, but I’m not sure how, so I’m forced to do everything the old-fashioned way – reading the docs.
https://e.ml A free inbrowser inbox for inspecting .eml (email) files. There are many one-off .eml viewers around but I found myself inspecting the same files many times which evolved into this concept of an inbrowser inbox. Plus, world's shortest domain (3 characters) and the domain is an exact match for the file extension, a fun novelty. Very easy to remember!
https://milliondollarchat.com a reimagining of the million dollar homepage for the AI age. Not useful, but fun. A free to use chatbot that anyone can influence by adding to the context. The chatbot's "thoughts" are streamed to all visitors.
I've built a generic PKCS#11 interface to the Apple's Secure Enclave[1]
Primarily to use in conjunction with OpenVPN. Like secretive or /usr/lib/ssh-keychain.dylib[2], but not just for SSH.
I’m working on a 2D top-down Zelda-style adventure MMO game. I’m imagining it as a persistent world with Minecraft-like building and procedurally generated quests. I’d like to focus on co-op adventuring and social rather than pvp. Kind of a D&D experience I suppose, though that’s not really a direct inspiration for me.
I have no illusions that this is actually something in capable of building to an actual release-able state but it’s fun to tinker with.
Managed BYOK stateless agent orchestrator called BeeZee: https://beezyai.net/. Basically Claude Cowork / a coding agent on the web but provider agnostic, you own the data and you can connect several nodes to it. Instead of installing an agent for all your machines you have one master agentic server and executor nodes. The server is stateless the data lives on the nodes and in a managed database. I use Supabase and Google KMS so my auth keys are encrypted. Uses Pi agent under the hood. This enables me to code from my phone without a dedicated SSH terminal and without the need to babysit the agent. I describe the feature, off it goes, I close my phone and in 10 mins the results are there. Also using it to support my wife with white collar stuff like Excel analysis, translation, etc. It's a bit buggy but getting better.
Here is my fun mini-project:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kaien/id6759458971
I wanted a way for my kid to learn the alphabet, but without a UI that looks & behaves like a slot machine. It's all maximally slow, relaxed and designed to be easy to put down.
One month ago, I purchased this small eink reader (Xteink 4) and I've been loving reading on that device. It made me read much more in the past month (already more than 50% through Fall or Dodge in Hell).
The stock firmware is horrible but the community has this firmware called CrossPoint. I wanted to be able to upload, manage files etc. from my iPhone on the go and also send over web articles. So I build this app CrossPoint Sync https://crosspointsync.com to do just that.
I've already published it on App Store and pending publishing on Android. The community is niche and has also been using the app, so its been fun building for my use and in turn also getting good feedback from community.
If you are using the Xteink and CrossPoint firmware, then give the app a try.
iOS App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/crosspoint-sync/id6758985427
Android Beta: https://crosspointsync.com/android/join-beta
PC Part Picker for hi-fi stereos: https://buildhifi.com/
I've wanted this for a long time, so I finally started building it. I've had a lot fun!
- 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
I used Rust to build a terminal based IDE for parallel coding cli workflow. It works with Claude Code, Codex and Gemini!
My favorite features are: - custom layout and drag and drop to change window - auto resume to last working session on app starting - notifications - copy and paste images directly to Claude Code/Codex/Gemini CLI - file tree with right click to insert file path to the session directly
OH and it works on both Windows and MacOS! Fully open source too!
Agentic code construction has broken traditional models for code review - the volume is just too high for humans to keep up with.
There are some good tools out there for automating pr review; IMO, they don't catch enough, and they catch it too late.
I've been experimenting with some ideas about a very opinionated AI code reviewer, one that makes an ideal tradeoff between cost and immediacy (eg, how soon after composition does the code get feedback).
Currently in an invite-only alpha, but check out the landing page and lmk if you'd like to be a trial user!
I'm working on a personal recipe site called Struggle Meals, in the genre of https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook and https://old.reddit.com/r/shittyfoodporn/, for food I ate when I felt too poor / depressed / tired / chronically unwell. Some of them are just normal adulting recipes. Some are meal prep. Some are too struggly for a legitimate recipe site.
I have some barebones content at https://struggle-meals.wonger.dev/ and will be working on the design over the next few weeks. Some decisions I'm thinking about:
- balancing between personal convenience and brevity vs being potentially useful for other people. E.g. should I tag everything that's vegan/vegetarian/GF/dairyfree/halal/etc? Should I take pictures of everything? (I'd rather not)
- how simple can I make a recipe without ruining it? E.g. can I omit every measurement? should I separate nice-to-have ingredients from critical ingredients? how do I make that look uncomplicated? (Sometimes the worst thing is having too many options)
- if/how to price things? Depends on region, season, discounts, etc
I am working on a HTML-to-PDF converter written from scratch in pure Go. I got tired of using headless browsers for various reasons and decided to give it a try and implement something that I can use internally. However the results have far exceed my expectations and I've decided to open source everything. It's around 10x to 15x faster than wkhtmltopdf, which is by far the fastest headless browser converter. It's 80x-100x faster than a pagedjs. It's even 2x faster than PrinceXML, which is pretty much the most mature and reliable HTML-to-PDF converter on the market. It also produces the smallest PDF size.
I started small as a toy project, but gradually implemented full support for proper block context, flexbox layout, CSS variables, tables, etc. to the point where I have almost full support of all major CSS features (even math functions like calc(), min(), max()).
I'm cleaning up the code right now and will upload it later today or maybe tomorrow here: https://github.com/PureGoPDF
I absolutely love pre-1800 homes and am exploring a few ideas on how to help preserve and promote them. The main thing I'm working on to that effect is https://homelore.org
It's like a carfax but for your home, although the intention is more to create an interesting historical narrative that inspires people to care about the history of their home rather than as a tool for inspecting home issues before buying.
My target customer is realtors who want to inspire buyers to take on historic homes that may need a lot of work. Also home owners themselves of course.
I’ve been building Adversa [1], a tool that monitors competitor websites and explains what actually changed.
Most monitoring tools alert every time anything changes. That usually ends up being navigation tweaks or small copy edits. After a while the alerts just get ignored.
Adversa focuses on meaningful updates instead. It detects changes across competitor pages and uses AI to summarise what changed and why it might matter.
I originally built it because I was manually checking competitor pricing pages and changelogs. I also wanted something practical for smaller SaaS teams. A lot of existing tools are either enterprise-priced or the free tiers are too limited to be useful.
Still early and trying to learn what people actually want from this kind of tool.
I've been working on an MQTT Broker/Topic tree explorer. It's intended to help someone understand what kinds of data are moving through their broker, what the busiest data is, and just generally be pretty. https://ryanbateman.github.io/mqtt_vis/
OSS, MIT licensed. Feedback welcomed!
Balance Buckets helps you set aside money for the things you care about.
It’s two-minute envelope accounting for your bank balance.
I love making games, and I've been building a no-code game engine by extracting reusable components every time I ship a new game. It started as me scratching my own itch, and now it's turning into a real platform.
Each game adds more building blocks to the editor: multiplayer, event systems, NPC behaviors, pathfinding, etc. I build a system once, and then anyone using the editor can use it in a click.
Since my last month, I shipped the asset marketplace and the LLM builder. Artists can now upload tilesets and characters, and unlike itch.io, assets drop directly into the editor. You can preview how they'll actually look in-game before using them [1].
An other problem I kept running into: even with a no-code editor, users don't know where to start. So now I'm extending it with a coding agent. Describe the game you want, and it assembles it — pulling assets from the marketplace, wiring up the event system, and using all the building blocks I've spent the past year extracting. Multiplayer, mobile controls, pathfinding, NPC behaviors — the agent doesn't build any of it, just reaches for what's already there.
Once the LLM assembles it, users will have a game ready to work on, and will still be able jump into the editor and tweak everything [2]. Here's an example of what it can already make [3] (after a lot of prompting), and the goal is to reach games like this one I built with the manual editor[4].
Hoping to release the AI mode in a week or two. The manual editor is live at https://craftmygame.com in the meantime.
[1] https://craftmygame.com/asset/mossy-cavern-JdYWai1
[2] https://youtu.be/6I0-eTmoHwQ
I'm building an image editor for macOS. Don't really like Affinity or GIMP so thought I'd go ahead and make my own. https://skullrocksoftware.com
I built a simple joke tool to analyze all the rejection emails (over 1600) that I got during the recent job searches and create simple bar graphs from it. Wrote a blog about it https://github.com/khante/l here https://rohankhante.substack.com/p/thank-you-for-your-applic....
PS - The results are entirely obvious.
Writing (https://www.metanoia-research.com/). A multi-year project but one I have needed to start for much longer. Publishing one essay per month.
Wanted to see if AI could figure out how to compress executable binaries better than existing generic tools without me actually knowing much about compression engineering or ELF internals.
The result is an experiment called fesh. It works strictly as a deterministic pre-processor pipeline wrapping LZMA (xz). The AI kept identifying "structural entropy boundaries" and instructed me to extract near-branches, normalize jump tables, rewrite .eh_frame DWARF pointers to absolute image bases, delta-encode ELF .rela structs with ZigZag mappings, and force column transpositions before compressing them in separated LZMA channels.
Surprisingly, it actually works. The CI strictly verifies that compression is perfectly reversible (bit-for-bit identity match) across 103 Alpine Linux x86_64 packages. According to the benchmarks, it consistently produces smaller payloads than xz -9e --x86 (XZ BCJ), ZSTD, and Brotli across the board—averaging around 6% smaller than maximum XZ BCJ limits.
I honestly have no idea how much of this is genuinely novel versus standard practices in extreme binary packing (like Crinkler/UPX).
Repo: https://github.com/mohsen1/fesh
For those who know this stuff:
Does this architecture have any actual merits for standard distribution formats, or is this just overfitting the LZMA dictionary to Alpine's compiler outputs? I'd love to hear from people who actually understand compression math.
I made a game where you try to guess a daily mystery bird.
It pulls a list of birds reported on eBird in your county in the last 2 weeks and you ask preselected questions like the the color or size to whittle down the possibilities. I also made a matching game that uses the same list and you have to match the name to a picture of the bird. I set it up for California for now. I wanted to get more comfortable with SQL and APIs.
Feedback welcome.
* Reconstructing `$HOME/git` after an unfortunate `rclone sync` wiped it. It was not fun discovering that my backup was on the wrong `git` directory and also that I'd not committed some stuff for ... years. Lesson learned, etc. * Implementing three new bot ideas. * Trying desperately to stay out of the "we must vibecode!" juggernaut's path at work. * Wasting hours having to manually download Every. Single. Model. from my MyMiniFactory library because they don't provide an API, a bulk download, or a sync to something like Dropbox. (1500 down, about 4000 to go!)
Building a tool that automatically generates living infrastructure diagrams from your cloud anccount and turns them into real-time incident dashboards. Think Figma meets Datadog - beautiful visualization that updates during outages to show you exactly what's failing and how to fix it.
https://telephone.health, which shows how well LLMs can take narrative medical text, convert it to a structured form (FHIR R4, for application consumption), and then convert it back to narrative text for human consumption.
Interesting findings include Mistral doing better than Gemini 3 Pro in certain usescases, cross-LLM works better than one LLM to another, oh and - the cost all of of this. So, so expensive.
Building wireless (LTE-based) sensors for most major horticultural sensing needs. Measurements include:
- CO2. Side note: I was surprised to find that most (all?) CO2 sensors used in closed plant production setups are not meant to operate below 400 ppm.
- Air temperature, pressure, relative humidity
- Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR)
- Addons like: wind speed, wind direction, soil moisture and Electrical Conductivity (EC)
- The coolest and most challenging: pH, EC, and flow rate
The hardest part has been running everything on battery while maintaining accuracy and using LTE (2–4G) and not common LPWAN options like LoRa. I'm primarily a software guy, so the learning curve has been huge.
A soccer web game where you are the coach and your only possible interaction is shouting (ie typing) messages to your players from the sidelines. An LLM interpret your messages and pass instructions into the game engine.
It is a pretty fun project
Been working on https://localhero.ai, its my service to automate on-brand translations for product teams. I've been doing outreach to Swedish companies/people, getting some good interest from a few that want to automate their localization workflow but don't want the work of maintaining own solutions. Even though you can build a version working with coding agents these days, there is a lot of stuff around it to make it work well over time in a product org. On the tech side for Localhero, one thing I've been working on how it learns from manual edits. Like when a PM or designer tweaks copy in the Localhero UI, those things now better feed back into a translation memory and influence future translations. It's like a self-learning loop, turns out a pretty nice combo of using old-school techniques and offloading some work to LLMs.
Also been spending some time on my old side project https://infrabase.ai, an directory of AI infra related tools. Redesigned the landscape page (https://infrabase.ai/landscape), going through product submissions and content, optimizing a bit for seo/geo.
Building grith — OS-level syscall interception for AI coding agents.
The problem: every agent (Cline, Aider, Codex, Claude Code) has unrestricted access to your filesystem, shell, and network. When they process untrusted content — a cloned repo, a dependency README — they’re prompt injection vectors with full machine access. No existing tool evaluates what the agent actually does at the syscall level.
grith wraps any CLI agent without modification. OS-level interception captures every file open, network call, and process spawn, then runs it through 17 independent security filters in parallel across three phases (~15ms total). Composite score routes each call: auto-allow, auto-deny, or queue for async review. Most will auto approve - which eliminates approval fatigue.
Also does per-session cost tracking and audit trails as a side effect of intercepting everything.
I'm building AthenaOS: https://athena-os.ai/
Basically OpenClaw but with investing dashboards for my portfolio, additional tools specifically for investing, and exploring an AI-Human collaboration on researching economics (check the 'community' tab).
The data models are all in markdown and Excel so that there's no lockin and you can manually edit positions, personalities, etc.
This comes from frustration around most investing tools basically scraping your personal data + forcing you to lock into subscriptions. I think it's now possible to just vibe code most of what one needs, aside form raw data subscriptions.
It's all open source, too: https://github.com/wgryc/athena-os
Working on a software trial automation infra.
While working on another project, I needed a very simple service I could setup in a few clicks, which would take my docker compose and manage the spin up and tear down of ephemeral VM automatically when triggered by a signup on my landing page.
I couldn't find anything real simple, so I decided to build it. Currently working on it.
Any feedback will be much appreciated.
A visual explorer for the trees of San Francisco.
https://greenmtnboy.github.io/sf_tree_reporting/#/
For all the places it's bad at, AI has been fantastic for making targeted data experiences a lot more accessible to build (see MotherDuck and dives, etc), as long as you can keep the actual data access grounded. Years of tableau/looker have atrophied my creativity a bit, trying to get back to having more fun.
Delving on to personalized software again now that AI agents code it for me with little hand holding.
Instead of building scrips here and there I'm attempting my own everything app. Lets see if that's a good idea :).
Starting with android home screen and widget sync to server/desktop. So e.g. calendar notifications happen desktop first, then escalate to mobile etc. Also phone as mousepad (for using my projector from bed). Just feature creeping it all in without regrets so far.
In general I feel like feature creep needs to be reevaluated. UX must not be destroyed, but features cost less now.
I'm working on Firefly, a programming language for full stack webapps:
https://monohub.dev — a new EU-based (hosted and developed) GitHub alternative. Currently, it has a file browser and a PR review tool. Started off as a personal tool, but grew enough to consider offering as a service.
I posted about it recently on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47199062):
It is at a fairly early stage of development, so it's quite rough around the edges. It is developed and hosted in EU.
I have started developing it as a slim wrapper around Git to serve my own code, but it grew to such extent that I decided to give it a try and offer it as a service. It doesn't have much at the moment, but it already has basic pull requests. Accessibility is high priority.
It will be a paid service, (free for contributors) but since it's an early start, an "early adopter discount" is applied – 6 months for free. No card details required.
I would be happy if you give it a try and let me know what do you think, and perhaps share what you lack in existing solutions that you would like to see implemented here.
I've finally finished the long-abandoned project that I've been meaning to build for a while.
If you use Stripe Billing for subscriptions, your customers can specify reasons why they cancelled (e.g. too expensive, not using it, switched to competitor, etc.). However, to access those, you either have to use Stripe Sigma or pull them from the API. I wanted to build a more convenient way to access those (and also act upon them).
I've submitted the app to Stripe's App Marketplace, but I have a limited number of test invites to send out if you're interested (I will happily waive your subscription for 3 months).
I'm building a distributed key-value store as part of my university project.