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
Have been tinkering with a few different projects:
- Tilth: Smart(er) code reading for humans and AI agents. Reduces LLM token use and cost by ~40% (benchmarked) https://github.com/jahala/tilth
- mrkd: Native macOS .md viewer (+preview in Finder) that imports iTerm2 and VSCode themes https://github.com/jahala/mrkd
- O-O: Self-updating articles concept with polyglot (bash/html) files. No server, no database. https://github.com/jahala/o-o
Still working on https://kavla.dev
I have worked with data for a while. I feel like our tools could be much better when it comes to "flow". I want an experience where you don't need to alt+tab to slack/images/another query. What if we put it all on a canvas? That's what Kavla is all about!
Since last month I've done a lot of improvements to the editor to make the "flow" better.
I've also read up on HMAC, Nonces and fun encryption stuff to create read only boards.
Here's one where I look at stack overflow survey for databases: https://app.kavla.dev/v/mqhg54o319doya4.67dbfee1ccd6caf638d3...
Snowflake users apparently make the most money!
I've been working on two small projects recently.
1. Live Kaiwa — real-time Japanese conversation support
I live in a rural farming neighborhood in Japan. Day-to-day Japanese is fine for me, but neighborhood meetings were a completely different level. Fast speech, local dialect, references to people and events from decades ago. I'd leave feeling like I understood maybe 5% of what happened.
So I built a tool for myself to help follow those conversations.
Live Kaiwa transcribes Japanese speech in real time and gives English translations, summaries, and suggested responses while the conversation is happening.
Some technical details:
* Browser microphone streams audio via WebRTC to a server with Kotoba Whisper * Multi-pass transcription: quick first pass, then higher-accuracy re-transcription that replaces earlier text * Each batch of transcript is sent to an LLM that generates translations, summary bullets, and response suggestions * Everything is streamed back to the UI live * Session data stays entirely in the browser — nothing stored server-side
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2. Cooperation Cube — a board game that rotates the playing field
Years ago I built a physical board game where players place sticks into a wooden cube to complete patterns on the faces.
The twist: the cube rotates 90° every round, so patterns you're building suddenly become part of someone else's board. It creates a mix of strategy, memory, and semi-cooperative play.
I recently built a digital version.
Game mechanics:
* 4 players drafting cards and placing colored sticks on cube faces * The cube rotates every 4 actions * Players must remember what exists on other faces * Cooperation cards allow two players to coordinate for shared bonuses * Game ends when someone runs out of short sticks
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Both projects mostly started as things I wanted to exist for myself. Curious what people think.
Me and Claude have been working on zfetch (https://github.com/roobie/zfetch), which is a single static binary that fetches URLs over HTTPS with strict security defaults. For many applications, it should be able to replace curl in restricted environments where you need a small, auditable tool with no runtime dependencies.
It should also be usable as a Zig library for embedding HTTP(S) fetches in your own programs.
Vendors and links BoringSSL
I have built npm for LLM models, which lets you install & run 10,000+ open sourced large language models within seconds. The idea is to make models installable like packages in your code:
llmpm install llama3
llmpm run llama3
You can also package large language models together with your code so projects can reproduce the same setup easily.
I’m building a decentralized Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS) orchestration layer that treats aerial robotics as a simple API endpoint.
The system allows users to submit a JSON payload containing geocoordinates and mission requirements (e.g., capture_type: "4K_video" | "IR_photo"), the backend then handles the fleet logistics, selecting the optimal VTOL units from distributed sub-stations based on battery state-of-charge and proximity.
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.
Still working on
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - database of domains and youtube channels
- https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy - web crawling / web scraping tool
- https://github.com/rumca-js/webtoolkit - web crawling toolki
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds - feeds databse
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - RSS reader
I am building ReifyDB(reifydb.com), a database for live application state.
A lot of existing databases are storage first, with everything else built around them. I have been exploring what it looks like if the database is closer to the application runtime itself, where state is live, queryable, and easier to reason about directly.
One thing I am prototyping right now is database-native tests.
Basically: what if integration tests were a database primitive?
CREATE TEST test::insert { INSERT test::users [{ id: 99, name: "Ghost" }]; FROM test::users | FILTER id == 99 | ASSERT { name == "Ghost" }; };
So not a wrapper, not a framework, not an external test runner.
A real test object inside the database.
The idea is that you could run these before schema changes, and make stored procedures or other database logic much easier to test without leaving the database model.
Still early, but it feels like one of those things that should just exist, especially for databases built around live application state.
https://github.com/AzimovParviz/openblaster/tree/qt6
I wrote a CLI utility last year to control my SoundBlasterx G6 DAC (can only control LED colour and EQ bands) without needing to use Creative's windows only program (I am mostly a Mac + occasional Linux) user.
Recently downloaded Qwen3-coder-next 80b model and been vibing with it to introduce Qt6 and write a dead simple (aka ugly) crossplatform GUI to it so that other people can use it on their Macs and Linux machines. Letting a LLM wreak havoc on your project feels bad, I constantly have to reign it in and rollback the repo once it starts looping due to writing something that doesn't compile, making it going back and forth between doing and undoing changes.
Starting to work on a mobile app that gamifies exposure therapy. Helps you progress every day. No demo yet but hopefully soon :)
A5 - a pentagonal geospatial index: https://a5geo.org
If you’ve used H3 the semantics should be familiar. The biggest differentiator is the fact that cells have exactly the same area globally, for why this matters see: https://a5geo.org/docs/recipes/a5-vs-h3
Since starting the project last year and providing implementations in TypeScript, Python and Rust it’s been great to see a community grow, porting or integrating into DuckDB, QGIS and many more: https://a5geo.org/docs/ecosystem
Building a new kind of news site, featuring updates from primary sources.
We're constantly pulling info from official sources, and using AI to group and summarize into stories, and continue to share reporting from trusted, vetted journalists.
The result is news with the speed and breadth of getting updates straight from the source, and the perspective and context that reporting provides.
Still ramping up, but I'd love to hear feedback:
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.
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.
I finally decided to try and make a note taking tool I've been wanting to use. https://chrononotes.com/
As many here, I've found that a single text file is all that I really need, but found that it makes it difficult to keep track of a variety of things. I was also trying to use the file as a simple project tracker, adding some tags like [BUG-N], and updating them by hand. Eventually, it became difficult to track the progress of things, since I had to jump around the file to look for updates.. or use grep.
I condensed the idea to just that - a very simple tool which manages "trackers", and has a simple filtering built in to "trace" the updates. I've been using it, since I've added the BE, and dogfooding it a bunch. Would love for fellow note takers to take a look. It's not perfect, but I'm keeping it around for myself :)
AI assisted medical consultations
My first agentic app to dive head first into the AI world not to be left behind, oh boy this new world moves faster than I thought.
Feedback highly appreciated
Two choropleth map projects I've wanted to make for a while:
https://housepricedashboard.co.uk - shows a visualisation of house prices in England and Wales since the 90s, with filters for house types, real vs nominal, and change views over time
https://councilatlas.co.uk - similar structure to the above, but focusing on local council datasets. The idea is to make it easier to compare your local council's performance against the rest of the country.
Running a marathon soon and want my friends to track and engage with me in realtime. Working on:
1. An app for my Apple Watch that streams GPS + health data
2. A web app that tracks my run in realtime. Friends can engage by sending cheers that I see while running.
I made my own AI personal assistant:
https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot
It's like OpenClaw but actually secure, without access to secrets, with scoped plugin permissions, isolation, etc. I love it, it's been extremely helpful, and pairs really well with a little hardware voice note device I made:
I've been working on Peachy, a framework for writing native Linux applications easier and faster with React and GTK: https://peachy-9b8f81.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/
Very WIP and no docs, but I hope it will be helpful someday
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 :)
Not a developer but have few ideas that I didn't pursue due to professional and personal responsibilities. One of them was a simple protein price comparison tool that allows me to find the value for money protein powder which is tested for label accuracy, heavy metals, amino spiking etc. I used to maintain an excel of my known brands and track which ones offered the best value without breaking my bank. I thought if I am looking for such data then there might be others like me. So I recently subscribed to Claude and was able to create a simple website from scratch. It's great that people can create their hobby projects so easily now.
Link to website:
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.
Eazip (https://eazip.io) — ZIP remote files in one API call.
I built a service that lets developers bundle remote files into a ZIP with a single POST request. You send a list of URLs, we fetch, package, and return a signed download link.
The problem: creating ZIPs from remote files (S3, R2, CDN) usually means downloading to a server, zipping locally, managing temp storage, and cleaning up. It's surprisingly painful at scale — especially with large files or thousands of items.
Eazip handles all of that. ZIP64 support for files over 4GB, up to 5,000 files per job, zero egress fees on downloads, and no infrastructure to manage.
Use cases so far: e-commerce photo bundles, document delivery (invoices/contracts), creative asset distribution, and backup/export tooling.
Free tier available, no credit card required. Would love feedback from the HN community.
Side project - plan mode and code review annotations for coding agents (ui that integrates via hooks): https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
Main gig: Trusted agents. We just shipped hardware based signing to web bot auth protocol.
Working on Functional Universe (FU), a formal framework for modeling physical reality as functional state evolution, integrating sequential composition with simultaneous aggregation.
TermWatch, a terminal-native monitoring
Monitor your infrastructure from the terminal.
Integrated GitOps flow.
Define monitors in YAML, deploy from your terminal, get alerted when things break.
No dashboards to click through.
Install via CURL, dotnet package or manual download.
I wrote this Telegram bot that translates any video with AI-generated subtitles in about 2 minutes. You paste a YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram link, pick your language, and get back the video with burned-in subtitles.
It started because my wife watches Chinese dramas and new episodes never have subtitles for our language. Turns out thousands of people have the same problem — Arabic speakers watching anime, Russian speakers following Turkish series, Persian speakers catching up on K-dramas.
Supports 40+ languages, works with any video link or direct file upload. There's also a Mini App inside Telegram for a more visual experience.
https://symgraph.ai/ - AI-Powered Reverse Engineering Inside Your Disassembler
Open-source plugins for Ghidra, Binary Ninja, and IDA Pro that bring LLM reasoning, autonomous agents, and semantic knowledge graphs directly into your analysis workflow.
Coming soon: A supporting online service. The VirusTotal for reverse engineering. A cloud-native symbol store and knowledge graph service designed for the reverse engineering community.
- Submit files for automated reverse engineering and analysis
- Query shared symbols, types, and semantic knowledge
- Accelerate analysis with community-contributed intelligence
- Versioned, deduplicated symbols with multi-contributor collaboration
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.
the main thing ive been hacking on recently is what i consider to be the first next gen llm harness, ive a demonstrator that implements like 40percent of what ive pretty complete specs for on top of mono pi. theres some pretty big differences in overall reasoning and reliability when i run most useful sota frontier models with all my pieces. early users have reported the models actually are more cozy, reliable and have a teeny bit more reasoning capacity
Working on...
- Tablex (https://www.tablex.pro) - seat arrangement app for weddings, seminars, conferences.
- Kardy (https://www.kardy.app) - group card app I've always wanted to build.
- Jello (https://www.jello.app) - Create games with your own photos and sound effects!
A macOS screen recording CLI application that can record: screen, mic(s), camera(s), system audio, iPhone/iPad screen. You can select different tracks with their own options (video encoding, audio encoding, filename, combine camera with mic for example or even screen + system audio + mic). It also tracks clicks, scroll, keyboard and generates closed captions automatically at the end. Now I'm working on adding 1-2 more features and an MVP is done.
I'm building web-based CAD software for woodworkers. Not a plugin, I'm starting from scratch. I'm aiming for it to be intuitive for non-technical users (think SketchUp), while also offering some of the more powerful tools of "proper" CAD tailored for woodworking: simple parametric workflows, cutting layout optimization, built-in tools like chamfers and joints,...
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!
Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:
https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.
https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.
https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".
For over a year now, I’ve been working on Compute Prices (https://computeprices.com).
It’s been a great way for me to better understand the cloud GPU industry, learn about data collection, normalization and use agentic coding to build a side project.
One thing I’m working on is distinguishing spot vs on demand prices and listing those separately. Also, including inference pricing for non-text AI models.
What features or data would you like to see me add next?
Completely automating the difficult problem of json parsing and normalization in cloud data warehouses. https://forge.foxtrotcommunications.net/
Today engineers spend dozens of hours agonizing over how to unlock the vast analytical possibilities of JSON data in their warehouse. The internet is littered with half solutions and broken promises. Today, we have solved this problem.
I didn't like any of the car maintenance apps I've tried, so I'm building my own. simpler, can be run locally (I run it in a k3s cluster). I don't think I have any stand-out features for it right now, or planned for the near future, but it works well for my purposes.
I finally, after a couple of years off, picked up work on a Standard Ebooks[1] edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. I made a new years’ promise to myself to get it as done as possible by the end of the year. If it doesn’t happen I’m not going to be too hard on myself though, given the 5K endnotes and 1.5M overall word count. But we’ll see!
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 working on VineWall (https://vinewallapp.com), a network tunnel that helps you fight doomscrolling by making your internet slower when it detects you spent too much time scrolling.
At this moment I’m working on improving the logic that decides when/how much to throttle the network.
* 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 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.
Not sure if people interested, but since I use sqlite in a lot of my own projects, I am working on a lightweight monitoring and safety layer for production SQLite.
The idea is pretty simple: SQLite is amazing, but once it’s running in production you basically have zero observability. If something weird happens (unexpected writes, schema changes, background jobs touching tables, etc.) you only find out after the fact. It tries to solve that without touching application code. It's a Rust agent that runs next to your sqlite file, and connects to the server where everything is logged in. My current challenge right now is encryption and trust, mostly.
Curious if others here are running SQLite in production and if you would be interested in something like this.
ClipNotebook: A FREE modern bookmark manager
- Visual cards with titles and thumbnails
- Playlists keep research focused
- One private URL for editing, share links for viewing
- Fast import for friends and teams
Still working on Bitwit, my CS/math spaced-repetition education site [1]
I'm dogfooding it heavily. The bugs at this point tend to be in card formatting. I ended up delaying the introduction of TeX/MathJax until I had quite a few cards written, and man oh man, it's tedious to go back and fix that formatting in hundreds of cards.
The real question: does it work? I _think_ so. I'm learning, and I feel like I'm retaining more, and I think the general structure counteracts or compensates for most of my issues as a learner. I think the science is pretty solid, but I'm also experimenting in a few areas, so... eh, we'll see.
If anyone is interested in trying it out, you can use it for quite some time (several months, maybe a few years) without needing to provide an email address or sign up.
Proving the infamous FTP guy from the original Dropbox HN thread right: you can now access your Dropbox over FTPS, SFTP, S3, or MCP. And not just Dropbox, it works with every storage backend out there: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
I just launched Kyaraben, it's an alternative to EmuDeck that autoconfigures Syncthing for your devices.
For those not in in that niche, the goal is to set up a Linux desktop or Steam Deck for retro (and not so retro) video game emulation, so you just drop in your ROMs, open a frontend via Steam, and play your games.
https://kyaraben.org