alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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Designing a conversational UX for Bookmarker.
I was stuck on this conversation problem. First version had a dead-end search box: six starter prompts, one referencing a tool that didn't exist. No follow-ups. No guided flows. Users got an answer and had to invent the next question from scratch.
Now the assistant explores your library with you. Tag discovery, color browsing, weekly digests, smart collections that auto-curate as you save.
Semantic search runs hybrid, keyword matching plus pgvector cosine similarity on 768-dim embeddings. Streaming responses.
Almost there. https://bookmarker.cc/
i'm working on this two projects: https://github.com/shrec/Exorcist and https://github.com/shrec/UltrafastSecp256k1
I inherited a stake in a pyridine derivatives chemical plant - while I do not know much about chemical feedstocks and the chemical supply chain, I am trying to help the current partner optimize their yields and reduce losses across multiple stages of reactions across the feedstock and reagents. It is quite similar to hardware design and electrical engineering than I thought.
I have also taken an interest in learning distributed paradigms like MPI and am using it on my own cluster of rPis
I'm rewriting a shipping app, that is just over two years old.
This is a "full rewrite," because I need to migrate away from my previous server, which was developed as a high-security, general-purpose application server, and is way overkill for this app.
Migration is likely to take a couple more years, but this is a big first step.
I've rewritten the server, to present a much smaller API. Unfortunately, I'm not yet ready to change the server SQL schema yet, so "behind the curtain" is still pretty hairy. Once the new API and client app are stable, I'll look at the SQL schema. The whole deal is to not interfere with the many users of the app.
I should note that I never would have tried this, without the help of an LLM. It has been invaluable. The development speed is pretty crazy.
Still a lot of work ahead, but the server is done, and I'm a good part of the way through the client communication SDK.
MedAngle + MedGPT + MedAgent
All in the MedAngle Super App - literally everything a future doctor needs in one place. 100k+ users, 150m+ questions solved, tens of billions of seconds spent studying smarter
During the day I run Facebook ads for an apparel brand. On nights & weekends I'm trying to automate my job: https://www.staticads.ai/ :)
Numenon: Sandbox knowledge base management tool for teams.
website: https://about.numenon.app
Have been building a project https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/ which aims to make it easy for teams to easily deploy internal tools/webapps. While creating new apps has gotten easier, securely deploying them across teams remains a challenge. OpenRun runs as a proxy which adds SAML/OAuth based auth with RBAC. OpenRun deploys containerized apps to a single machine with Docker or onto Kubernetes.
Currently adding support for exposing Postgres schemas for each app to use. The goal is that with a shared Postgres instance, each app should be able to either get a dedicated schema or get limited/full access to another app's schema, with row level security rules being supported.
Keep on chugging away at The HN Arcade :) https://hnarcade.com
Over the past weeks, we consistently get 5-6 submissions per week. The newsletter and number of visitors are growing.
I’ve come to treat this as a pet project but realized that for indie devs who get very little marketing attention, being featured in the newsletter, top of the daily list, etc. can be another burst of users.
I am working on Grog, the “grug-brained” alternative to Bazel. Bazel has a very steep learning curve and is pretty much overkill for most medium-sized teams. Grog already powers all of our internal mono-repo CI and is a lot more fun to work with.
GetSize (https://www.getsize.shoes). We’re collecting the official sizing data of the world's shoes in one place.
Today, if you search for "what size should I get in Nike Air Max 90" you'll find size charts. We have it, and for 200+ brands across 70+ retailers. When users tell us which shoes they own and what size fits them we’re slowly building crowdsourced fit recommendations which are personal and more accurate compared to size charts.
We're two coders who've built an almost fully autonomous platform. AI agents build, debug and deploy crawlers on their own. We went from 4 crawlers to 280+ in about a month, and the whole thing runs on a home server. When new shoes are discovered, the platform publishes new pages with relevant info automatically. Agents get access to platform metrics and SEO data via custom MCPs to identify the right opportunities on their own. Currently at about 3000 MAU and about 100 size recommendations/day.
Example: https://www.getsize.shoes/en/shoes/nike-air-jordan-1-low-se-...
I’ve been iterating on nights and weekends on a hackers news like website that sources all content from engineering blogs (both personal and company blogs). I have about 600 of the total 3k rss feeds I’ve collected over time loaded up, just tweaking things as I go before dropping the whole list in there: https://engineered.at
While the main app is closed sourced, the rails engine that handles all the rss feeds is open sourced here: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
I have another version of source monitor getting by published soon with some nice enhancements
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 written my own version of OpenClaw, but it's cloud-first so no setup or install. An early release, but I think its pretty neat and I'd appreciate any feedback: https://gipity.ai
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!
Mostly Jolteon (https://github.com/lautarodragan/jolteon), a TUI music player written in Rust (for almost 2 years now!)
Also used the new Navigation API (and some Shadow DOM) to build a cheap, custom client-side rendering (sort of) into my site (https://taro.codes), and some other minor refactors and cleanup (finally migrated away from Sass to just native CSS, improved encapsulation of some things with Shadow roots, etc).
I've been wanting to write a simple AI agent with JS and Ollama just for fun and learning, but haven't started, yet...
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 out https://measuretocut.com, which started as a tool for myself to help with planning board cuts (and now sheet cuts). It calculates how much material you need for your project and gives you a plan for the materials and shows all the cuts you need to make and where to make them.
First release was in December for 1D cuts. Last month I released sheet cutting for 2D cut calculation. It's been working well for my own projects and it started getting consistent daily users since my last update in February. You can save projects now on the site for you to come back to later.
Any feedback is welcome. I'm always looking for what features to add next.
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've been building https://lan.events. It's been built entirely with an LLM as I've been learning more concepts behind agentic engineering for reliable development with an LLM. The primary reason I built it is because LANs are disappearing and they were a formative part of my childhood. They were a way to connect with people that I knew from all over the world. I still have some lasting friendships from the big and small LANs I went to as a kid. LANs are free for 50 and under so please sign up and if you have feedback, send it through the support system!
Building DynoWizard [1] - tool for designing single table DynamoDB tables.
I first used DynamoDB 8 years ago and have been designing single-table schemas heavily since. For me, the best way to create drafts was always pen and paper (and then excel/confluence tables), but in reality it's a process (based on The DynamoDB Book) that can be automated to an extent.
Decided to build an app while on paternity leave. You define entities and access patterns, create (or get suggested) key and GSI design, and generate code for access patterns (TypeScript and Python), infrastructure (CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform), and documentation you can share with stakeholders.
There's more I want to build beyond the MVP - things around understanding and validating designs that you can't get from a chatbot - but for now focusing on the core.
If anyone wants to try it out, sign up for the waitlist on the landing page. MVP should be ready in the next few weeks.
* 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.
rainy-city.com! rainy-city.com is an ambient rain sound generator that is also a kind of city simulation. it is my recurse center project. it's suppose to be more of an ambient experience than a city simulator. it's a total work in progress, I've implemented buildings but haven't made a PR yet because they don't really work the way I want them to, and so I had to rebuild the tiling for them. So right now, there is no city. lol. just rain. but eventually it will have all this stuff you would expect. there are whales.
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?
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'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
Working on Fairvisor — a tool for API governance and usage control.
The problem: one buggy integration, scraper, or infinite retry loop can suddenly explode your API costs or overload infrastructure before anyone notices.
Fairvisor acts as a guardrail in front of your API:
per-tenant and per-route rate limits
request budgets and soft/hard caps
anomaly alerts for sudden spikes
The edge component is open source (OpenResty / Nginx + Lua) and the SaaS part provides policy management and audit.
Still early, validating whether teams would use something like this instead of building internal scripts.
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 wanted to make it exceedingly easy to learn vocabulary in Catalan and Spanish.
To me good is - Pre-determined lists of words - Audio examples - Sentence examples - Native app with offline support
most importantly: - No business model that requires a subscription
I'm trying to see it more as writing a text-book, than starting a business
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!
When I have time between freelance work I make games and tools for myself.
Put One In for Johnny Minn (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3802120/Put_One_In_for_Jo...) - A small soccer game all about scoring nice goals. While I don’t expect it to do well, I’m very happy with how it came out, and it’s the first game I’ve made that I’ll release on Steam! Comes out on Thursday (March 12th).
HeartRoutine (https://www.heartroutine.com/) - I built this a few months ago to help me stay on top of my heart health. I enter my numbers on the (offline) app, and then configure my goals (like “lower Apo B through diet and exercise”), and then the server emails me every morning asking me what I ate yesterday, how I exercised, etc. The goal is to stay on track, and to be able to bring a cardiologist a very detailed report.
I’m working on a small deployment tool called push2start[1]. The goal is to make Docker Compose apps easier to deploy from a laptop to a remote server without a lot of custom scripts. Right now, I’m trying to keep Compose as the source of truth and avoid creating another mini orchestrator. You point it at a compose file, it transfers only the images that need to come from local, then deploys and gives status, logs, and restart controls from one CLI.
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've been building a collaborative docs tool called Docules. The short version: it's a team documentation tool that doesn't have any embedded AI features. I use Claude Code daily, but putting LLMs into every workflow and charging for it is kinda insane. Every docs tool is adding AI auto-complete, AI summaries, "generate a page" buttons. Docules has an API and an MCP server instead, so you connect whatever AI tools you actually want to use. The core product focuses on being a fast, solid docs tool. Real-time collab, fast — no embedded databases or heavy view abstractions, hierarchical docs, drag-and-drop, semantic search, comments, version history, public sharing, SSO, RBAC, audit logs, webhooks, etc. The stack is React, Hono, PostgreSQL, WebSockets. The MCP server is a separate package that exposes search, document CRUD, and comments — so Claude/ChatGPT can work with your docs without us reimplementing a worse version of what they already do. Happy to talk architecture or the MCP integration.
Five months into building product analytics for conversational AI. Started by targeting vibe coding tools like Lovable but realized most of them don't care about user experience yet. With monthly churn over 50%, they focus on acquisition, not retention.
Now shifting to established SaaS companies adding AI assistants to their existing products. Some of them literally have people reading chats full time, so they actually value the experience.
Building https://lenzy.ai - 2 paid customers, 2 pilots, looking for more and figuring out positioning.
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:
Working on Functional Universe (FU), a formal framework for modeling physical reality as functional state evolution, integrating sequential composition with simultaneous aggregation.
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 have been using AI workflows at work to increase the productvity. I have shared these workflows internally and at a couple of tech meetups I went to. I got positive response.
Some of these are present here: https://github.com/vamsipavanmahesh/claude-skills/
Planning to package this as a workshop, so companies could be benefit from AI Native SDLC.
Put together the site yesterday https://getainative.com
Couple of the people I have worked with in the past agreed to meet me for a coffee, will pitch this. Fingers crossed.
Native macOS sandbox terminal:
- UI for sandbox-exec to protect filesystem - Network sandbox per domain - Secrets filter via gitleaks - Vertical tabs option
It's highly customizable. You generate native macOS app wrappers for each terminal app, each with its own rules and customizations.
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
I'm working on JRECC, a Java remotely executing caching compiler.
It's designed to integrate with Maven projects, to bring in the benefits of tools like Gradle and Bazel, where local and remote builds and tests share the same cache, and builds and tests are distributed over many machines. Cache hits greatly speed up large project builds, while also making it more reliable, since you're not potentially getting flaky test failures in your otherwise identical builds.
https://bettertaste.cc/ Building an iOS app that helps travelers find handpicked places with real local character: cafés, restaurants, hidden galleries across European cities. No sponsored listings, no aggregator noise.
Still on time. It is almost two months now and this is such a deep subject and there are so many little tricky bits that I wonder if I will be able to complete the thing but there is still (slow) progress. I never suspected the amount of hard work that goes into building something that is stable at the nano second scale. But I'm becoming more appreciative every day ;)
A music livecoding app[0], it's open-source[1] and it's been in the works for years in various iterations, but I've finally settled on the format and delivery. I'm now trying to make it as newbie friendly as possible by doing tutorials[2] and videos[3] and having ready-made instruments[4] to begin with. Thinking also to expand it as a general purpose creative editor in a standalone electron app and bundle in other livecoding languages as well, for graphics also.
[1]: https://github.com/loopmaster-xyz/loopmaster
[2]: https://loopmaster.xyz/tutorials
Trying out vibe-coding (so mostly not even reading the code) a note-taking web app that's essentially a simplified and dirt-cheap to host Workflowy clone. That seems to me like an easily disruptible SaaS in the sense that note-taking is a very generic app, I only use a small part of the feature set of Workflowy and find the price far too high given that. A lot of other vibe-coding around me I see is throw-away junk, but my intention is to actually use this. The frontend is mostly done and working quite nicely already. Sync is then more crucial to get right to avoid data loss and I think I'll review and rewrite myself more of that.
Working on an all in one "platform" that runs multiple different checks on a website/domain. Got sick of having to run different checks in different places to ensure everything is at it should be - SSL, HTML, SEO, redirects etc.
Extended the checking to monitoring and change detection/alerting. You can try for free at https://www.augsentric.com - built for my own needs, but made it for others if there's interest... feedback welcome
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