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 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!
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.
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
https://getvalara.com - PDF appraisal document in, grounded appraisal review out in 5-10 minutes to aid in risk management for lending institutions and individual appraisal reviewers.
We use landing.ai to parse the PDF, as well as useworkflow.dev to durably perform other work such as rendering PDF pages for citations, and coordinating a few lightweight agents and deterministic checks that flag for inconsistencies, rule violations, bias, verify appraiser credentials, etc. etc. Everything is grounded in the input document so it makes it pretty fast and easy. We’re going to market soon and have an approval sign up gate currently. Plenty of new features and more rigorous checks planned to bring us to and exceed parity with competition and human reviewers.
There’s plenty of margin for cost and latency versus manual human review, which takes an hour or more and costs $100 or more.
I've been working on an open source cat-themed virtual pet running on an ESP32: https://github.com/moonbench/catode32
It was inspired by tamagotchis of yesteryear (and my two cats). It uses a small common monochrome SSD1306 display with 128x64 pixels of resolution.
All of the pixel art is my own. And the cat features a bunch of different animated poses and behaviors, as well as different environments. And there are minigames (a chrome dino clone - but with a cat!, a breakout clone, a random maze generator, a tic-tac-toe game, and I plan to add more.)
I'm currently working on tweaking the stats so that they go up and down over time in a realistic way and encourage the player to feed and interact with the pet to keep stats from going too low. Then I plan on adding some wireless features, like having the pet scan WiFi names to determine if its home or traveling, or using ESP-NOW to let pets communicate with each other when they're nearby.
I made a reddit post with a video of it a few weeks ago [1] and have various prototypes of artwork for these little screens on my blog [2].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1r8i1vx/progress_o...
I'm working on arranging talks and poster presentations at various conferences/seminars to spread knowledge of my latest academic paper, "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points". In the paper, among other things, I argue that (we should define species in such a way that) for any organism in any species, either the species is made up almost entirely of descendants of that organism, or else the species is made up almost entirely of non-descendants of that organism. This is a funny property because most people who hear about it fall into one of two camps, those who say it is obviously true, and those who say it is obviously false!
The paper in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05274 (published in the Journal of Mathematical Biology)
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.
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.
I'm building Fillvisa: Turboxtax for Immigration [1]
It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.
So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled.
I found out SimpleCitizen(YC S16) offers a DIY plan for $529 [2]
So, a free (and local-only) version might be a good alternative
[1] https://fillvisa.com/demo [2] https://www.simplecitizen.com/pricing/
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
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/ :)
I've been celebrating five years of working on OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com/) by adding more features for teams that build software:
- 2FA, PassKey, and password-based login for folks that hate magic links
- Moved my entire API from GraphQL to REST so I can fully dogfood the API I offer
- Added an audit log as standard on all plans
- Built a terraform provider (https://github.com/OnlineOrNot/terraform-provider-onlineorno...), and a way to download existing config into terraform files
- Started iterating on a CLI (https://github.com/OnlineOrNot/onlineornot)
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've been working on an app to track my son's 1000 books before kindergarten. I've also added QOL features like barcode scanning for adding books to the library and creating a rotation based on the last time the book was read and whether I actually enjoy reading it. (The books I don't like make it through the rotation just with less frequency.)
This was an excuse to ship a mobile app for the first time and get familiar with supabase.
After these last few bugs are fixed, its ready for a semi-public TestFlight with our friends who have kids.
I wrote this little web app over the weekend, the idea was to make you think about your next purchase by introducing a 48 hour countdown. In 48 hours you come back and decide if you really need this product, or if it was just an impulse buy.
All data lives in your browser (IndexDB) - https://buyitlater.vercel.app
I'm working on a native code backtester that compiles pinescript strategies, and (hopefully) runs them super fast. Also a parameter optimiser with different scoring methods.
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'm porting Jetpack Compose to Rust. The Rust would be the future default ai language. Having the familiar well designed by Google UI API will help Android developers to be in a loop. https://github.com/samoylenkodmitry/Cranpose
Working on Functional Universe (FU), a formal framework for modeling physical reality as functional state evolution, integrating sequential composition with simultaneous aggregation.
Building a tool to make test reports useful - https://gaffer.sh
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:
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 ;)
This weekend I spent a lot of time on an Agent Registry idea I wanted to try out. The basic idea is that you put your Agent code in a Docker image, run the container with a few specific labels, and the system detects the Container coming online, grabs the AgentCard, and stores it in the Registry. The Registry then has (in the current version) a REST interface for searching Agents and performing other operations.
But once all the low level operations are done, my plan is to implement an A2A Agent as the sole Agent listed in the AgentCard at $SERVER_ROOT/.well-known/agent-card.json, which is itself an "AgentListerAgent". So you can send messages to that Agent to receive details about all the registered Agents. Keeps everything pure A2A and works around the point that (at least in the current version) A2A doesn't have any direct support for the notion of putting multiple Agents on the same server (without using different ports). There are proposals out there to modify the spec to support that kind of scenario directly, but for my money, just having an AgentListerAgent as the "root" Agent should work fine.
Next steps will include automatically defining routes in a proxy server (APISIX?) to route traffic to the Agent container. And I think I'll probably add support for Agents beyond just A2A based Agents.
And of course the basic idea could be extended to all sorts of scenarios. Also, right now this is all based on Docker, using the Docker system events mechanism, but I think I'll want to support Kubernetes as well. So plenty of work to do...
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.
ChatShell (https://github.com/chatshellapp/chatshell-desktop) — open-source desktop AI agent built with Tauri 2 + Rust. Ships with 9 built-in tools (web search, bash, file read/write, grep, etc.) so the AI can take real actions from the first conversation. No plugins, no config. Supports 40+ providers, MCP with OAuth, and a skills system. Apache 2.0.
Today working on adding chat history search (FTS5) and OpenRouter Nano Banana 2 support.
Mostly art projects:
- VR version of Surface Browser (3d internet browser): https://boxc.net/surfacebrowser.html
- Crowd Strike: faster self-driving: an exhibition where the visitors help autonomous drones target a different visitor each minute with lasers
and also Wingman: a dating app secretary (privacy focus, runs locally on your computer for any dating app that has a web site. It tells you if favourites have messaged you): https://boxc.net/wingman_app.png I'll open source this one if interest.
I built Collider, A wrap-based package and dependency manager for Meson.
I needed a way to use and push my own artifacts in Meson projects. WrapDB is fine for upstream deps, but I wanted to publish my packages and depend on them with proper versioning and a lockfile, without hand-editing wrap files.
Collider builds on Meson’s wrap system: you declare deps in collider.json, run collider lock for reproducible installs, and push your projects as wraps to a local or HTTP repo. It’s compatible with WrapDB, so existing workflows still work: you just get a clear way to use and push your own stuff. Apache-2.0.
https://talimio.com/ Generate fully personalized courses from a prompt. Fully interactive.
New features shipped last month:
- Adaptive practice: LLM generates and grades questions in real-time, then uses Item Response Theory (IRT) to estimate your ability and schedule the optimal next question. Replaces flashcards; especially for math and topics where each question needs to be fresh even when covering the same concept. - Interactive math graphs (JSXGraph) that are gradable - Single-image Docker deployment for easy self-hosting
Open source: https://github.com/SamDc73/Talimio
A site for anti patterns in online discourse.
Example: https://odap.knrdd.com/patterns/strawman-disclaimer
Need to gather more patterns then create tooling around making it easier to use.
The goal is to raise the quality of comments/posts in forums where the intent is productive discussion or persuasion.
Training a tiny LLM for fun using Rust/Candle - I constantly tweak stuff and keep track of results in a spreadsheet and work on generating a bigger corpus with LLMs. It's a project for fun, so I don't care about finding actual human generated text, I'd rather craft data in the format I want using LLMs - Probably not the best practice, but I can sleep properly despite doing that.
My favorite output so far is that I asked it what life was and in a random stroke of genius, it answered plainly: "It is.".
It's able to answer simple questions where the answer is in the question with up to 75% accuracy. Example success: 'The car was red. Q: What was red? ' |> 'the car' - Example failure: 'The stars twinkled at night. Q: What twinkled at night? ' |> 'the night'.
So nothing crazy, but I'm learning and having fun. My current corpus is ~17mb of stories, generated encyclopedia content, json examples, etc. JSON content is new from this weekend and the model is pretty bad at it so far, but I'm curious to see if I can get it somewhere interesting in the next few weeks.
Numenon: Sandbox knowledge base management tool for teams.
website: https://about.numenon.app
I've joined this year's Flame Game Jam which uses the Flame Engine built on top of Flutter. This is my first game jam and I really hope I manage to submit the game before the deadline on Sunday.
Here's a link to the jam if anyone else is interested, and I recommend joining the Discord server too because the organizers and participants are really great and fun to hang around! - https://itch.io/jam/flame-game-jam-2026
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 a TUI-based agent orchestrator called Tenex: https://github.com/Mockapapella/tenex
It's gone a long way to solve the "review" bottleneck people have been experiencing (though admittedly it doesn't fix all of it), and I'm in the process of adding support for Mac and Windows (WSL for now, native some other time).
Some of the features I've had for a while, like multi-project agent worktrees, have been added as a part of the Codex App, so it's good to see that this practice is proliferating because it makes it so much easier to manage the clusterf** that is managing 20+ agents at once without it.
I'm feeling the itch to have this working on mobile as well so I might prioritize that, and I'm planning to have a meta-agent that can talk to Tenex over some kind of API via tool calls so you can say things like "In project 2, spawn 5 agents, 2 codex, 2 claude, 1 kimi, use 5.2 and 5.4 for codex, use Opus for the claudes, and once kimi is finished launch 10 review agents on its code".
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!
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.
Published a post that contains all of the blog posts by other people that I shared in my monthly mail-letter: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/other-cool-blog-posts-2026
Also moving to Sveltia as my CMS (Astro markdown blog), after exploring multiple other options. Changed the structure of my Obsidian vault, will write about that also.
I’m also still working on a few projects:
- https://game.tolearnkorean.com/
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.
Coffee Roaster Aggregation ETL using fastapi, nextjs, bs4 etc etc. It's been fun, just finished up the oauth for discord that pairs nicely with the info required to make Discord dm notifications function. attempting to charge 6$ for the instant notifications, but doubt many people will be interested. up to 75 roasters and all of them are checked every 10 mins for new products.
Considering reusing the repo as a framework for other industries if this project ever gains any traction. Also was considering adding a goofy rag discord bot to the server just because i love tossing in a rag layer everywhere lately, and feel like i fall a bit short on my filters for stuff like origin/flavor notes and all that junk. Semantic search with solid chunk strategies might create a better solution than if i did get all the filters working as well as possible.
* Remote viewing stock market trading programs - One version is with a buddy who shows me a colored board depending on the outcome for the week. The other is a solo version using a Swift app on Mac. We're just out of buggy beta (the analog version was laughably more difficult to get clean. We'll see if either works and which one wins.
* Telephone handset for my mobile phone with side talk.
* First draft of a book / workbook on Work Flow. Outcrop of the work flow consulting I do, stuff I've learned, and so on.
* Short film script - trying to convince a local actor to play the lead before we lose the rainy season here - otherwise we'll need special effects or just wait until the fall.
* Polishing firmware, OSX, and iOS suite for a wearable neuromodulator unit. Deadline in a week!
* Nmemonic community and app - been poking at this for years and finally had a breakthrough on the UI. My first app to release in the wild, so pretty exciting.
I started working on Rio[0], a modern TypeScript HTTP client for Node.js 24+, Deno and Bun. It's built on the native `fetch` API and fully type-safe from request to response. It's still very much a work in progress but I'm working towards an alternative to fetch/Axios/ky I wish I had.
Building CiteLLM, an API that extracts structured data from PDFs and returns exact source locations for every field.
There's also a widget so you can add click-to-verify to your own app in a few lines of code.
Click any value, jump straight to the highlighted source in the PDF.
Demo: https://citellm.com/demo
i'm working on this two projects: https://github.com/shrec/Exorcist and https://github.com/shrec/UltrafastSecp256k1
icloudpd-rs - Fast iCloud Photos downloader, Rust alternative to icloudpd
The original Python icloudpd is looking for a new maintainer. I’ve been building a ground-up Rust replacement with parallel downloads, SQLite state tracking, and resumable transfers. 5x faster downloads in benchmarks, single binary, Docker and Homebrew ready.
We are developing a single-passenger autonomous vehicle, capable of traveling over 1000 miles, performing fully automated vertical takeoff, cruise, and landing.
Info (not recent) available here: https://awz.us/docs
NotifyButton - A simple script on the frontend of your site, a complete SaaS platform on the backend for DSA compliance.
If you operate in the EU and want to avoid heavy fines, this is for you. Once integrated, it allows users to report legal content issues directly to you, which you can then manage via a dedicated dashboard following official EU procedures. Without such a system, users are much more likely to file complaints through official state or EU channels, which can trigger investigations.
I'm working on an alternative solution to Ansible and Puppet, trying to mix the best of both world: The pull-based aspect of Puppet, by having an agent running on nodes, and the simplicity of Ansible, by writing playbooks and roles.
It's called Peekl, and is available on Github. Tho it's still in what I'd called "alpha". Lot of new features to come!
Current working on two new products:
* https://sprout.vision/ - AI generated Go-To-Market Strategy for launching your next venture. I have a Tech background with limited GTM experience, so I experimented with AI to learn about different strategies and decided to turn it into a simple product that will generate a comprehensive plan (500+ pages) to help you launch your next venture. Try it out, would love to hear your feedback, use the HN50 promo code for 50% off your order.
* https://pubdb.com/ - Reviving a 10 year old project, it’s meant to make research publications more accessible to mere mortals with the help of AI. I have lots of ideas I want to try out here but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Currently focused on nailing down the basics with an OCR indexing pipeline and generating AI summaries.
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.
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.