alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
Working on figuring out onboarding for my coding tool. For someone who has been baked into building I'm struggling to put myself into the position of a new user just landing on the website. What features do I highlight without overwhelming them?
Any advice in this arena would be greatly appreciated.
Game Boy app to explore 4-bit synthesis and "modular" sequencing, smth similar to https://roberthenke.com/technology/inside8032av.html but for Game Boy instead of Commodore PC
https://leftium.github.io/nimble.css
I made a classless CSS library, then migrated most of my projects from PicoCSS.
I also made a quick logo generator: https://logo.leftium.com/logo
A fun project I'm working on: Chipmunkify. You upload a song and it isolates the vocals to give you a 'chipmunk' version while keeping the instrumentals untouched.
Have fun trying it and let me know what you think!
Month 4 of building a data management platform called Seaquel [1].
Months 1-3 were about building a desktop client. Now I'm working on a server binary customers can optionally self-host to share dashboards publicly and run workflow automations.
I wanted to make JSON/YAML configuration language for my projects. And i wanted a strict specification. This is want i created, now with specification and 100% coverage, reference implementation it’s just one prompt to reimplement parser in another language.
I built a database of 2,345 failed startups — causes of death, funding raised, years active. $209B burned in total.
Still deciding whether to ship it as a product. gauging interest here first.
Not working on it yet but planning some projects with the kids: - A candy classifier with Arduino for Halloween (the goal is to have trick-or-treaters choose their preferred candy and have the machine sift it out automatically) - A board game based on the idea of fog-of-war, details undecided - An app to reduce screen time
A complex text shaping and rendering library in Javascript and no_std Rust that supports Ligatures, Bidi, Arabic, indic, CJK, Khmer, etc and is super small and memory efficient. JS version is <25 KB gripped, Rust version is aimed at approx. 130 KB compiled size. My plan is to show a demo of it running on an esp32 soon.
Inspired by Ralph loop and bash scripts, I created my own version of it where I focus on finding code issues and auditing my codebase. It runs N iterations after mapping the whole code.
https://github.com/BVCampos/operator
It has been working quite well.
Bid-Euchre.com (https://bid-euchre.com/) - If you have ever played Euchre this is a bid based way to determine suit. A lot of people in my home town play it. Just hit 5k completed games.
One of my current clients is an EV charging firm and realised the tech side is such a mess, though of doing a Parse/Firebase/Stripe for EV chargers and networks.
So people don't need to lose braincells over this till it actually matters.
I built an Android app for nurse-midwives in Zanzibar to get medical advice. It's running Gemma 4 model on device, completely offline. I just released the first beta version. Feedbacks are welcome :)
Trying to improve my fine tuned whisper through more custom dataset. I can still see it not understanding certain things currectly.
I struggled finding mock exams when I was studying for the Einburgerungstest in Germany so i built a super simple site to offer folks some mock exams to practice with https://www.einburgerungstestpractice.com
I am building a coding agent like claude code. Lambda agent, getting to learn a lot like how to control your context window how to conserve tokens. Check it out here https://GitHub.com/ayusrjn/lambda
Claude-profiles https://github.com/alimoeeny/claude-profiles an easy way to backup and switch your claude-code profile (the ~/.claude directory)
I am working on building Bloomberry, an alternative to Builtwith for finding companies thar use a specific SaaS product.
Example: Companies that use Github: https://bloomberry.com/data/github-enterprise/
Working on a new pomodoro mini timer that uses native PIP for an always on top display, and can be installed as a PWA.
Most that I have used don't play nice with trying to get a tiny window size in the corner of my monitor.
I've been working on Mixreel, a video/motion graphics editor with integrated support for 3D visualization. I'm working with some business clients to produce instructional videos for construction, industrial fabrications, etc.
After going to a bunch of bachelor parties over the past few years, and planning a few myself - I built an AI-powered bachelor/bachelorette planning tool to help make it a lot easier then it actually is
Check it out at https://bartyai.com
https://kulikuli.app/translate I'm building a web version of my app, which has better quality than Google/DeepL and also translates the result in reversed for users to double check.
I am building ExamineIP - Free network security toolkit
Collection of 15 diagnostic tools (VPN leak test, DNS checker, port scanner, etc.) built after a WiFi security incident. All client-side, no data collection.
Feedback welcome!
Grit Garden: https://grit.garden (https://github.com/pravj/wordle-garden)
Recently shipped this personal art project that turns daily Wordle attempts into gritty / struggle-filled stories, kinda similar to the emotional arc of the Wordle game play.
You can upload your own Wordle game screenshot to generate one for yourself.
In addition to completing what was once in the idea list, I got to learn about
- Prompt fine-tuning: Models are sharp enough to complete Wordle games quicker than human average scores, so I had to dump that down and get the average down.
- Karpathy’s Autoresearch: Experimented with auto-research for prompt fine-tuning, in addition to manual prompts.
- Vision models: While leading labs have multimodal models with quality visual reasoning, the benchmarks are still quite different for a simple Wordle analysis (reading what letters were yellow/gray/green); I also noticed labs/companies with separate vision models but their APIs lag significantly compared to what’s possible in developer experience.
- Video generation: For the last few days, I have been experimenting with automated video generation for the project's social handles. I'm still struggling with the right hooks that reduce the skip rates, but it's fun.
---
Additionally, working on an Apple Watch app similar to my Mac app on the same lines, [Plug That In](https://plugthat.in), i.e., notify before the device goes too low on battery, but with a twist.
I'm productizing the unique Git workflow work I do - this may be the last week I'm ever available for consulting engagements, so head to https://merge-base.com now if you're interested!
First post after lurking for.. 15 years.
I've been working towards a new platform that mixes fantasy sports with stock market mechanics. My first public project, I just launched a few week ago. No gambling, free to play (despite the .bet):
I’ve been building the next generation of scam detection products; isthisspam.org. So far, the homepage took has been getting mildly successful, trying to build offline detection with iOS app now capable of offline detection, working on new ideas to market the tool.
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-security-module/adjwZAevNaDgui...
Patch for linux kernel adding support for enforcing Landlock rulesets from eBPF. In RFC stage now.
I'm building https://personalfinanceisboring.com (PFIB) to help people like me who accidentally made personal finance an obsessive hobby, and would like to return to other hobbies and better uses of their time.
An alternate ad network (tied to an ad blocker) that optimizes for the most useful ads instead of the most immediately profitable ones. https://github.com/Chrisjayhenningsen/Eudaimonia
Bare bones IM program inspired by bitmessage(.org): https://github.com/iljah/p2pIM Uses proof of work for spam protection. Consists of server and command line client written in python.
Building a video game adaptation of Pass The Pigs (the "dice" game where "dice" are plastic pigs).
Early preview here: https://piggy-toss.netlify.app/
The goal is to play with friends, we love this game.
2 products released (merge conflicts/codeowners) and now working on workflow automation. Basically trying to use Cloudflare Workers for a different paradigm of executing workflows instead of the traditional n8n VM.
A premium podcast listening experience… with no ads, no tracking, and no subscription required. Full support for iOS/CarPlay/WatchOS including Podcast 2.0 features. Open source: https://yourpods.app/
hivemunk (hivemunk.com): hive management for beekeepers.
Data engineer, 20 yrs software / 10 in ag-tech. Picked up beekeeping and was surprised how much structured data a single inspection produces, and how nowhere useful exists to put it. It's a gloved, veiled, honey-and-propolis-covered activity. Tapping through a mobile UI mid-inspection is not ideal, and good luck getting your phone back clean.
The core is a virtual hive model. It's all mutable state: boxes, frames, components, queens, and colonies you rearrange to mirror the physical yard. Treatments, feedings, and inspections layer on top.
This summer I'm shipping voice-driven inspections: narrate what you see frame by frame, STT + LLM pipeline extracts structured data and maps it to your hive model.
If you have beekeeping friends, I'd love it if you could send it along <3. I won't claim it has every feature under the sun, but I work on it every day and have a strong roadmap ahead.
Also open to critiques. Thanks!
I’m working on a mobile app called Dream Chimp.
It’s a preset editor for UAFX Dream ‘65 pedal that I decided to build because I was so frustrated with the stock app.
If you’re a Dream ‘65 owner please check it out!
Adding unit tests to a game for Game Boy Advance.
https://medium.com/@lmy/adding-unit-tests-to-a-game-for-the-...
Self-hostable slack for humans and openclaws - iphone, mac, web, and soon android. Very important for me to get close to feature parity with team chat apps. https://github.com/bogpad/meepachat
An open pricing framework for quant finance based on QuantLib:
I'm building a workspace for thinking with AI. Think what Cursor did for coding, but for rigorous thinking.
I believe the direction toward persistent, proactive, remembers-everything AI is the wrong one for thinking. AI should be used as a selectively invoked sparring partner.
Two things, one is a container control plane inspired in the efforts of the Nextcloud AIO people called LOOM (yeah, like the Lucas Arts game), the other is a full blow NixOS deployment system (from the USB or network directly) for my company so we can deploy the computers for each colleague faster.
Releasing version 9.0 of my self-hosted analytics app[0]. I will finally add an in-app cron job editor, so you can easily schedule clean-up jobs, data retention settings, newsletters/summaries, etc.
We're building a python library that compiles revenue = price * volume into =B4*B5 in Excel — because the final user always asks for Excel in the end. https://modeleon.ai/
Same thing we work on every night, pinky
I'm building this mostly to scratch my own itch
It's a newsfeed constructed from 130k substack RSS feeds but limited to the past 24h.
Its helping me discover writers other than just what the algorithm gives me.
Porting a giant monolithic JSF app from JSF/Wildfly to two separate apps, a react frontend and a REST Quarkus backend.
First time doing this sort of thing with agents. So far it seems ok?
If it works out it will really help us scale and improve a legacy application that so many depend on at the moment. Wish me luck!
Making rent as an open source developer.
Shamelessly trying to attract new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my crap HTML skills.
Let's see; I keep so many projects going concurrently that I have to go look through my git history :)
I'm presenting at LinuxFest this year, so I'm currently in the process of wrapping up my slides for that. They're turning out ok; I have had to resist the urge to have AI write them for me, since they has a tendency to make everything feel soulless.
I maintain a fork of the main MiSTer executable [1] because of some disagreements with how Sorg runs the project and because I want to reduce the risk of saves being corrupted. Now I'm trying to come up with an automated way to monkey-patch the upstream changes so I can apply my changes on top. I have been experimenting with putting something like Claude in a Github Actions to handle this, but I haven't nailed down anything I'm super happy with.
I have been on a quest to find the source code for the old Digital Research Concurrent DOS. It's taken a few turns and I've been blogging about it: https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/03-March/The-Q...
Because I have to accept the fact that I may be unsuccessful with finding the source to Concurrent DOS, I have been learning how to do reverse engineering with Ghidra if I ever want to see even a facsimile of the source code. Once I get competent enough with that I want to play with the MCP for Ghidra.
I have grown tired of people committing AI generated code, so I've been working on a library (written by my own fingers) that allows you to "assume" certain functions exist and have AI generate it for you, and use aggressive memoization to avoid it being too expensive. I'm working out the kinks and trying to make it more modular and flexible and deterministic, but I think it would be kind of neat. It's Opus doing the real work, of course, but for example I told it to `assume` that there existed a symbolic differentiator function that took in a string and did a derivative with respect to x, and then another function that could take in a function that took in a string of a polynomial and made a regular function out of this; basically assuming a very light version of Mathematica.
I think that's basically it for now.
[1] https://github.com/Tombert/Main_MiSSus