alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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I'm working on a local proxy application locally. I was building a mcp application in my organization and had to make some code changes to match what we wanted on the AWS load balancer. So I thought why not have an application that runs a server, takes some rules and allows users to add applications.
That way, I can expose the server's address on network and have everything work from there. It is still a WIP but I have couple of plans to make it better.
If you want to check it out, take a look at - https://github.com/PulkitBanta/connectio
Building Stripe Atlas for EU Inc. Once approved later this year, it will be in effect as of 2027. It will simplify incorporation of an EU Inc, but requires a mandatory shareholder register, so I built that at https://incorporateineurope.com. Also, national EU Member States will impose national taxes. The goal is to be able to outsource this fully for a fixed price per month, so you don't need to worry about getting an expensive tax consultant anymore.
I’ve been vibe-ish coding a GUI Toolkit in Zig w/ SDL3 and Vulkan for a few months now.
It has lots of features, but I posted a demo of some fun with buttons here: https://x.com/rudedoggtweets/status/2043531378181161357
I think I’m building up an agentic IDE, just haven’t committed yet, but probably will this month.
One cool new thing I’m trying is running models directly w/ Vulkan. I’m about halfway there with my first model, but it’s going better/easier than I anticipated and I’m hoping I can make something very specialized and fast.
Worked on some features at open reader, a local-first PDF TTS reader that highlights the words spoken and uses the excellent local kokoro tts engine.
Got fed up with web tech, it's so slow and clunky, so made my own version in python and qt. I changed the design to be based on a doclayout llm, so you can skip or include things like tables and references easily.
It now works so beautifully fast, it's code is readable and simple, no apis or multiple services. Just a qt app, some local llms that can run on a decent cpu and word-leven highlighting and playback selection.
https://github.com/thepycoder/projectwhy-tts
I can listen to papers now!
As a means to learn about both WebAssembly and Rust, I started writing a WebAssembly binary decoder (i.e. a parser for `.wasm` files) from scratch.
Recently it hit v3 spec conformance. (I'm executing the upstream spec test suite.)
I don't plan to make it a highly-performant decoder for use in production environments, but rather one that can be used for educational purposes, easy to read and/or debugging issues with modules. That's why I decided not to offer a streaming API, and why I'll be focusing on things like good errors, good code docs etc.
P.S. I'm new to the language so any feedback is more than welcome.
I'm working on several things:
1. Better GitHub insights at https://temporiohq.com (public and very early stage). Demo of what the product can do here: https://temporiohq.com/open-source/github/symfony/symfony
2. My art. Mostly at https://instagram.com/marc.in.space or at https://harmonique.one/works
I'm working on ghidra-delinker-extension [1], a relocatable object file exporter for Ghidra. Or in other words, a delinker.
Delinking is the art of stripping program for parts, essentially. The tricky part is recovering and resynthesizing relocation spots through analysis. It is a punishingly hard technique to get right because it requires exacting precision to pull off, as mistakes will corrupt the resulting object files in ways that can be difficult to detect and grueling to debug. Still, I've managed to make it work on multiple architectures and object file formats; a user community built up through word of mouth and it's now actively used in several Windows video game decompilation projects.
Recently I've experimented with Copilot and GPT-5.3 to implement support for multiple major features, like OMF object file format and DWARF debugging symbols generation. The results have been very promising, to the point where I can delegate the brunt of the work to it and stick to architecture design and code review. I've previously learned the hard way that the only way to keep this extension from imploding on itself was with an exhaustive regression test suite and it appears to guardrail the AI very effectively.
Given that I work alone on this in my spare time, I have a finite amount of endurance and context and I was reaching the limits of what I could manage on my own. There's only so much esoterica about ISAs/object file formats/toolchains/platforms that can fit at once in one brain and some features (debugging symbols generation) were simply out of reach. Now, it seems that I can finally avoid burning out on this project, albeit at a fairly high rate of premium requests consumption.
Interestingly enough, I've also experimented with local AI (mostly oss-gpt-20b) and it suffers from complete neural collapse when trying to work on this, probably because it's a genuinely difficult topic even for humans.
I’m building HobbyBoard - A private(self-hosted) visual library(A Pinterest alternative).
Mostly for myself to use for my hobby. Sharing with everyone because I find it genuinely useful.
Yes, it is coded with assistance of LLMs, but I care for the details and it is not vibe-coded in hours.
https://hobbyboard.aravindh.net/
GitHub: https://github.com/aravindhsampath/hobbyboard
Demo (resets every hour): https://demo.hobbyboard.aravindh.net/
Almost ready to do a show HN :-)
I’m working on https://github.com/true-async/php-async and planning to bring it to a production-ready state. It would be great to build a fast HTTP server.
I'm working on some free financial planning tools at: https://financialwebtools.com/
I found that most tools online are either overly simplistic, non-responsive, and/or require you to hand over a bunch of contact information before getting results. I built snappy web tools for retirement planning, budgeting, debt paydown, house hacking, etc. that show you quickly and visually how changing variables like interest rates, savings rates, inflation, etc. impact your financial positioning.
I've been building a Thunderbird extension that gives me the mail view I want.
So far it's mostly just configuring hotkeys to tag messages, and settings to hide or fold messages by tag, but I can trivially add functions to parse common messages, send things to my todo list, etc. It's great how easily programmable this is. I threw together a "summarize message with Gemma4 on Ollama", and it wasn't useful, but was a quick and easy experiment.
Thunderbird extensions are just Javascript using the Thunderbird API, and Claude knows the API, so it's a super-low barrier to get started on your own personal extension.
Synchronous P2P file sharing tool with post-quantum encryption and virtual mount point (https://keibisoft.com/tools/keibidrop.html)
Both peers mount a virtual FUSE folder. Files shared by one side appear in the other's folder in real time. You can open, copy, and browse your peer's files as if they were local. Files go directly between devices over encrypted gRPC. (by default it tries over LAN, then direct IPV6, then uses a data relay).
The hardest part has been making git repos work through the FUSE mount between peers.
(Been developing the tool for 12 months now, very close to a full release)
Building Cabreza Command (https://cabreza.com/product). Most critical infrastructure orgs manage their OT security program across SharePoint folders, Excel trackers, and slide decks that get updated once a year. The actual state of the program lives in someone’s head.
Command replaces that with a platform that maps to their real sites, real assets, and real operational constraints, so they can actually run the program, not just document it.
Consulting firms use it to deliver more engagements with the same team. Asset owners use it to keep the program alive between engagements, or run one themselves.
I've spent several years developing an ad-free website with a few dozen solitaire/puzzle games:
I am currently rewriting+testing the engine and about to add ~400 games to my platform in a few weeks.
Mirror Immich - macOS Photos exporter for Immich with full metadata: https://flowlogix.com/mirror-immich.html
Apache Shiro PMC chair (trying to get financial support for the project) https://shiro.apache.org
Jakarta EE Components: https://github.com/flowlogix/flowlogix and it's starter: https://start.flowlogix.com
Working on all of these for the last 15 years, looking for more exposure.
I've been updating my game Blackshift (https://store.steampowered.com/app/741110/Blackshift/).
It released in 2020 but I've never stopped adding things and tweaking it. Recently I added mirrors that spin when you shoot them, called "flip-flops" because they work a bit like flip-flops from computing.
I'm also tinkering with some new game ideas, because I'd like to make something popular that can sustain me financially, and the gaming market, as difficult as it is, does still seem to value human soul and creativity.
Hi HN,
I’m working on OurCodeLab, a Singapore-based startup. After 11+ years in DevSecOps, I noticed a lot of local SMEs are either overpaying for simple sites or using insecure, bloated templates.
I’m trying to solve this by building high-quality, lightweight landing pages at the most affordable rate possible. Right now, I’m running a promotion: we’ll build your landing page (up to 2 pages) for free if we handle your domain hosting.
I craft each site individually to ensure they meet modern web and cyber standards—no copy-paste layouts. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the model or any feedback on the tech stack.
If you're an SME or know one that needs a hand, reach out at [email protected] for a non-obligatory chat.
Orange Words. My hobby project, a hacker news search system. It was initially created by hand and now I use AI augmented development. It's a good low risk environment for experimenting.
I'm building a chaotic, physics-driven first-person woodcutting game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4521770/Drunk_Woodcutter/
I was splitting wood in real life, and even though it's a chore, it's oddly satisfying work, too. Every hit feels different, sounds different, every piece of wood splits in different ways. I want to catch that vibe and put a good dose of comedy on top.
It's using realtime mesh cutting for the splitting, and I recorded 48 different chopping sounds for it :D
I’m building CurateKit.com - a lightweight content curation tool.
I always have growing lists of short texts, facts, and links that I wanted to host on a standalone site rather than burying them in a notes app. The workflow is simple: a browser extension to clip links with remarks, which then feeds into a public-facing list.
I’ve also added a "Substack-lite" feature. Instead of long-form writing, it lets you send simple roundup email digests (e.g., "Top 5 links this week") to opt-in subscribers.
My personal blog (wenbin.org) is currently powered by the tool.
CurateKit.com is in private beta while I'm fine-tuning a few things now, but I’m opening up invites to the waitlist over the next few days if anyone wants to give it a try.
AnomalyArmor (http://anomalyarmor.ai) is a data observability platform. I got tired of being priced out of existing tools and hand-configuring per-table thresholds for every new dashboard. An AI agent sets up schema-drift, freshness, and row-count monitoring on Snowflake/Databricks in minutes, and you can ask natural-language questions when something breaks.
$5/table, about half what incumbents charge. Happy to trade a 30-day Professional trial code for honest feedback. Reply here or [email protected].
Greetings from Munich. I’m building Joy, a CLI for product management. Your backlog is plain text in your git repo. joy add "fix the login bug", done. AI works through the same workflow as humans: identities, capabilities, cost budgets, every action in the git log. Still early. I use Joy to build Joy. Joy docs: https://joyint.com/en/joy/docs Ecosystem and trust model: https://joyint.com/en/docs/architecture Feedback welcome.
I’m working on (and inside) https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw. It started as “my own OpenClaw” and quickly became an entire workspace to develop and test stuff in. It currently runs my homelab, my Obsidian vault, my blog static generator, a lot of my ARM low level stuff, and after some M365 hackery, my personal mail and calendar as well, all properly sandboxed. The home page at https://taoofmac.com has a list of things I’ve been doing with it over the past few weeks.
I made a Slack reader/inbox that allows customizable categories / inboxes, message categorization with rules and/or Claude (optional), and fast keyboard navigation:
Also put together a directory of 31k+ personal websites, tagged with design keywords so they're searchable. As someone who loves personal sites, I think it's one of the more comprehensive list of indie / personal sites on the web:
Taking on a 'slow' software project with the kind of attention to quality (inside and out) that I had pre-AI. It's a tool I'll use myself, LLM-related, but not any kind of radical idea; it's main value is in careful UX design/efficiency, engineering quality, and aesthetics.
I've been shooting for the moon with one experimental idea after another (like many others) testing out LLM capabilities as they develop, for at least 2yrs now.
I'm still very excited about how these new tools are changing the nature of software development work, but it's easy to get into this frenetic mode with it, and I think the antidote is along the lines of 'slowing down'.
I'm working with Claude Code to create complete programming systems in languages other than English. Not just wrappers around an English syntax;these are based on an English original but are complete scripting languages in their own right, with documentation, tutorial and programmer's playground. Each variant has its own language pack and they share a common compiler and runtime. The best of all is they are extremely AI-friendly. I've started with Italian and I'm looking for collaborators to work on others. I'd like to do Polish and Bulgarian but any are possible. See https://allspeak.ai.
I created an intelligent AI form-filling tool, hope to help finance customs officers and research workers who are troubled by complicated spreadsheets, enabling them to have more time for thinking and creative work.But this project is still in its early stages and hasn't been discovered by everyone yet.I hope it can be known and loved by more users, and if everyone has used it, I would appreciate more feedback, I'm really looking forward to it：https://www.gosnapfill.cn/landing
Mostly playing around with AI agents session logs.
Lately I’ve been having LLMs implement multiple analysis methods on my session transcripts, trying to surface and identify patterns.
It’s been interesting. It took quite a bit of nudging, but Claude applied techniques I didn’t expect, from disciplines I wouldn’t have thought of.
If it works out, I’d like to turn into a sort of daemon that locally runs analysis on the sessions of users, with a privacy-preserving approach (think federated machine learning).
Would be interesting to see what patterns appear at scale, and have those confirmed or rebutted across thousands of transcripts corpuses. No reason Anthropic & OpenAI should be the only ones to benefit from that; those are our interactions after all.
Android app for audiobookshelf with Admin functionality (Manage users, backups, logs, retc)
Building a file processing pipeline that will take a list of pdf/ppt/mp4 docs associated with an event/talk, group them by talk, and turn them into a nice-looking webpage for searching and exploring
Ajqvue v3.6.
A 20yr old Java project that I have been working that I now call a Personal Database Desktop Application. The new release in comming in a week or two supporting PostgreSQL 18, MariaDB 12, SQLite, H2, Derby, and HyperSQL.
This morning published a design manifesto for the Co-Wiki — a wiki-based warm storage layer that sits between LLM context windows and vector DBs, designed for human-agent co-authorship. The architecture solves chat hell, RAG chunking failures, and the missing second brain infrastructure in one brutally simple design. I'm a long-time SW architect who moved to epistemology. I’m too busy to go back to building — the design is complete, documented, and open. First to ship owns the category.
https://gist.github.com/paulshomo/69cf99e3185fa7ad0f50fc0e38...
Working on tooling to help make working with agents in parallel easier, with minimal tools/no deps - https://github.com/andrewhathaway/ag.sh I don’t want to manually manage worktrees, tmux sessions, branches but want to remain in the terminal.
Also recently built a home energy cost/consumption display for the TRMNL - https://andrewhathaway.net/blog/ambient-cost-display-for-oct...
I made Claude build me a web app to come up with anagrams: https://github.com/egeozcan/anagramci
I'm now having immense fun trying to come up with anagrams to whole sentences in Turkish.
I guess you could even automate finding anagrams (there are even web sites which allow you to do so), but Turkish agglutination makes it so much fun, and you can make really creative ones manually.
Once upon a time I even had made a tumblr to share what I found: https://sacmanagram.tumblr.com/ (also Turkish).
I've been building an HLS streaming engine with Elixir. It takes care of asset segmentation, transcoding, and streaming. It supports regular VOD playout, as well as live streaming by dynamically building HLS playlists from a variety of sources, including transcoded VOD assets and other HLS livestreams. It has a basic scheduling system and I'm integrating a lua engine to allow dynamic scheduling using user-provided scripts.
I'm hoping to continue extending it until it can act as a full internet TV delivery stack like Pluto or Roku TV. It still needs to be behind a CDN for efficient delivery but basically any CDN would work.
Still (in fits and starts) working toward a Bitemporal SQLite based (SaaS, for now) software architecture, because of an obsession with this notion of "Sovereign Software". Any SaaS I build should never lock in customer data, for example.
Current state of work: The implementation of the core data model is wrong. I need to throw it away and redo it from scratch.
Whiplash status: WTF, Time. y u move so fast?
This thread made me---forced me---to accept that it's been well over a year of the agony and ecstasy of solo software construction. Or maybe 2026 is moving way too freaking fast. Or it's good to be obsessive I guess.
Possibly the most insane browser game of all time? Big if true.
I will launch on hackernews soon-ish.
But the game mechanic itself is novel, and the infrastructure is novel.
To develop the game, I built my own custom game engine from scratch using html canvas for rendering. Zero libraries. If you see some of my other submissions, I’ve built a “game engine” in C too - a raycaster, but it was just a proof of concept.
Been “working” on this game + engine for 5-6 years now, this is my tenth and final attempt at building it. Eventually settled on building it in the browser.
I’m very excited to launch soon.
Hey y'all, couple of projects to show off:
https://ragbandit.com - improve the retrieval stage of your RAG systems by tuning your document processing pipeline
https://smolinvoiceagent - an agent that process invoices, you make corrections, the agent learns your ways
https://vendor-simple-central.streamlit.app/ - this is just a POC, but it's a system to process and extract insights from data from amazon's vendor central
This post is really wholesome :)
Like an idiot, I wrote a workflow dev library from scratch. (https://github.com/workglow-dev/workglow). Each task has either static or dynamic input, output, and config json schemas. Which makes creating a UI for it a little easier.
And I do have a basic UI at https://workglow.dev/ (where you can run the workflow, though if you use AI models, the models will run in the browser -- if you want to run GGUF models, please signup for the desktop app waitlist).
Trove - a really simple web app where I can shove some files without having to really think about configuring anything
https://agjmills.github.io/trove/
Go, docker, bit of alpine js
I am working on a way to edit google docs using markdown. Many tools exist to convert google docs to markdown and to import markdown to google docs - but none of them make in place edits. The core logic is to convert the google docs to md. The user then edits the md. Then diff the markdown files, and apply the changes back to the source google docs. This way, features not represented in markdown do not get overwritten.
Lots of effort has gone into testing against real world docs. Its beta quality right now.
Built/building godom, a framework that lets me build local apps in Go, with the browser serving as a dumb view layer. I don't hate JavaScript or React, but my primary motivation was to eliminate NPM as much as possible. https://github.com/anupshinde/godom I used AI to create the first POC, and once it was proven, it was improved, and AI handled a lot of grunt work where it could. The framework was built primarily to solve my pain points
And building Fractiz.com, a customizable pre-coded backtests platform.
A terminal manager for Claude Code: https://github.com/gi11es/deckard
The main goal is to reduce cognitive load managing many Claude Code and terminal sessions in parallel, while keeping things simple with a design focused on peripheral awareness of session status. And making everything resumable. The Claude session explorer also supports forking past sessions mid-conversation.
Overall this is designed to support the Claude-first software development workflows I've developed over the past year.
Hey Team, working on a project that makes it easier to track time on Mac.
- There's a desktop app tracking the title bar and time you spend in each app. - You can use this 100% free, or sync this back to https://heygopher.ai to match the time up with your active projects. - if you use HeyGopher you can manage your time, team, projects, quotes and invoices.
This pairs pretty well with my normal project https://goodsign.io which is a Docusign alternative that is pay as you go. No subscription.
Building mobile app to cure my socials scrolling addiction - instead of videos you scroll live flights. https://planefeed.app/
https://github.com/thisisharsh7/modron-discord-bot
I am managing a discord community with over 1k+ members I found some people would regularly put spam links or message on all the channels and this been repetitive it's just take time deleting them one by one or reposting them into the specific channel. So I build a discord bot that would make this lot easier it catches the spam message post them into actual channel and also delete spam links. It's open source and easy to setup.
I'm working on a calorie & macro tracker called FitBee [1]. Tracking my food has been tremendously helpful in terms of improving my health, but it's always been a PITA. The focus of FitBee is food quality & speed. Tracking your food is something you have to do multiple times a day, so I tried to make it as frictionless as possible. The app is built 100% with Swift & SwiftUI.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fitbee-calorie-macro-counter/i...
Repo: https://github.com/jbonatakis/pginbox
Makes reading/searching the Postgres mailing lists easier.
I’m polling a Fastmail inbox to nearly instantly receive and ingest messages. Anyone can browse without an account, but registered users can follow threads to be notified of new messages, threads in which your registered email is found are auto-followed, and there are some QOL settings.
Search is pretty naive right now (keyword on subjects) but improved search is the next big thing on my list.
I'm working on https://opal.cloudflavor.io It can run gitlab pipelines locally and assist you using AI to troubleshoot your pipelines. I daily drive it now and it has seen hundreds or runs, but it's still in active development. Building in a void, isn't much fun, so if anyone can use it and give me some feedback, i'd really appreciate it. l.e.: It's not released yet, but it works really well on MacOS as an MCP using the Apple container cli.
I am building a dev envirnmont to use Claude Code (or other agentic coding tools) for electronics development. I give Claude access to my lab equipment like my scope. That way I can let claude programm an MCU and at the same time verify that it creates the right output. Also, it can correlate spice simulations with the actual measurements. Which is often tedious to do "manuall" and verify how good my spice simulations are. I am going to record a longer demo, but here is very short video I made about it: https://lucasgerads.com/blog/lecroy-mcp-tutorial/