alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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https://porchweather.com/ - free app for notifying you when the weather is right for opening your windows. The idea is to save you a few bucks on using air conditioning as well as simply enjoying some fresh air.
Tracks temp, humidity, wind speed, and precip chance and you set the parameters.
Notifications are currently email and web push. SMS is too expensive to run as a free service. I think the next direction is probably an app, as web push support in iOS is not great.
I've been working on IdleQuest for about a year. It's a from-the-ground-up recreation of the 1999 classic, EverQuest. It features a custom real-time MMO server built in Go, a very thoroughly implemented web client, and the classic UI recreated in React. I spent hundreds of hours meticulously scraping, cleaning, and organizing original data and graphics, and there's still a lot of work to do. But I've had a lot of fun with it and have had a lot of people enjoy it so far.
I've had a lot of side projects but I'm finally actually finishing some, and it's sort of useful so that's fun. Wanted to make it easy to see the difference between the Xbox Gamepass tiers, maybe you only need essential or premium - saving a few bucks. With Claude it's been pretty fun to add new features. Since there's no API for Leaving Soon I built a scraper, content gets parsed through an LLM call and matched to games. There's a swipe mechanism to favorite or trash games, so you comparison doesn't get cluttered up by fifa's or cod's. It's just been a fun playground, I host it on https://gamepass.fyi
Learning Lock-Free Data Structures:
- https://parallelthoughts.xyz/2026/03/cas-me-if-you-can-part-...
- https://parallelthoughts.xyz/2026/06/cas-me-if-you-can-part-...
- https://parallelthoughts.xyz/2026/07/cas-me-if-you-can-part-...
Mostly me exploring how to build a Treiber Stack (first in Go, then in C++) -> Figuring out ABA and Use-After-Free in the C++ implementation, and then touching a bit of Hazard Pointers, and ending with a benchmark comparison b/w a mutex and a lock-free version of the stack.
LLMs are a great tool at teaching and explaining. I don't use it to generate code, but it takes away the pain of searching and setting up dependencies, tools, etc. So I can focus only on the concepts and then do the testing.
It is not perfect, but I learned something that I did not know thanks to these techniques. And that too without reading dense and obscure books. I love it.
I'm working on hunting down as much publicly accessible stained glass and mapping it. No exciting libraries or frameworks, but if you know of some great stained glass in your area, please document it!
I'm working on a large open-world terrain-rendering library for threejs's webgpu renderer! https://hello-terrain.kenny.wtf/
At its core, it uses quadtrees, and has affordances for arbitrary topologies. Check out the planet and donut-world demos!!!!
- https://hello-terrain.kenny.wtf/examples/torus - https://hello-terrain.kenny.wtf/examples/cube-sphere - https://hello-terrain.kenny.wtf/examples/raycast-character-c... (a little slow to load~)
In my free time, I'm building an iPad game to help Autistic kids practice real world skills. The game is called Pocketown. https://pocketown.app/
If you're a parent to an autistic child(like me), I'd love to talk to you about this.
If you know anyone who has an autistic child, It would be super helpful if you could tell them about this game.
Thanks!
Two side projects I’m actively working on:
https://openaltfinder.com - To help people discover selfhost-able open source projects.
Been maintaining this for almost a year, and it’s been fun. Keeps me up to date with new OSS.
https://getpinnd.com - A small social network for map makers to created shared lists of places.
Was just a spur of the moment, and ended up building it in little than a week.
Working on the feedback I received for diffy after launching it here and on Peerlist.
diffy makes reviewing GitHub PRs easier, especially the large ones where GitHub starts freezing and memory usage spikes. I'm using Pierre's Diffs and Trees for rendering the diff and file-tree. Under 2MB, you get 50+ themes, split/side-by-side view, comments, review flow, syntax highlighting for 100+ languages and much more.
It was my first time launching a tool publicly, so it's been a great experience. The feedback so far has been incredibly helpful, and I'm using it to keep improving the product.
Working on a macOS terminal because Ghostty is taking too long to add quick-terminal tabs which was my main workflow in iterm2.
All I wanted was cmd+space fullscreen quake-overlay with low input lag so I made it. It fits my workflow exactly so it might be a bit weird for someone else.
You can test it out here: https://getmot.app/
I'm working on a self-hosted MCP server to give your AI agents access to email: https://github.com/churichard/fluxmail-mcp
The main reason is because I wanted a privacy-preserving way to access my email without using ChatGPT or Claude or another hosted email connector. Also, this supports connecting multiple accounts, even multiple accounts from different email providers, with a unified API. And you can use it with any AI agent, even one you build yourself.
It supports Gmail API and IMAP/SMTP right now, with Outlook / Microsoft Graph coming soon.
As an engineering manager and later a director, a regular and often difficult task was assigning ROI to projects that had recognizable but diffuse impact. It's easy to calculate a dollar figure for certain projects by projecting additional conversions or revenue. It's harder for a security or SRE project that doesn't have a direct impact on those things, but can help reduce risk or empower a bunch of other teams to operate more safely or move more quickly.
I have been working on a set of tools and standard formulas that can be applied to these cases and demonstrate a more accurate view of a team's or department's overall ROI. The plan is to open-source the bulk of it, but provide a hosted service for folks who don't want to manage it themselves.
https://github.com/Cyoda/cyoda-go
Business objects as state machines.
The idea is to reduce the number of moving parts and simplify processing architecture when building apps that need to be transactionally rigorous and scalable.
It stems from the patterns we used to successfully apply in banks, which worked really well. I believe it's an effective way to get shit done in a broad class of systems. You just need to first get your head around it.
https://medium.com/@paul_42036/whats-an-entity-database-11f8...
Working on AutoFlow - a chrome extension that lets you record yourself using your app and then automatically generates user guides that you can publish instantly to a user-facing product knowledge base.
It can be tried for free: https://www.runautoflow.com
I'm hosting my own docs on it at: https://www.docs.runautoflow.com
Started in response to challenges I encountered at my last job in setting up and maintaining a full set of user guides for our SaaS product. Target users are SaaS founders, product manager, developers, indiehackers etc.
I'm slowly building an IDE with mentor/skill-level awareness baked in.
I've noticed that juniors and new hires often fall into an impostor-syndrome trap when reading an unfamiliar codebase or reviewing a senior peer's PR. Documentation helps, but it usually runs into the curse of knowledge: it's written by someone who's spent so much time in the code that they've lost sight of what it's like to be new to it.
I've always liked the rubber-ducking process, and mob programming too, so I'm trying to combine both into a modern AI-enhanced form:
- "Duckies" with distinct personalities (really, skills) that each specialize in a particular kind of problem
- "Teachable moments" (working title): small bubbles that surface something novel, tangential, or foundational as you work
- Skill-level detection and a routing model, so the app doesn't overwhelm or annoy you with explanations you don't need
Each duck also runs on a tiered memory model, rather than one flat context window. There's a core memory, essentially the duck's resume, defining what it's actually skilled at. Above that sits a longer-term memory for company standards and code style, and a separate long-term memory scoped to the project itself. Short-term memory then covers whatever task or feature is currently in flight. The idea is that a duck should reason more like a team member with a real employment history than a chatbot that forgets everything between sessions.
It's called Duckies AI (https://www.duckiesai.com). It’s very rough, working locally, but not in a state I’m ready to ship yet. I'm hoping to ship an alpha soon. Turns out there are a LOT of table-stakes features an IDE needs.
I'm building a Go to WASM reactive UI framework called Goowee. Fine grained signals (no VDOM), components run once, SSR and hydration built in. The JS bridge is about 200 lines. Still experimental but I've thought about it thoroughly and have used it for the landing page of the project and some other projects of mine.
I know Go UI frameworks have a long history of not quite getting there. The bet I am making is that WASM is now fast enough, the tooling is mature enough, and the fine grained signal model avoids the VDOM overhead that held earlier attempts back. Would love an honest critique of whether the framework actually solves the problem and whether it's usable for other's development experience.
I have been building few tiny financial apps for analyzing the market, domains and stocks to see if I can use them to make investment decisions.
Adding small tools to help understand specific option strategies, and once executed understand optimal action (exercise early, let it expire, wait)
Personal tools, for my use. No commercial angle in mind.
I released 3 games my friend designed, and built a game framework in WebAssembly for building them. Some 9 or 10 months ago I asked my friend (legendary game designer Mike Elliott) if he wanted to work through his backlog of designs he has that he'd love to see brought to life. I'm very protective of my family life and dedicate a lot of my time to it, and have a normal full time job, and so LLM-agents really enabled being able to make stuff like this happen in a reasonable timeframe just working on and off in my free time.
I started them with ebitengine (Golang) but got somewhat frustrated with its web builds, and so built my own thing for small games that I want to work great on mobile or native PC, but also on web. I call it NanoGame, the host is written in Rust and the games are AssemblyScript. I've ported a number of other small games I had written to it as well, but haven't released any.
Two of the games I released a couple days ago were actually the ebitengine versions, but have partial ports to my framework, and the third I released the version using my stuff.
https://scramblequest.app - ebitengine, word search game where you slay monsters with the words, has a long campaign as well as a daily challenge and unlimited play
https://wordpeek.app - ebitengine, another word search game, this one reveals pieces of a picture and your goal is to guess the picture
https://playsilhouette.app - my own framework, this is a simple matching/hidden object(ish) game, more for kids
I also made a little umbrella site for them at https://playthese.wtf
I'm continuing to work on Personal Finances Python [1], a book that teaches software developers how to track their finances using the Python ecosystem, Double Entry Bookkeeping, and a bunch of plain-text files.
Apart from that, I recently started getting interested in the AT protocol ecosystem, so I built a directory [2] for discovering ATProto alternatives to mainstream/centralized products.
This is my side project turned solo bootstrapped startup that I've been working on over the past 2.5 years. Pastmaps has been solely a US-focused platform since it's initial launch but I'm currently working on launching to the UK and Ireland within the next week. If all goes as planned then I should have a first wave of 30K fully digitized, hi-res, and fully georeferenced 1800s ordnance maps available soon to help folks discover the history all around them.
I'm likely going to need to start building out my own global LiDAR dataset next though. My coverage for the US is quite stellar thanks to the data provided by the USGS' 3DEP program but I'm way out of touch with what's available and possible in the EU. It's gonna be a challenge but I'm excited to dive in.
Video Hub App - 8th year update: browse, search, tag, rate, enjoy your large video collection! https://videohubapp.com/en/ & https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App/
Simplest File Renamer - just ported from Electron (130m install) to Tauri (3mb install) - https://github.com/whyboris/Simplest-File-Renamer
Simple Image Browser - browse your images in style (on PC, Win, Linux, and tablet /phone) https://github.com/whyboris/Simple-Image-Browser
Finished my hobbyist analog computer [1]. (Just need to make a YouTube video, blog about it…)
[1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Anna-Analog-Computer
I'm working on a multiplayer RPG https://grimrain.com - calling it an MMO is quite bold, but the gameplay fits that genre. The game server is designed to be self-hostable too, so it's like Valheim meets OSRS
I am working on native macos editor that can natively read and write to/from apple notes, reminders and calendar - not via applescript - like proper full features support.
and bidirectional markdown sync for all those apple tools
https://filipkunc.com/ - my website with experiments accelerated by Claude
Notable projects/prototypes:
https://filipkunc.com/posts/meshmaker - 3D modeling app ported via Claude to WebGL2
https://filipkunc.com/posts/text-rendering - Wrapper over Slug and Harfbuzz in browser
https://filipkunc.com/posts/gemini-game-art - custom art using Gemini for Heroes 2 (fheroes2 engine fork)
I started toying with perlin vector fields as a level design tool for a game idea, then became more interested in visualizing them than the game they were meant to support. this weekend i realized i think im making a (short) ~game in which you control a dust mote riding air currents, trying to gather enough water to fall back to earth as a raindrop
I'm getting out of my comfort zone (software) to work on a telepresence robot for my D&D games. My main motivator for this is that I'm often the only person remote for these sessions and it's difficult to hear just the DM talk when everyone else is talking. So I thought that having binaural audio would be helpful, and even moreso if the microphones can be aimed at the person talking. So, now I have some 3d printed pieces that fit together with a couple of servos that can turn the entire thing on a lazy susan base and also rotate the head up and down. My soldering skills suck, so I'm currently stalled while I figure out why the PWM controller isn't being seen after I rewired everything (in an attempt to clean up the cable mess). But, I have(had) gotten a Raspberry Pi set up and working with the servos and two microphones and once I get my issues sorted I can start playing more with the software for it.
I am building Promptster - an AI fluency platform that helps level up engineers. Engineering managers invite their teammates and Promptster analyzes the engineers work with ai coding tools (claude code, codex, cursor, copilot). The manager receives a team-aggregate dashboard where they can roll-out certain practices / skill to their whole team. Each IC receives their own dashboard where they can see their fluency statistics, skill usage, context management, and a DORA dashboard.
I'm looking for design partners, if you're interested would love to chat: https://www.promptster.ai. We also have a hiring product: https://www.promptster.ai/hire.
I’m working on [Homestead](https://myhomestead.dev), which is my OSS solution for building personal apps. You can build web-apps and Homestead will handle backend, agent support, authentication, notifications, and a bunch of other stuff.
I’ve used it to build a grocery store list, credit card perk tracker, address book, mini-golf scorecard app, and a bunch more. It’s really helped having all of the “platform” stuff handled for me so I can just focus on the app.
Just published the first version of cardspark_ui [1], a library of polished, themable UI components for TCG apps. Kind of like shadcn for pokémon cards
I worked at a startup [2] building in the space for a few years and it reignited my childhood love for collecting and trading, and turned me on to the software side of the industry.
We're in a little golden age of DIY collecting tools now, but most hobbyists and sellers don't have a design background and get stuck recreating the same primitives (badly).
I spent a lot of time thinking about them, so I'm packaging them up and offering them for free. This first release has the basics (cards, grids, stacks, filters, value charts, detail pages), with more coming soon.
making the internet sql queryable, crawling, cleaning, indexing, embedding many sources into source-aware schemas, solving contention problem with free-floating pricing.
Currently crawling over 1M records/sec. software is still in alpha.
scry.io.
goal is a 10PB NVMe cluster online by November (need funding champions) as a public benefit project, so prosocial researchers and builders and their agents can have low-friction access to running analytical queries over the public internet.
I built a fully locally hosted language learner app. It build language lessons based on a 4 year college curriculum, using a local LLM, Qwen TTS, local STT, and comfyUI image gen. I formulates themed lessons, around 'interesting' stories, generates dialogue, images, audio, quizzes, and pronunciation tests. Each lessons progress is tracked and new lessons are generated daily to reinforce concepts and extend past lesson story lines.
Overall it acts like a 'Choose your own adventure' book, but you learn while doing it. Currently supports Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. Runs on a 4060 16GB card.
Making a little static site to document the AV setup at my church.
Started with just an html page with buttons for shortcuts. Added a few paragraphs and then got tired of writing html. Not many simple wysiwyg desktop html editors surprisingly.
Then discovered Zola, a static site generator that takes md files as content, and adds them to template html files.
Perfect for my little use case. I'm having fun with it :D
I got so frustrated with all of the busywork that was building up in my email inbox that I built something better.
Housecat is the first email inbox that helps you get real work done. Our email connects to the other services you actually use like your Claude, Notion, Slack, CRM and Github and makes it easy to send messages and data between them. So if you need to update the CRM with a new lead, track a Github issue or ask a question of a colleague in Slack, you can do it all from right inside of your inbox. We just launched the email app in private beta.
Check out https://housecat.com/ or join the beta at https://home.housecat.com/welcome
Feedback and thoughts very welcome!
I'm working on a tool to manage developing with Agents for teams, using a UI like a Kanban board and workflows, so the development starts from a given workflow and not from a prompt, the idea being that instead of starting from a prompt/talk with the agent you define the ticket, create a plan, review and then have workflows that cover the implementation -- I find that I have better results than trying to do a chat with the agent for implementing.
I've been full time on it for 4 months already and dogfooding: https://beolis.com -- starting to look for feedback, although I would say it's not where I want to be yet, but getting there.
Building CVD Portal, a free whitelabel Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure platform for EU manufacturers, plus tooling for the incoming Cyber Resilience Act. From September 2026 the CRA obliges manufacturers to file a 24 hour early-warning and 72 hour report to ENISA for actively exploited vulnerabilities.
Recent work is all top-of-funnel. Free no-signup self-assessment and exposure-scan tools that pull in people who don't yet know they have an obligation.
Live demo (no signup): https://demo.cvdportal.com
https://actions.work/listening-post - Listening Post is my macOS multi-scrobbler that works with Last.fm, ListenBrainz, Rocksky, Maloja, Shortcuts, social posting, etc., independent from Spotify or Apple Music. The app can also scrobble shazams (music recognitions) from iPhone and Apple Watch, without the need for an extra app.
Basically, I built the scrobbler of my dreams. I love it to bits! I'm a professional software engineer for ~27 years by now but I only now got around to building that thing. :)
When working on our startup Stacktape, we were struggling a lot to keep our public technical documentation up to date. AI didn't really help - correcting its mistakes was as hard as writing it ourselves. But then, we came up with an idea how we could do it reliably - https://docstube.dev
docstube generates documentation from your codebase, fact-checks every claim against the source, writes it for the people actually reading it, and keeps it in sync as your code changes. What sets it apart from other such tools is its advanced verification engine (validates both deterministically and using AI agents). So you can actually trust the outcome.
It's currently in private alpha, and not ready for testing. Public launch is planned for first half of 08/2026.
I'm working on TableForge[0], it's a browser based, solo or multiplayer, D&D 5e game. TTRPG DMing can be effort-heavy and my friend group constantly has trouble finding enough time to play together let alone set it up. In TableForge, the DM is agentic with access to tools strictly following 5e rules. The DM is responsible for narration and reacting to players but your character sheet, inventory, spells are all real server resources you manage. The DM can interact with them through deterministic 5e-based tools (dice rolls, damage, sheet updates, memory). Players can play in real time or async.
You can provide the DM a premise (or pick one from the library) and it'll flesh out a full campaign story arc. Either way it's a fresh story arc reacting to your actual decisions, every time.
Aggregator for new posts in build threads from 277 old-school DIY forums.
Build threads of people building cars, 4x4s, motorcycles, boats, airplanes, hot rods, musical instruments, etc.
Pulling together lots of solar data trying to promote solar panel installation in the UK.
We've had three back to back heatwaves so far this summer in the UK. THREE!
Hopefully it inspires people to make an informed decision to get the best price and starts generating more questions and leads for solar companies.
I am working on speeding up the review-refine loop of LLM generated artefacts between me and the LLM. i run my coding agent (claude code) in auto / full-permission mode, so it doesn’t stop for accept/reject — by the time it’s done i’ve got a pile of generated code, docs, sometimes ui to review. and the slow part for me is to refine it before push it to remote. i would copy-paste snippets to point at what i wanted changed, screenshot the ui, describe where the problem was in prose, one message at a time. its cumbersome.
so i built prereview to speed up that review-fix loop. you run it in your repo (or point it at a file, a dir, or a running dev server), click what’s wrong: a diff line, a markdown/html block, a region of an image, a box on a live site — and leave a comment. the comments go to a csv, your agent reads it and fixes things and tells you what it did via a comment or even posts suggestions which you can accept or reject. it ships with a claude code skill, but the handoff to llm is just an open csv protocol, so any llm cli can drive it. stuff that might interest people here: single static go binary, fully offline; it reviews docs/images/live ui as well as code; comments re-anchor when the file changes under them. it’s mit and still early but I use it everyday. Its here: https://github.com/livetemplate/prereview
This is a Chrome extension that records lots of details in a usage session. Stuff like network calls, console logs, screenshots and also optionally screenshots and user narration
Tools like this exist, but every one I tried is uploading the session details somewhere in their cloud and try to monetize this.
So I built the version I wanted: free, open source, and local. There is no account, no backend, no telemetry. Sessions live in IndexedDB in your browser and exported as a zip.
What it records:
* Clicks, typing, page changes, network requests and responses, console errors screenshots, video with sound
* Your voice, transcribed and placed next to what you were doing at the time
* Annotations: Arrows and boxes you draw on the page's screenshot
Note: Passwords, auth headers, and tokens are masked at capture time
All events are lined up in a timeline with timestamps
At export you pick a detail level with a live token estimate, so a long session still fits your model's context window.
.
Repo: https://github.com/mohsen1/session-recorder-chrome-extension
My team participates in a World Cup prediction league, I don’t really know much about football teams but figured I’d build a prediction model to try and top the charts. Uses a Poisson distribution model and Monte Carlo simulations. I wrote up the process and the maths as well as generated some inline SVGs (no chart library). Next working on whether Dixon-Coles low scoring correction would have had an impact on the outcome and in which direction. Link to the write up if anyone is interested: https://haywire.blog/posts/i-built-a-robot-instead-of-having...
I'm making a midi clock -> dual tap tempo device (I'm calling it the Twin tap tempo toy, or Tttt). It's based on an Arduino Esplora linked to a dual channel optocoupler / relay.
I'm building it because I have an analogue delay and an an analogue tremolo which each take tap tempo input I want to be able to slave them simultaneously to my DAW (Reaper). I could only find one product (Disaster Area Designs micro.clock) which seems to readily do what I want, and it is hard to find and expensive.
The software side has been pretty easy for me, now I am just troubleshooting the Arduino -> relay connection as currently it is not behaving.
I'll probably sling the code and other docs on Github at some point :)
Input: video of an exercise/workout/dance. Output: single collage image as summary.
Me+team have been working on a large scope problem this past year. We're hardening some of our internal tools, and choose this small-scope problem about a month ago. Results have been encouraging so far, though not yet non-sloppy enough to share. We'll release in about a month.
Going into this, I thought I'd be spending most of my time tuning computer vision. Instead, the majority of the time has been handling codec and ffmpeg behaviour edge cases.
My passion project is an LP-sleeve-sized music streamer built around an ARM compute module, a custom PCB carrier board and an industrial 17" square display.
https://pentaton.app/blog/2026-07-12-introducing-pentaton-lp...
I'm working on TTZ, a sort of, pardon the expression, next-gen terminal protocol.
I wanted a middle ground between web apps and Terminal UI that allows for things like raster images, vector graphics, simple audio support and file transfer; to let me move more apps and workflows from web apps to a lighter experience.
I have an old laptop that I love and is very nice to use, but since it has only 2 GB of RAM, using multiple web apps is out of the question. I live on the terminal and SSH, but it has its own limitations, like spotty support for images, no audio at all, and ReGis (for vector graphics) support is not available in a lot of terminals.
I've recently finished implementing both client and server libraries for multiple languages (with the help of AI), and right now I'm in the process of fully testing and squashing all bugs and inconsistencies. Next, I will port a couple of applications as a proof of concept.
I plan to publish the source code very soon to receive feedback.
I am working on a few things:
* TimeTracker (https://time-tracker.hosgeldin.click/) because I needed a privacy friendly freelancing tool that I needed personally.
* A simple exercise tracker that my wife requested from me (https://daily-menu.hosgeldin.click/) - later I will build a menstruation tracker that is connected to the Daily Menu.
* My magnum opus, "MyApps" (https://myapps.ideasofhakki.com/) - This is no less than an OS running in your browser, equipped with whatever "Apps" written in it. I am building it with GunDB and Svelte and foundationally it will be a web of apps running completely in your device (i.e. offline first), with privacy and data security built-in.
* Cram school management SIS for Turkish education system (https://edusis.hosgeldin.click/)
Flying drones with natural language input instead of remote controllers. Instead of having a human on the control sticks the entire time, what if they could describe the goal they are trying to achieve, and then the drone goes and flies according to the agreed intent? I know traditional drones already have autopilots, but they seem to be static pre-planned routes and could benefit from advancing the capability to be more dynamic and flexible. Eventually I want to combine a live camera stream to run a local vision model that would identify and notify images of interest the drone sees while flying. From there the operator can decide if they want to re-task the mission or adjust as needed. That is the general technology direction, but I hope to expand this into the wildland firefighting vertical. Instead of putting humans up in helicopters and fixed wing aircraft, I hope we can leverage drones instead. I understand not every use case will be able to replace with a drone, but enough of them could be to make it worthwhile in my opinion. Still early days of research and development, but super excited about the tech and combining AI + robots for the common good. Currently a huge fan of the startup Seneca, and hope to help expand the industry or join them.
1) I recently published my latest milestone here: jakedecamp.com