Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)

Reading is a System! https://reading-is-a-system.vercel.app/

I've been helping people achieve their reading goals by hosting workshops at libraries and helping adults become more intentional about their reading goals and how to achieve them.

My clean comedy newsletter. Find the latest essay here: https://yelluwcomedy.substack.com/p/the-greatest-invention-e...

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I've been working on a web application for learning 倉頡輸法 https://demo.cangjieworkbook.com/ , no login required for the demo version (Cangjie Input method). It's a visual way of decomposing Chinese characters. It has a high initial learning curve so I've come up with a method based on the ways QWERTY is taught. I've added a few more texts and lessons in the last month. The most time consuming part is adding annotations to characters to show how they are composed, but it is worth doing. I already have a couple of users and they have given me helpful feedback. If you are interested, check it out and let me know how it goes.

I've been working with coding agents for a few years and became increasingly frustrated by the way it pushes you towards a solution. So I built rubberduck (https://userubberduck.com/) - a way to control exactly what solution the agent ends up creating by mimicking a design conversation with a competent colleague where the agent explores the solution space together and forces you to make decisions. The final output is a consolidated design document of all the decisions you made. At least that was how it began. I've since built an implementation plan step where it figures out how to translate the design to code and execution where it actually builds it. All of this happens in a properly isolated environment (using gVisor under the hood). There are more features I want to build so on it goes I suppose.

Still working away at https://whistle-enterprise.com.

Have spent the last month giving the UI a bit of a modernisation refresh and simplifying/improving some elements based on early user feedback. There's also been a boat load of performance improvements in the dirarisation and document generation pipeline.

Feel free to download the prerelease version (its unsigned) here - https://downloads.blazingbanana.com/whistle-enterprise/unsta...

I am playing around with creating a public domain repository for ebooks. https://babelnexus.com There are a few differences. It uses core collection theory and is selective. The name comes from the short story The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Borges used Hexagonal Galleries for his library. I realized you could put anything into hexagonal galleries. It did not have to be books composed of random letters. I also saw that you could use different levels to group kinds of knowledge using the spiral staircase concept. I have added other concepts like reading trails and cortex maps. I learned that the hexagonal concept of Borges library matches with knowledge graphs with both nodes and edges. There is a lot of experimentation in what I am doing. It is an art project, a bit of philosophizing, a bit on the public domain and many other things.

I'm working on Flex (https://flexenv.com/)

I am speaking to initial customers and from my initial pain at my day job it was going to be a way to be "Lovable for your existing product" . But it also seems like it might turn into "internal cloud to host dashboards non-technical people are making with Claude".

I'd love to talk to anyone that's in Product or Ops or Sales or Account Management or Customer Success who'd either like to make changes to their existing product without the need for a developer. Or maybe they have thrown something together with Claude and have no idea how to "get it into production".

Same as last month for once - optimizing how well agents can work with a new language [1]. I've been able to 2-3x success rate and drop total tokens for complex tasks significantly (though the initial syntax dump is rough - need to do some ablation there to get it down).

The best part has been that I think it's significantly improved things for humans too; it's weirdly satisfying to be able to measure improved ergonomics. Also, since a big pitch/theory was that the language should be ideal for agents as a result of the original nice things for humans it was designed for, it's a relief to be able actually measure a concrete lift.

[1] https://trilogydata.dev/ - SQL with types, composable functions of arbitrary complexity, and a native semantic layer.

I've been working on Contextify: https://contextify.sh

Makes it easy to use Claude Code or Codex interchangeably across multiple computers. Personal editions are free, I have a hosted commercial cloud (workgroups share AI history) and commercial self-hosted option available.

It has macOS and Linux clients and I released a guide for setting up the source-available, self-hosted cloud option this week: https://contextify.sh/docs/self-hosted/

I am thinking about the other AI cli environments and providing support for those as well.

Building out a housing heatmap of England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland publish housing data differently, working on getting them integrated!

https://housepricedashboard.co.uk

recently, i have been pondering around reddit and its api, because i was missing an "idea validator" which will harness the power of reddit and its content, so it gave me the idea to build https://signalseek.cc/

(SignalSeek watches the subreddits your buyers already hang out in, scores what it finds, and tells you if the demand is real enough to build on. When it is, it drafts the replies so you can jump into the conversation right away)

But there is so many things to do, more projects i work on this month at https://www.craftengineer.com/projects/

https://o11y.jobs

A curated job board for DevOps, SRE, and Observability (o11y) jobs.

Working to become the specialist jobs board for infrastructure jobs.

I'm working on https://smalldocs.org, https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs, anonymised usage analytics https://smalldocs.org/analytics

Jumping into this "handcrafted with love by a small indie shop" landscape of commercial Mac apps, with Mojave Paint, my Photoshop and Affinity Photo competitor. https://mojavepaint.app

I'm working on a website directory (intrasti.com), not really sure what the direction is other than I'd like to celebrate the best of the internet in a way that isn't pay to win, manipulative, or anything like that.

It's a slow business and engineering catalyst that I'm making progress with behind the scenes each day. Suffice to say I'm taking the scenic route!

Currently working on a unified website submission flow for submissions and topic creations (topics are collections of websites) and after that I'll be looking into overhauling the whole site focusing on accessibility and how I can make that a great experience.

I got tired of Codex/Claude not being able to write good UI reliably, so I made a TypeScript library toolbox to help with that.

https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/MachinaLayout.JS

Pretty much just SwiftUI-like layout/style in TypeScript with a bunch of utility tools from other languages I like, like Rust's payload enums, table helpers, LINQ-like queries, state management, etc. It's framework neutral so it works with React, React Native, and Vue right now. Everything is just plain TypeScript that compiles to the DOM, so no HTML or CSS needed for most normal web apps, they can all be written in plain .ts or tsx files.

gleam fhir types and client https://fhir.hexdocs.pm/

it is relatively new and untested irl, but interesting as gleam is very nice for fhir in some ways:

-fhir choice types imo were originally designed for some kind of object oriented polymorphism, but are nicer as sum types

-cardinality works nicely with Option for 0..1 and List for 0..*, the only ugly part is if you need primitive extensions and suddenly there are a ton of Option fields

-works with whatever http client you need for erlang or js target, meaning can use on server or in browser

hl7v2 is much uglier than fhir but commonly used eg by state immunization registries, so I am considering gleam types that have message/segment structure, but leave each field as String (as opposed to gleam fhir which uses Bool or whatever for primitive types)

after that not sure some kind of gpl toy emr probably a stripped down version of openemr that uses gleam/lustre and a fhir server instead of php, but this is definitely the mysterious step 3 ??? as there are a lot of features and integrations that take a lot of work or use different formats (hl7v2, ccda...)

I am working on Stylify. It is an AI based word formatter. It uses local ai models so that nothing leaves the computer. Most of the time is spent on formatting word-docs rather than writing the actual content, that's the reason I thought of building one. You can see it here in action https://stylifyword.com

Working on a drink pacing app: https://www.trypound.app/

I lost a lot of weight on GLP-1s, and on top of that my tastes changed. Instead of IPAs, I like cocktails now, and the transition made me feel like my own internal clock was out of whack.

Also, also: these hard seltzers are totally crushable, waayyyy too easy to drink fast. So this app helps with that, too.

A JVM written in go at https://www.jacobin.org

https://easel.games

A game programming language that makes your game multiplayer automatically. This month I’ve been developing the tutorials so it’s easier to learn.

I'm building a low friction logging/metrics platform that allows for easy visibility into your apps. The idea was to make something that isn't really geared towards enterprise and can be used by anyone. I started about 6 months ago and have been testing extensively so far with an internal beta with a few colleagues/friends.

https://logdot.io

Many things:

- BrowserBox just landed WebAuthn (passkeys) - for now just macOS clients: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

- This website is served entirely from a 200Kb binary: https://200kb.freelang.dev

- An open SSH server with a TUI web browser: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com

- All the government's 300K+ pages of UFO files released so far: https://hypergrid.systems/war.gov-ufo-viewer/microfilm5?fram...

And more

What if your web apps e2e tests ran in production through actual user sessions? Know exactly what browser session cohorts are having issues. Open source, https://github.com/Faultsense/faultsense-agent

I'm managing my GitHub repository. I created a really great project - better than even Mem0's product. It can make AI companies' products smarter and is also awesome for auditors, lawyers, and so on. But I have no way of letting people know about it

A local, static-image wallpaper manager (kinda like Wallpaper Engine but for directories of images) Made it for myself because windows wallpaper/background management is horrible lol, avail on linux though too

https://github.com/DefrimBinakaj/WallMod

Give me feature suggestions!

I'm working on MedAngle, the world's first Agentic AI Super App for medical and dental school. You can think of it as literally everything one would need from day one of admission till graduation day as a doctor.

I myself am the first medical doctor and full stack engineer in the history of my country (250 million), graduated as a doctor at age 25, and we have over 100+ users [all of which are medical/dental students and doctors], 10s of billions of seconds studying smarter, hundreds of millions of questions solved, and more.

Our Super App has subsystems including MedGPT, MedAgent, Spaci (our own take on spaced repetition) and much more.

We're bootstrapped, and continuing to scale. If you are in medical school or know someone who is, please reach out!

https://medangle.com

Slowly improving the UX on my SQL review/approval tool: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet

Also finally closed the first real customer on it recently!

I want to get through a large chunk of the open issues the next few weeks and then spend some time building agentic capabilities for it. I believe a central place to configure database access for your dev team without having to share passwords and with sensible review policies should also help e.g. if claude needs to access production data to validate a premise.

Still have to figure out the right UX though not sure the agent should have the exact same review requirements that a human does. Maybe it needs to be configurable separately

I’m working on https://gnooma.com, a lightweight tool for reducing knowledge drift in teams.

It introduces a new document type called a gnoom: a living document that knows who has read it. When the document changes, read confirmations reset, so you can see who is up to date.

I built it because important decisions kept getting buried in chats and then discussed all over again.

It’s a free beta and doesn’t require an email. Curious if anyone else has this problem. I’d also appreciate any feedback on Gnooma.

Recently got a typewriter and I'm practicing on "long form" writing. Basically an offline blog.

I continue to take photos with film, developing and scanning at home.

I'm working on hexora, a library that detects malicious Python code using static analysis and machine learning.

Recently, I've added a simple ML model to filter out false positives. In the last month, I found and flagged more than 40 malicious Python packages.

Unlike the LLM approach, my library is not susceptible to prompt injection and deobfuscates Python code. Where LLMs see "obfuscated code, potentially harmful", my library decodes it and sees what's happening inside.

https://github.com/rushter/hexora

I built a world cup tracker into an LED matrix display, and now I'm working on making it useful after the world cup

https://www.schuetzler.net/blog/world-cup-tracker/

I keep hacking on my Markdown-based text editors at https://saturn9.studio/

I went on a side quest to strip out ProseMirror and markdown-it and implement a custom stack instead. I open sourced both the parser and editor (https://saturn9.studio/technology/):

* Markoffset is a fast, plugin-based, incremental Markdown parser: https://github.com/saturn9studio/markoffset

* Scribeframe is a text editor engine: https://github.com/saturn9studio/scribeframe

https://github.com/airdaydev/airday

Underpinning my current app is an e2ee local-first sync engine, basically it is a traditional client-server sync (encrypted logs + snapshots sequenced with integers). It sends bundles of Loro CRDT operations. I wrapped the client side in WASM to power the web app and the CLI and have started a swift wrapper to port to native iOS. Bundle size is 3MB/1.2MB g-zipped so pretty happy with it. I've realised that web encryption is kind of bs (at least not as "WE CAN NEVER ACCESS YOUR DATA" as some vendors state) if someone else is distributing the app.

Over the last week I have done a lot of performance work & data remodeling - CRDTs are interesting because you can let data fall through the gaps if you're not careful.

With the help of AI & LLMs I restarted working on some of my older side projects. I updated the code and did a landing page for Printable Mockups (a free, open-source drag-and-drop tool for creating device accurate wireframes and sketchpads that you can export as PDFs, print, and sketch on by hand) https://github.com/alexadam/printable-mockups I plan to add more features soon.

Modern coding agents code blind; they can't see the consequences of their actions. I built a cheap solution that lets them see your browser.

It's called peek-cli: https://github.com/puffinsoft/peek-cli

I just launched my digital media shelf on my personal website, a catalog of my favorite books, movies, records, podcasts, and more. Lots of fun to build despite some false starts and fits:

https://dmschulman.com/shelf/

https://talkingtomachines.xyz/ Talking to Machines is an interactive AI course. Each concept be it agents or context window can be experienced and experimented with using fun little widgets designed to help you learn by doing. I've really tried to make the AI course I wish existed. Getting into as much nuance as possible and as much hands-on fun as possible. I would love some feedback.

I'm converting an AI-powered Finance app I built for my wife and I into a more feature-rich product: https://www.heyalistair.com

I am vibecoding a elixir/phoenix agent dashboard to manually & closely review the coding agent plans and code patches for my day job. I am at a stage where I can I use portal to work on the portal and my day job.

I have not yet figured out a way to live reload the dashboard itself after a feature addition or a bug fix. :-(

Local voice dictation and text editing for Mac. We'd tried most of the available options but wanted something that runs completely locally, is fast and has a good UX.

https://epilude.com

A single-user blogging CMS/server that acts as static site generator while having a GUI for publishing/reading and that speaks some indie web protocols. I'm implementing webmentions (vouch, private mentions, salmentions) and maybe indie auth. It's mostly to solve some annoyances I have with Hugo (and SSGs in general) and to try new things. I want it to be something between bearblog and miniflux.

I'm also writing it in java, which is quite uncommon for this type of software, but I hope it'll be way more stable in the long run (in the sense of security flaws and maintenance) than projects made in python and js.

Improving my free/hobby AI Benchmarks website: https://aibenchy.com

And, as always, working on my main self-hosted analytics platform: https://www.uxwizz.com/

I’m working on https://checkpost.dev, a lightweight and easy-to-use osquery manager. It is open source, easy to self-host, and ships as a single binary. It only requires osquery to be installed on the endpoints. Checkpost is readonly and doesn't make any changes on the enrolled hosts.

It can run adhoc or scheduled queries and send the results to ClickHouse, or store them locally in Parquet files and use DuckDB to browse the results. It can also initiate YARA scans and collect the results. It also supports policy evaluation and alerting.

I've been working on Wattle (https://wattle.app) for the past six months or so.

It started out in life as a bunch of post-it notes for friends who were watering my plants while I was on holiday, which evolved into a long text message, a Google Doc, a static site, a simple CMS, then Wattle. The more I look around, it seems like there are lots of use cases, so I'm having trouble with my positioning.

"Digital guidebooks for vacation rentals, home swaps, sitters, carers, and more."

The MVP was released last week :)

My wife shipped a booking platform called BookingMaven, https://bookingmaven.com and I'm just here hoping she'll get a few customers.

https://vask.dev - websockets - Pusher alternative. It's Pusher compatible, but way cheaper and powered by Cloudflare.

https://tailstats.com - display data on almost any device (ios,android,macos).I've build this for myself so I don't have to build dashboards or mini-one-purpose-apps and clog menubar/workspace. It also works with AI agents via API and MCP so agents can create interactive cards.

I'm working on https://GovWeave.com/.

It's like a BuiltWith for Government. I am tracking all UK government spend and building a picture of software and rising/falling trends of various products in the government.

I worked as a government supplier and found it hard to find out what tech/solutions are in place without inside knowledge. My idea is that by opening the data, I can help more suppliers compete and foster innovation.

I'm not a big fan of the encroachment of AI into Adobe's apps, so I'm using AI to build a replacement for those apps (a small web-based photo organizer and editor, just the tiny subset of the Lightroom features I need for my workflow)