alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
Comments
I just hacked together https://www.firstbranch.ai in a few days, conversational intelligence for congress hearings.
I was talking about healthcare price transparency with a friend. He pointed me to a hearing in congress and I was surprised by how much I learned from one of the witnesses' testimonies so I built a "serendipity engine" for congress hearings.
I am working on a CLI tool that will build a static web page for a small brick and mortar store. The software is FOSS and could be useful for the small store that has a lot of foot traffic, but is under served by many of the big tech offerings. The idea is that foot traffic can be increased by using a QR code placed on a banner outside the store directing them to the website that can display sales and types of items that the store offers. Pleases check out the build log for details of my progress.
A modern game engine that can play the Classic Fallout 1/2 games on modern systems (including mac, linux, iOS, Android). Hoping to bring these games to a wider audience.
I'm working to make one of the biggest free and privacy-friendly tool websites. A lot of them are things I want and need all the time.
A visually grounded AI tutoring application: https://knowable.ca Been working full-time on it for a few months, I'm trying to make the concept of an AI tutor better than just a chatbox.
https://pendragon.foxtrotcommunications.net/
A legit attempt at making an AI financial advisor for everyday Americans. Most Americans can't afford a human CFP which can cost thousands of dollars a year. We offer a great AI driven alternative for less than $300/yr.
For the last couple of months I was working daily, and intensely, on Meltdown. The project started in 2024, but I retook it recently and improved/extended it a lot.
This is an AI Harness + Platform, made in Python and Tkinter.
It has a lot of advanced features, arguments, commands, shortcuts.
Lots of widgets and the markdown parser were done from scratch.
It has a powerful API to create conversational sessions interactively.
You can learn about it on a blog post I made:
https://github.com/madprops/blog/blob/main/docs/meltdown/mel...
Today I resumed working on my open source browser extension to export chats from Microsoft Teams web client, after a two week long mandatory break due to busy dayjob activities. Now tackling the issues opened by users. Reached to more than 75000 users in less than a year, which makes me happy that its a useful thing.
Website is: https://teamschatexporter.com/
A few things actually.
I’ve been working up reimplementations of Nikoli puzzles to host on my personal blog, the goal is to work through the maths and then explain how it’s relevant or helps create a fun games. Nikoli is the magazine that helped create sudoku and made it famous - they have a lot of other pen and paper puzzles that are really fun to play.
I’ve also got two other open source tools I’ve built to help me work daily:
https://tajd.github.io/cofferdam/ which is a rust based cli tool I wrote to parse the ast of codebase and enforce architectural preferences - eg don’t reimplement design system for components down to DRY
https://tajd.github.io/projektor/ Is an ai native project management tool where I can plan work on the train and then have my agents pick it up autonomously. Bootstrapped it quickly but then have been incrementally adding more functionality to it. It’s like self hosted jira on cloudflare but much faster and has more agentic development tools. I added tooling around being able to autonomously work through epics, manage quality and fix identified bugs - https://tajd.github.io/projektor/agents/playbooks/epic-goal/. The goal being deliver useful features and then to ultimately surface the number of bugs identified by agents and users so that I can see the health of the project and figure out if I need to write more code myself or improve feature descriptions to reduce discovered bugs. I don’t think this is new at all but it’s reliable and done well, I hope.
I redesigned my portfolio page (https://yaman.pro) and my Hacker News Reader hn30 (https://hn30.eu) and added a new feature to it since I subscribed to Cursor Pro recently.
I‘m still working on it and adding features to my other side-project which is a local prompt library (https://bearprompt.com).
I am retired, so this may not be of general interest: I am working on my fourth AI coding agent, this one written in Racket Scheme: https://github.com/mark-watson/racket-coding-agent
I don't necessarily suggest that anyone besides myself use it. I open-sourced it to perhaps give other people ideas, but it is tailored to just my own needs (e.g., hardwired to use deepseek-v4-flash-0731 via FireWorks.ai; supports just the tools I need).
A prolog to c compiler
I got depressed from my grievance with my abusive mother and started reading the compiler dragon book along with artificial intelligence by steve.
I've been following my curiosity to see if I can find "ten (or twenty) year projects", as part of my "second life"; the first was before turning 40-ish, the second is now.
I think I have found three, and they will keep me quite busy for a while.
Read/Think: Bioelectric networks as the software plane of morphology
cf. Allen Center / Levin labs / TAME
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10346 and other work from that fecund lab is ever-fascinating. I have been following their work for five or six years. Much of that informed a giant essay I wrote prompted by an essay contest on Consciousness: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/consciousness-lives-in-a-ded...
Read/Think/Research/Write: How to write a Hard SciFi novel that does not have magic technology genius, and certainly not magic ET showing up to save the day?
A spec fic author friend is on my case about it, because he said "why the hell haven't you written your novel yet?" and I foolishly said "yeah why not? okay let me do it", and now I'm stuck in an honour pact. Write or die trying.
Side-quest of $DayJob: Um, how does the weather even work (metrology)?
Because that's what happens when you're helping an applied sciences team run weather forecasting models, like WRF (pronounced "Worf", which I absolutely love :D). My day-to-day is packer and FreeBSD and shell scripts, but I have to also understand enough about the domain to be somewhat dangerous.
And also... why isn't everybody using FreeBSD + ZFS for all their server workloads?
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x-posted from my earlier question [0] that David offered to fold into this regular Ask HN he runs... Thanks again; this is cool :)
I got laid off on the recent job cut wave industry wide, so I just started working on cars, it's been really fun to know deeper how something with higher physical consequences work, today I was looking on another old beat up car from marketplace, might work on my father's F150 next week, and got back to the industry this monday with another Tech Consultant job, so, been having a nice time
Blorp. https://blorp-lang.org
It takes inspiration from Python, Rust, Go, and functional programming. It's oriented toward readability, safety, and speed.
I'm finishing up the journey of completely self-hosting. Then I'll be tidying it up for an initial release.
A newspaper for kids. Printed on real newspaper and delivered monthly. Full of puzzles, math challenges, nature facts, science experiments, outdoor scavenger hunts, and even custom card/board games for families to play. https://thecuriositytimes.com/
Limiting screen time has been a primary goal in my household and has been going well. But I wanted something that would take my kids hours every month that
1. isn’t on a screen 2. educational 3. fun
A graph-based code editor https://miralume.dev
I've been a hobbyist game dev for years; nothing published.
Over the time I've built a massive collection of assets from various stores and stuff I've built.
The solutions for managing assets seem to be largely in house tools studio build themselves and don't share.
So I'm working on a digital asset management system that plays nicely with the tools I use; unreal engine, unity, and blender.
I don't have anything public yet, but hopefully for September or October edition of this post!
I’m working on The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton, a chess app for Apple platforms:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/mqfhpmHY
This work is motivated for my lifelong love for chess, my passion for Apple hardware and software (not as much as before, sadly), and my frustration of not having an Apple-native app comparable to ChessBase. My disappointment with the trend of recent macOS apps using Electron or other cross-platform frameworks instead of the native toolkits is also a factor. I miss the days when Apple users demanded more from macOS apps.
My aim with MBCA is to create a serious chess app that satisfies the needs of everyone from club players to professionals, with a native Apple look and feel and iCloud sync. Currently the app supports the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. I hope to make a visionOS port later. There is still a lot of work to do, but I’m having a lot of fun developing it, and I already find the current version very useful for my chess training.
The name, in case you wonder, is from a short story by Gene Wolfe, my favorite science fiction author.
A lot of Claude plugins.
https://github.com/mrieck/demoday-claude-plugin - create demo videos for your projects using Claude
https://github.com/mrieck/overboard-plugin - CTO assistant, PM helper Claude plugin
https://plugmyplugin.com - Weekly voting contest and directory for Claude Plugins similar to Devhunt/ProductHunt
Working on a 5 min multiplayer dungeon https://escapethe.app which the kids say “is actually fun”.
And taking a second crack at a feature flags with https://quonfig.com because I seem to be unable to put this problem down and finally feel like I have the right git native and agent first approach.
Building FabShack, a white-label instant quoting engine that gives sheet metal fabricators SendCutSend/OshCut-level capabilities without needing an in-house software development team.
I’m building cloud managed self improving agents at https://sanbox.cloud.
Each instance gets its own persistent file system, root SSH access and a web terminal. The goal is to let an agent build skills with experience rather than start from scratch on every task.
I started with Hermes as the first harness and now exploring Prime Agent. You can use it for a personal assistant, use it to build LLM wiki, connect it as part of an agent team, or run any coding agent on the cloud with dangerously skip permissions.
I’m also working towards a more general-purpose agent setup that can connect to channels such as email, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Buzz.
i'm working on a mobile app which spins up https://sprites.dev/ sandboxes, allows you to log in with your coding agent cli/subscription (claude code and codex currently supported), connect other services (github, vercel) and run+manage your coding agents in a convenient chat interface
it's for people who dont own a home server, don't like to keep their laptops open and working, don't want to trust on magical stuff openclaw does and instead would like to work with the usual harness they are working with day-to-day, don't want to be vendor-locked (crush/opencode/glm-5.2 and other models/providers support to come) but want to have a way to execute ideas while being away from their laptops
the demo is available on testflight and going to be released to play market soon as well
it's very alpha version but it's functional
lmk if anyone would like to test
I'm building Duolingo for blackjack card counting. It's a Progressive Web App so you can install, learn, and practice cross-platform, and it is designed to combine a mastery-styled lesson plan (e.g. you can't move onto until you demonstrate mastery of the current lesson) along with exercises and tools for keeping the skills sharp. A complete novice should be able to pick it up and become a profitable blackjack player.
It also contains tools for scouting casinos, logging sessions, calculating effective profit-per-hour based on table rules, and other things a professional would need.
I'm in the process of polishing it up, and am aiming to launch Fall 2026. Current pricing plan is to be ~$10-15 per month for the pro tools, but provide the offline capabilities, lesson plan, and learning tools completely free without ads or weird gimmicks like a limited number of lessons or practice per day.
Research on an AI super agent that manages memory, knowledge, skills, tools, other agents, channels, management and orchestration, and auto update its own code at the end of every session if needed
Previous agents developed:
I’m building FitBee, a fast, ad-free, no-nonsense calorie and macro tracker for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The app is built with Swift and SwiftUI, with a Python backend. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fitbee-calorie-macro-counter/i...
I'm remaking an old MMORPG Canaan Online to be fully native web client, learn a lot like reverse engineering the client server protocol, a bit of network programming, and how to render that sweet nostalgic 2D sprite with WebGL. Currently had somewhat playable server and the client going, got lot of help from AI to learn the domain I quite not understand.
My family has gotten into camping the past couple years. I was navigating around the Texas State Parks' website and got annoyed trying to find the right combination of amenities, trails, etc.
I decided to make my own version of the state parks website which surfaces precisely what you need for all parks in one place and make it filterable. I've been adding states and features to it for the last month or so and I'm up to 20 states and 1252 parks.
I try to keep each parks' fire bans, alerts, and events updated on a cadence.
Nearing the release of my first game ever - Silent Shark, a tactical, map-based WW2 submarine sim releasing this Wednesday on PC, Mac, and Linux! I'm at about 17,000 wishlists on Steam and I'm having such a blast. Very impressed with Steam so far.
I designed Silent Shark to be the sweet spot of minimalism meeting realism of dials and procedures (like a simulated Torpedo Data Computer) that scratches my simmer geek itch without being impossible to write the game myself.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705650/Silent_Shark/
Browser demo: https://silentshark.app/alpha
Tritium, the legal IDE in pure Rust: https://tritium.legal
We're working on our WASM API this month, as AI-native startup law firms are looking to use it on their web platforms: https://tritium.legal/wasm
I've been hacking away on some scripts to clean up saved ChatGPT transcripts (surprisingly annoying because of how the app's JavaScript works, and I discovered too late that some of them were incomplete; but I have workarounds now) and convert them to a fairly minimal Markdown with some custom restructuring. This is mainly so I can share them on my blog and discuss some experiences of using the LLM; but also I'm extracting some code samples as the basis of some small projects I've had in mind for years but could never motivate myself to start (at least partly from an inability to choose).
In particular: an image viewer with a small suite of extra functionality; and a browser extension for cleaning up URLs and then bookmarking them in a more organized way that I might actually use meaningfully.
I am working on another iOS to help me learn Japanese, this time for explaining grammar. Put in a Japanese sentence, tap Analyze and you get grammar detected, highlighted, explained. There is a public testflight if anyone is interested https://setsumeiapp.kulman.sk/
Two open-source initiatives:
1. https://preseason.ai Basically a benchmarking platform that measures how the top LLMs recommend devtools when prompted to build different types of web apps.
2. https://widen.dev A native Mac desktop Postgres GUI with text-to-SQL. You can even use the LLM that already comes installed in your MacOS.
Enjoying an Upper Midwest summer and:
Six months ago I began writing and publishing one essay a month. Last month my wife and I hiked Fuego Volcano in Guatamela for our 20th anniversary. Here is my essay on that: A Country Within Myself - https://www.metanoia-research.com/dispatch-005-a-country-wit... .
I've pivoted to game dev because I'm burned out on AI dev tools. I started working on a hexpunk skirmish roguelite deckbuilder (working name is Hexborne) where you place units and structures on a hex scenario map to build a base and eliminate your opponent. Imagine a combination of X-Com 2 and Starcraft using cards, set in a world reminiscent of Arcane but 10,000 years in their future when humans have ascended to godhood and colonized the multiverse.
It's been a lot of fun, Godot and agents have taken most of the pain I remembered from my childhood attempts at game dev out of the equation so I can focus on game mechanics, art and lore. I'm almost ready to start soliciting external playtesters (which I'll admit is a bit stressful), I just need to clean up the UI/card templating/art/tooltips/etc so the game is accessible out of the gate and I don't churn for reasons other than the gameplay not being tuned yet.
My side project this quarter has been building a system that adds steering / planning to LLMs/WAMs/etc. (T, DiT, etc.) in a market/physics/other-ground-truth-constraints aware way. I have a small model outperforming some of the largest frontier models in some games (i.e., adversarial settings) now, but that is not very impressive because "plain old LLMs" are the wrong mathematical object for gameplay, IMO. So far, it's a mix of RL + optimization (e.g., MILP) on the planning side, and not quite realtime enough to play RTSes, but that's only a few weeks away. Have been very impressed at how far the open source ecosystem for this stuff has gotten since the last time I tried something like this.
Tandem bike physics game with device motion, controller gyro and multiplayer. Open source.
https://tandemonium.jimandi.love
Steam play test: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4482940/Tandemonium/
Open source: https://github.com/petegordon/tandemonium
Building a simple sandboxed way to run open weight models over a copy of all my personal data (email, docs, messaging, photos, etc). Think it'd be cool to have a self hosted AI "chief of staff" that has full read access to my personal info.
I've been working on two projects.
## Tab Highway: Browser extension focusing on the UX/process of decluttering
It turns tab cleanup into a game.
When you pile up too many open tabs or whenever you want, it opens a night drive where each tab is a road sign you drive through or send to the trash.
[GitHub](https://github.com/pravj/TAB-HIGHWAY)
This is still a work in progress. It works on my machine, but not fully distribution-ready.
## A short satirical blog on the overly-expressive/interactive web experiments fueled by coding agents.
Ironically, the project listed above falls in the same category.
[Woodworking Has Been Achieved Internally](https://hackpravj.com/blog/woodworking-has-been-achieved-int...)
I made a site https://snack.game where people can upload and share multiplayer games.
It uses webtransport instead of websockets for the networking transport so the games feel a lot better than normal web based multiplayer games. I'm surprised more people aren't using webtransport given it's supported now by all major browsers.
I resurrected an ancient UIUC x86 ASM game, built with some friends in the summer of 2002 for ECE291. Claude Code drove most of the work.
The first attempt was a full on x86asm->webasm transpiler which ran into some difficult stack issues.
The second attempt was successful via conversion from x86asm->c->emscripten->wasm [0]. It plays pretty well on mobile and just about any browser now.
Fair warning it is pretty difficult to win, unless you can figure out where the enemy weaknesses are [1].
[0] [code] https://github.com/gottebp/alan_parsons_project
[1] [play] https://particlefield.com/projects/alan-parsons/game.html
I wrote a release train modelling app (https://allaboard.ooer.com/) and it turned out so horribly complex and hard to use I'm building a general systems modelling app instead so I can rebuild the model in a nice text format.
Few things, trying to take full advantage of AI coding and my domains.
FutureOfGaming.com - In-depth weekly analysis revealing what's actually being developed in gaming, from new player experiences to technical innovation. Over 1,000 gaming patents covered since Nov last year. Every Tuesday for patents and Thursdays for filed.
ContentCreators.com - education, free toolkits, tools directory, job board for content creators. Recently also set up creator profiles to build out a creator directory and connect with brands.
WebsiteAudit.com - does what it says, run my websites through it to identify gaps - anything from performance, security, SEO and get recommended fixes. Looking to expand to also add brand AI visibility, hoping to launch soon. Still in testing
I've been having fun building out a link-in-bio tool / micro-site builder in my spare time. It started out as just something that a solo-dev could build without a lot of experience... but it's turned out to be more complicated and interesting than I thought! Right now I'm working on getting embeds and other 'fancier' types of blocks built out. Also… if any SEO wizards are lurking, I would love tips on getting more Google impressions/CTR, lol. If you want to check it out (would love some feedback!):
I'm working on writing up pages for projecthammer.org, the new website where I'll host my database of Canadian grocery prices. It's getting interest from more academics and needs a more formal home.
I've been curious about ways in which politicians who are in the minority/out of power can still make progress on issues that matter to them.
I was laid off in early June (was a staff software eng at Viam writing motion planning software for robots) and have been fiddling with electronics.
Most recently I made a portable AQI meter, since the air quality here in Central Oregon can quickly get bad.
It's a small 3d printed box containing a rpi pico, an 18650 battery, an e-ink display, and a SEN66 sensor.
I hit a button, it turns on, runs the sensor for ~40 seconds to get a good reading, displays on the e-ink, and then turns off. So there's zero power draw when it's off, and the battery lasts for ~1500 readings. Accuracy seems fine, the AQI, temp, and CO2 readings all match my permanently placed sensors inside and outdoors.
Other projects include using some of the old leftover robot scrap to automate irrigation in my apple orchard.
Ever since I read this https://paulbupejr.com/developing-the-optigap-sensor-system/ I've wanted to build a system that takes in a shape and adds bends and fiber routing so you can dynamically create readable objects. I was initially imagining wanting to add the bending points manually but I'm not so sure that's the best practice and I may want to think of a heuristic for good vs bad bend points before even considering the UI.
I also bought some cheap gloves from harbor freight and used a needle to route fiber through each finger to make a simple power glove like thing which I think I can connect to arm arm to make a cool robot game. I think of the two I am more excited for the first but its much more work than the second and my day job is getting more exciting than I would like so by the end of the month I'll have had to pick one to finish.
I am building this:
https://safetyevidence.org
It is the most comprehensive collection of benchmarks of the safety, ethics, and values of LLMs. I also aggregate sparse safety benchmark scores into a global ranking by optimizing the global ranking to maximize correlation with individual benchmarks.