alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Enjoying an Upper Midwest summer and:
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 have been working on the marketing site for an ETL Product that I am ready to launch, and this thread made me realize that I should ask in another thread about recommended MoR/affiliate programs for current day.
This is meant to be something that will help business teams be better able to communicate what they want, while producing ready to deploy tech artifacts that do not rely on AI.
More importantly, I have been working on being a Dad - something we were told would be impossible naturally. Way more fun than being in front of the computer - our little one is nearly six months old now, and sleeping through the night until usually at least 8 AM, starting to roll over and enjoy tummy time more, and bringing smiles everywhere she goes.
Work: Security engineering focused on securing authnz at hyperscale in our new agentic reality. What interests me? Agentic engineering, vulnerability discovery at massive scale. Vulnerability remediation at massive scale. Bounding agent non-determinism.
Personal: Local models. Agent harnesses. Track cars, turning wrenches.
Had agents build recently:
- Photo catalog app with all 100K photos in my library described by a local 9B parameter model (it is absolutely amazing and my favorite personal project in terms of genuien impact)
- Generic RAG layer (vector embedding + FTS in SQLite with RRF and document ingestiation layers for 1-2GB knowledge bases to power agent context for stuff I am interested in, neuroscience and philosophy is where I spend time on this right now, and basically every AI research paper publicly available to help agents tinker with local models). This is especially useful for local models, but it even helps frontier models because they can freely churn through without a bunch of web calls and such when you are on a topic thread or research.
- Qwen 3.6 35B A3B clean-up proxy, achieving a clean thinking + tool calling A3B that I can leave running for 24+ hours. This particular model gets stuck in long reasoning chains and needs encouragement to get on with it, especially on context tasks. It actually reasons well but then starts second guessing and loops. Built a deterministic framework to inspect its thinking and make it wrap its thinking up if it gets stuck and also to trigger calls to external models and inject solutions to problems when it gets stuck. The agent sees the solution injected from a remote model like it is its own thinking, kind of a subconscious it has no idea about. Metacognition in models, it is wild.
DSV4->GLM->Kimi is the "phone a friend" external brain pathing I built. As far as I know no one has shared all of the bugs I have 'fixed' in my project and gotten local Qwen A3B this reliable.
Adding Java class inline editing without decompilation feature to https://jar.tools/class-decompiler - so you can update some class values (number or strings, or event access modifiers) without needing to recompile the .class file. I called it Tweaks
I’m building an image sharing site (just for me and a couple of friends) that tries to emulate the old days of Flickr and Instagram. Chronological feed, no recommendation algorithm, no reels, no ads, etc. Knowing that it’ll never be open to registration or “real” users takes all the pressure and expectation away and it’s just been fun to work on.
I’m working on “Supabase for science”: 1-click deploy of scientific databases with validation, transformation, MCP, export-for-ML, and provenance built in.
I'm working on a platform for context management that includes apps that operate on structured text formats (e.g. YAML, JSON, XML, MD) and provides editors for structured text formats (code editing using codemirror, markdown editing using prosemirror) and eventually all media assets (images, videos, audio).
The idea is you have a set of sources (e.g. Github, Google Docs, local file system), a bunch of transformations (templates, apps, llms/gen-ai, simulations) and sinks (communicated through changesets). The platform is like a cache layer that connects these together and allows for a graph of operations (source->executor->sink->source->executor->etc.) which allows for tracing the lineage of assets through a system.
It's an impossibly large vision made barely possible with agental coding assistance.
https://github.com/Nan0pk/Rush-linux A Linux variant one dynamic power and peromance tuning daemon, because Why Not--- https://github.com/Nan0pk/local-ai-relay A relay to grab Ai web chat and run it as openai compatible provider to run batch jobs https://github.com/Nan0pk/Archiv An offline Ai first institutional memory harness, ingesting office docs and outputing cited formatted deliverables.
I am working on a framework that allows creating very complex SaaS products with AI, that actually work. Very complex = +100k LOC of one-shotted AI-generated code. Codename o2p - outcome-to-proof.
It is a research-first method for designing or reviewing SaaS products. Its central question is: What customer outcome matters, and what evidence proves that the product delivers it?
Idea or existing product → Research real customers and current work → Identify their Jobs to Be Done → Design the minimum safe workflow, define the interface and system behavior (with a sophisticated scoring system) → Validate the workflow → Implement vertical slices → Observe proof of customer progress
A C++ lib to write SIMD code like you would write GLSL: CPPShader https://github.com/gitdepierre/cppshader. I need to clean up the code a bit right now, and I'll add SSE2 support for older CPUs (currently requiring SSE4, but I want to see it working on C2D and Atom. I just need to replace the blendv functions with something compatible with SSE2). Then I'll focus on adding NEON support.
I have been working on automating many of the programs that federal prisons run to help newly released inmates with re-entry.
Example: https://atlanta-fci.bop.doj.dev/program/65545-inmate-account...
I've finalized and have in beta testing an AI-based natural language search of properties from an MLS feed. On top of that, I'm continually tuning an AI agent that is able to do property research, comparisons, neighborhood and history analysis, etc.
[1]: https://mlsync.ai
Been building a data ontology project i call Tirith - think palantir's gotham + their different modules on top. Can ingest from different sources (textual, structured or freeform for now, images + video coming maybe later), detect relationships between objects, view graph, geospatial view and rudimentary analysts view. Very raw but with the help of nlp and/or openai compatible cheap model like deepseek its already amazingly capable.
And second thing im building is out of sheer frustration as a father of 5 in the school info management - https://www.classtable.org - aims to be a full school management software which is easy to use for both school staff, students AND (personal itch) for parents to keep an eye on their childrens progress
I got laid off on Friday so I'm using it as an opportunity to dogfood briansjobsearch.com again. I'm working on a Chrome extension that will help with autofilling job applications. It has dramatically sped up the time it takes to apply to each job even on complicated ATS's.
I’m iterating on a constellation of git collab services that I’m calling “the disappearing code forge.” All self hostable with a focus on minimalism and Unix philosophy.
I just revamped the collaboration portion which is a patchbin service: https://pr.pico.sh
As part of that I work im also iterating on the ci/cd solution we are calling pici: https://ci.pico.sh
AMA
Working on a web-based image editor with plenty of customisation and support for most Photoshop features.
Built overwhelmingly in vanilla JS with a couple of WASM modules for it.
It’s generally very performant across the app so far, but there’s still a handful of features that are functional but subpar in terms of performance that I need to address.
I am in the final stages of preparing to ship a 2.0 version of a fairly successful app, that has been shipping for a couple of years.
This is a complete, bottom-to-top rewrite (front- and backend). It's a huge improvement. I used an LLM, quite a bit. It's been a big help.
We're in the last stages of the first-wave testers. This is the one that affects the app UI. After this, we expand the test, and do bug fixes only.
Also, we need to start taking screenshots and app previews for the App Store. That requires setting up a test server, with anonymized (fake) users, so we don't compromise actual user anonymity. It's a bit of a pain, but it has to be done.
I am working on Amber.jl an acausal analog electronics simulation tool driven by Julia code. Just like in PyTorch, the neural network is the code, here the circuit is the code as well.
Because SPICE wasn't built for programmers in mind. The code in 0.1.0 is almost ready and I'll put the github repo public soon.
I'm reviving my multi-player Snake game Snaketron. It's written in Rust and probably the most technically interesting thing about it is that it's built for auto scalable Cloud hosting. The websocket isn't tied to the host actually running the game. And it can scale and rebalance in the middle of the a match without disrupting the game.
I started making a programming language that is designed to encompass frontend, backend, database, container, and cluster, so that there it is not necessary to stitch together other languages.
It uses functional programming and event sourcing to try and effectively "solve" modern distributed web application development, so that your app code in this language can be extremely simple but not have bad architecture and gaps.
I'm probably oversimplifying the complexity, so I don't even know if it's feasible, but it's pretty fun to give Claude my crazy ideas and see what happens.
Hosting an XGBoost-model for MLB totals predictions. It runs every thirty minutes: incorporating weather at the hyperlocal level and joins with player attributes that are provably affected by that weather. It also provides advanced decision-making tools with a Kelly Criterion calculator built in. Model still needs some calibration for bet-sizing but is very close to production-ready.
Robust historical evaluations available at https://ballcast.app/validation
Finishing up my GSoC project with MalariaGEN. We're writing a new tool to estimate kinship coefficients between mosquitoes genomes and the project got a lot bigger than I initially planned haha. I'm going to tie up a smaller part for the GSoC submission in August and then keep working on the rest for a paper we're writing up. Also a big shout out to AVX-512 and sleef, for numerical work it is just chef's kiss. For anyone curious you can see the tools used to analyze DNA for disease vector control here, it's pretty interesting :)
I'm adding MoE support to the GPT-2 code from Sebastian Raschka's "Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)". Just the minimal changes. Planning to do (or at least start!) a from-scratch base model training run on my own hardware before the end of the month.
A low-cost vibecoding website for non-developers. Still in alpha.
I have two personal projects at the moment.
First, https://agency.nu/ a personal agent platform for people who aren’t necessarily developers, but still want to connect multiple Gmail, Calendar, and other accounts and automate workflows across them. Spent a lot of time making the interaction easy and natural, so it supports chat, realtime voice and telegram.
Second, https://vinarium.one/ something I primarily built for myself to keep track of the wines in my wine fridge, when to drink them, and what pairs well with a particular dish.
Both are very much scratching my own itch, but I’m curious if either resonates with anyone else here.
I've always ran into an issue running arbitrary processes - whether it be for serious production work, or just toy scripts. So many choices with so many dependencies, featuring so many foot-guns. So I decided to take a stab at solving the problem. Would love any feedback or contributors :)
SystemG - An agent-friendly general process composer.
Waiting for the remaining broadcast equipment for my LPFM (www.kpbj.fm) to arrive! Then we finally get on the broadcast band. We have over 80 shows at this point. We still need fundraising support. If you are in Los Angeles and want to support freeform community please reach out.
I’ve been playing around with exploiting LLMs having ‘read’ every book ever written to make a chatbot to help people choose library books. You talk to it a bit about things you’ve read, and it uses the llm’s latent knowledge of books to suggest ones you might like.
It’s pretty fun! It might even work on your local library (I got carried away and spent a while making it work on a few thousand round the world - you can see the coverage here: https://leafle.nanosheep.net/coverage).
A tabletop adventure game generator. Instead of tediously rolling for disconnected content in limited ways (enemy to fight, loot after fight, etc), you generate an adventure and print it out. Random events can be connected, enemies can be elegantly scaled. You discover a rich world rather than tediously generate a low fidelity one.
I'm updating Metabase's Podman documentation to reflect using Quadlet instead of "the old way." It's my first open source contribution in quite awhile and while it's tiny I'm excited for it. It's a chance to get to know pi.dev, not to write, but to behave as a copy editor and fact checker. Since it uses Mistral on the back-end it's a slightly insane copy editor and fact checker, but that's almost better. It's forcing me to check everything I say.
I’m working on “nah” [1] an agent hook guard that blocks catastrophic agent actions like filesystem destruction, secrets exfiltration, and git disasters.
All the agent hook guards I’ve seen can be easily removed by agents (and they often do so they can get going with the task). I made mine harder to remove, and I’m working on making it impossible.
I also made “nah” easily extensible. Just point your agent to the docs which ship with the CLI, and ask it to build a custom guard.
I’m working on strong Python and Typescript pseudo-interpreters so I can detect disasters in inline code with less false positives. Bash parser is already very strong.
This is a side-project that I want to be proud off. I spend a lot of time designing, not just coding.
[1] nahguard.ai
Petrichor, a music player for macOS: https://petrichor.page/
This has been my work outside of work, which I spend most of my weekends on. It has gotten enough downloads (23k+) and traction to motivate me to continue.
https://corvi.careers/reports/technology-stack-trends/
It tracks explicit mentions of ~ 181 languages, technologies, vendors, etc as seen in job postings. The motivation was that GitHub activity and developer surveys describe what people use or enjoy, but not necessarily what employers are requesting.
As per usual for the last two years I'm working on an open source spreadsheet engine called IronCalc. It is super exciting. We have a proof of concept at
In the last couple of months my partner and myself quit our jobs to work on that. I am pretty sure that in a year from now the world is going to have a fairly competent spreadsheet alternative.
My capacity is fairly limited but I am trying to build a community around it. Join us!
I'm working on a go (the game) server. still unpolished, but it's functional! currently hosted on a raspberry pi in my living room and proxied to the public Web via Tailscale. Rust backend, SQLite, preact frontend.
https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator is still very useful for annotating html prototypes and markdown plans (as well as terminal agent messages). Was glad to see codex team pick up the feature requests in the Codex App.
About to release a fun paid version. All contributors get lifetime free access.
Better running agents run longer, they need better plans. (is my bet)
I've been working on a simple multiplayer word game: http://alphabetsoup.club
It's a bit like NYT Spelling Bee, except it's multiplayer and only your best (longest) word counts toward your score. So, instead of trying to find as many words as possible, the game is more about finding one unusually good word.
Funny timing, I just made my first Show HN post for this a few minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235347
I'm working on a painting of coneflowers and black-eyed susans from near where I live in New York City.
Oil on canvas, about 28 x 22 in.
I'm working on a multiplayer stock trading game that was inspired by all my favorite board games. https://www.spellfolio.com/
It's a web-based game for 1-8 players, features a tutorial and bots, plays like a board game, and operates with economy, bluffing, forward-planning, risk-taking, course-correcting mechanics.
Play as an amateur psychic navigating a fictional stock market. Receive premonitions, call in your wizard friend, navigate dividends & earnings releases, and chase the glamorous annual investor awards.
If you try it out, please leave me some feedback :)
So I am working on building a low latency streaming dataflow framework - ala gnuradio but actually usable in production. The idea is to have deterministic latency as a first class objective and let all the other benefits fall out of that.
Additionally:
Live graph reconfiguration Timed events Easy simd support Support for non-mmu based architectures Imperitive configuration management and querying at the single runtime level. Can be compiled to wasm, and run in the browser (w/ coors headers). IO/user interface and any GUI is done via typescript.
A free and open source chrome extension to help people review code - https://guidedreview.dev
It upgrades your GitHub pull request review experience with a guided walkthrough of the PR optimized for reading.
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.