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'm working my way through "Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding". Thank you so much, HN!
Had a problem this week helping a customer troubleshoot some SAML interactions. They couldn't install SAML Tracer in their environment and I got tired of digging through HAR files and manually decoding SAML assertions and the like so I made https://hartosaml.com/.
Just drop in your HAR file and get immediate insights into the SAML related events.
I recently got a Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad and have been using them on two different Macbooks (work and non-work).
I couldn't find a good way switch them between different Macs, so I made https://github.com/MegaManSec/magic-switch. It's a small application which allows you to basically share the peripherals between Macs, and send them back-and-forth either manually or automatically.
Since January I've been working on a storytelling system that fuses what I think is the best of interactive fiction / MUDs with the strengths of LLMs. The world model is entirely deterministic, but the LLM interprets the player and narrates the game and NPCs.
Also hacking on something similar to YC's QM but designed for small non-profits to ease as much back office work as possible.
I'm building Prospex (https://prospex.ch), a lead-generation tool for B2B salespeople in Switzerland. This is just a side-project as I have a full-time job.
Basically, I'm collecting public data (official registries, job boards, company websites, linkedin etc) to surface sales opportunity signals, like leadership change, new branch/market entry, funding rounds, etc.
A low-cost vibecoding website for non-developers. Still in alpha.
I had a lot of chats in OpenRouter, google AI Studio and lm studio and no good way to view/search/combine them together. ThreadShelf started as a local archive with semantic search/MCP, and later grew support for continuing conversations through llama.cpp or OpenRouter. https://github.com/ChrystianSchutz/ThreadShelf It is my first time creating oss so please be gentle.
I have had fun building a small test-framework in Gleam recently.
https://github.com/eliasson/garanti/
Just this friday I wrote an article that took a look under the hood.
https://markuseliasson.se/article/under-the-hood-of-a-gleam-...
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 :)
An interactive compound-interest explainer, based on The Compound Effect book https://github.com/alexadam/compound-effect
Added more widgets to Printable Mockups https://github.com/alexadam/printable-mockups & https://www.printablemockups.com/
neely (https://neely.app) - club & team management for amateur sports clubs in the DACH region, starting with youth handball. I coach youth handball myself. The incumbent here is SpielerPlus - practically every handball team in Germany uses it, and I've yet to meet a coach who's happy with it. That gap is the whole opportunity.
Most inventions are just better versions of things that already exist - I'm building the Google Workspace for clubs.
I'm working on codecast. Something that started as a way to index / search and sync agent sessions from their jsonl files has turned into a high level desktop/mobile orchestration and product / steering layer above agent sessions. It's a huge productivity boon for me and for teams that have adopted it.
I’m working on a sailing watch system for clubs and teams without the resources for existing systems (thousands of dollars per boat).
I’m starting with the Waveshare ESP-32 watch. It has a great price tag and features, and an impossibly small battery for regattas that run for hours over two days. Designing it for super low power like this, no internet (regattas are often rural), and very high expectations (competitive sailors) is challenging and fun.
Ultimately custom hardware (probably Nordic based) will be in the cards, but for now I’m engineering a solution from what I have.
A music recommender website oriented towards albums.
Tell it your 5 favorite albums, get an immediate suggestions list. No sign up, free to use, integrated with Spotify to hear immediate samples (or the whole album).
Working on making an old Nokia 3210 use 4G because 2G is being shut down within the next two years in most European countries.
As it currently looks I need to design my own PCB with a modern LTE module and make it connect to all the peripherals. Thought it would be a nice project to get into electronics, soldering etc. Also really enjoying the constraints of an 84x48 LCD screen and how to implement "modern" technology like GPS navigation or design the UI for a music player.
I’m working on WatchCat — uptime and cron monitoring.
I’ve always enjoyed solving observability and reliability problems, so eventually I decided to build my own take on the boring-but-important "is it actually working?" part of the stack.
It does uptime checks, cron/heartbeat monitoring, incidents, status pages and notifications. Nothing revolutionary — the goal is to make the familiar stuff simple, reliable, and pleasant to use.
It’s built with Rails and hosted in the EU.
I am experimenting with using A.I. to see an image, and generate TinyScheme code to draw it on Gimp. As soon as I got the code for a 2D representation, then I bring out the heavy weaponry, Rust and Freecad, and with some more information added I generate the 3D representation of a building.
A.I. generally shines when the steps are small and incremental. I would add that, when A.I. is used properly, generating code and hopping from one code to another, it should be better than any human already.
Audion, interpreted scripting language that is fun to write and lets you make interactive music, a/v installations using supercollider or any daw and hardware. BPM synchronization between real OS threads and Ableton sync is built in as well. https://github.com/audion-lang/audion
hack music
I'm building a photo book system that respects privacy via no tracking, not sending anything to the server until you go to print (all stored in indexeddb until then) and even then requires as few details as possible (eg email address optional), and no sign up at all. Then everything deleted within a month. It's at https://www.rgbloom.com/ and UK only for now.
I work on 2 things that are the same thing: 1. ghosttyfx — libghostty terminal for JavaFX (https://github.com/vlaaad/ghosttyfx/) 2. trying to integrate ghosttyfx into the Defold editor (https://defold.com/)
Turns out integrating into a bigger IDE is much harder than just implementing a JavaFX view using libghostty...
I've been working on an AI Tutor or Primer that automatically generates Duolingo style curriculums. Planning to apply to YC after the next big feature release.
The current website is a rushed out MVP. It takes a significant amount of data science and prompt engineering to generate good courses, so it's taking me a bit longer to build the true vision.
I'm working on https://www.amika.dev/, which lets you put sandboxed agents on cloud VMs and then message them over the internet.
It's for agent + human devboxes, for chatting with coding agents from the web, or automating them with an API. Thing like Claude Code web, but any agent and you directly control the VM, too.
We're working to make amika.dev work on any computer, homelab, or K8S cluster. For tech folks, I describe it kinda like if Tailscale and Firecracker had a baby.
I have tons of fun building a custom OS for my little ESP32 device: https://x.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/2086311226012025006
It now has power management, a launcher, iOS-inspired Control Center, an AI voice assistant (using OpenAI Realtime API), a tamagotchi-style app and I recently built the iBeer app :D
Working on GameBeacon, a different take on LFG(looking for gamers) app/website where gamers can sign up, light a beacon and invite friends to a game session. You can also add your games to build a game collection, including a neat way to scan photos of your physical games using AI. https://www.gamerbeacon.com/ and download the app in the app stores. Been a blast using it with my buddies on VR games weekly.
Working on https://letterspractice.com
This is a high efficiency, narrowly-scoped, low screen-time early literacy app for families with kids aged 2+.
I have a Pebble Time 2, which is an open source watch. I built a voice operated AI assistant for it.
It's hosted on a VPS, connected over Tailscale, and has a realtime TTS server (Piper).
The Pebble has built in transcription, so my app takes the transcript, hits the server endpoint with three possible paths:
1. Deterministic response
The server looks for certain triggers from the transcript like "Add task," "Complete task," "Set a timer," etc that will run a simple function on server and write / retrieve to a database, no LLM call needed. It then responds with the TTS output and the watch speaks. This path is nearly instant.
2. Fast response
If no trigger is found, then it hits a gpt5.6 Luna endpoint, which decides if it can answer the query itself, or if it needs to defer to the big brother model. If it can handle a query itself, it usually responds to simple questions in less than 8 seconds. It's also good about properly deferring, very close to 100% after a few weeks.
3. Deferred response
The VPS hosts a Hermes installation, and for more complicated tasks or for ongoing projects the Luna router sends it to the Hermes agent. This is typically quite slow, as you'd expect, but remarkably capable. I built the voice app to cache a few lines like "this will take some time" which will automatically trigger if the router indicates it's deferring, and then will respond with the full response from Hermes once it's finished (sometimes minutes later).
Pebble has a quiet mode, and my app will only display the text response if it's on, otherwise all responses are run through the TTS. Piper is so fast that this adds almost no time to the response.
In only a few weeks this has become the primary way I set up tasks, review and close them, set timers and reminders, log my weight, check in on the progress of projects I'm running on Hermes, and ask simple day to day AI questions.
Since Pebble is open source, AI tools are very good at building it, and it's trivially easy to set it up so that you can just ask the model to deploy it live. It's an awesome experience to tell it to change something, and two minutes later, that change is on your wrist.
Very fun project!
Finishing up the IDE (Chord Writer) for my new Interactive Fiction modeling language (Chord) for web+parser based games.
I've been working on a cross platform screenshot/screen recording tool with a built in editor:
https://github.com/joswayski/captures
Managed to snag a cool domain for it too!
Would love any feedback from anyone that tries it
My own IDE!
https://github.com/paradise-runner/toast
It has all the parts I want (lsps, syntax highlighting, a file tree) without the parts I don’t (a bundled terminal, tracking, ai)
A writing app.
The overall idea is to work/write at an higher level of abstraction where you work with "ideas" (just small paragraphs).
You can move them around and basically restructure many/whole paragraphs by simply changing few words.
The final text is generated by an LLM.
LLM that has the whole context so you can ask it questions, but more importantly it can provide you feedback
I just released my 2nd app to the App Store: Just Chess Puzzles
It’s as simple as it sounds: 100,000 chess puzzles, all offline, rated (just like chess.com or lichess puzzle modes)
A big thing I added that makes mine unique is the play it out” mode that allows you to finish the game with a chess engine of equal difficulty
You get 20 free puzzles per day, or a $5 lifetime purchase for unlimited puzzles and features: https://justchesspuzzles.com
Orchestrating an AI agent built in native Object Pascal for Free Pascal Compiler and Delphi. Runs in less than 10MB of RAM. Besides being very Windows forward and local first; doing some fun things with it like incorporating WebLLM and running it in the browser inside a WASM Linux.
Https://pasclaw.dev/
Recently completed GearPix https://www.gearpix.app/
Which is an app and audio plugin to take and send pictures to a DAW tracks and have them stored in the project file.
Not vibecoded but I must say Claude was a big help to finish and debug my C++ code (which I didn't know before this).
Working on building open-source QA agent for software teams. Consider starring on GitHub - https://github.com/vostride/agent-qa | Landing https://vostride.ai/
Working on a music sheet app that takes photos and turns it into a local doc you can play midi on, plenty exist but they all want subscriptions to use them. Trying to see if I can do it with pure local phone processing. Still in PoC Phase. The app world is tiring with the lockouts for yearly subscriptions fees of $50+. Apple promotes them too since they get a cut.
I got GIMP running natively on my iPad, and am now working towards VS Code and a few other useful *nix apps
https://files.maxleiter.com/f/gimp-on-ipad-optimized-Dyuygd6...
I'm currently working on an open-source End-to-End Encrypted P2P Chat-Platform similar to matrix but with the thinnest backend possible, the backend is a a simple directory server + relay, nothing more you can find more about it in the readme on GitHub :) https://github.com/Emn4tor/Seal
Building a new tool that can analyze employment contracts and see if there are issues. Also gives the ability to ask labor questions across Canada
Currently working on Intelligent Codebase Visualizer for reactjs/Nextjs/js and ts Codebases for easy PR review, easy onboarding and easy PR review.
Github: https://github.com/devlensio/devlensOSS https://devlens.io
I recently added autocomplete to rainfrog, the terminal UI database tool I've been working on: https://github.com/achristmascarl/rainfrog
I initially made it as a lightweight, keyboard-centric alternative to dbeaver/pgadmin, and it now covers 95%+ of the database-related tasks I need to do at my job.
It gives agents the ability to find website design references to improve their design skills via the mcp - https://design.withfudge.com/mcp
You can also critic your existing designs against competition.
Been improving the gui of my 3D-web-Player runtime. - What al I building ?
==> An FPS game editor, using photos as 1st imput. ==> It delivers a realistic FPS game. immersive-visit-game as we like to call it. ==> The FPS-Runtime is the lightest FPS existing today. It works on any web device, even Smartphones.
I'm working a new Fantasy Football league/format that is category-based (like hockey/baseball) in an attempt to make games more "watchable". The problem with traditional Fantasy Football, is that half of the game (defence) is ignored, while not very economically-valuable positions, like RB and TE, are elevated far past their real world relevance. This new system is my attempt at fixing both problems!
I just bought a home so doing tons of little projects and a couple big ones, it’s endless!
AI wise I’ve been refining my workout app for a few months and it’s ~90% there - I get good workouts now but I’m constantly tweaking / adding features. My kanban / planning tool has also become very useable with the latest updates. Next up I’m working more on a guitar practice app and a baby life app.
I'm working on an improved Markdown that offers a simplified language, clear hooks for extensibility, and a governance model to let it grow over time.
A workflow orchestration engine built for agent harnesses e.g. Hermes:
https://github.com/blairjordan/pygmyhippo