alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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An app that lets you view social media without ads or algorithms.
You add profiles from Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube and Narro pulls in the posts.
https://cou.sh, https://jun.is and https://abr.ac — some experiments on offline-first crdt
Working on slk (https://github.com/gammons/slk) which is a TUI Slack client that runs in a terminal. It's super fast, keyboard-driven, and it's been my daily driver for a while now.
Chatter, a self hosted almost feature complete alternative to Discord: https://github.com/Sphyrna-029/Chatter
Haven’t see a lot of app in this space but most of them focus on wastage rather than usage so I am playing around with https://usurp.onrender.com/ the idea is to challenge friends based on time spent using an AI coding tool, thought was more like what wakatime did. It’s also open source.
I just published a first version of a gateway that redirects to the correct proxy/frontend
The "official" syntaxis is
https://yups.io/?url=https://twitter.com/Wikipedia
But it is very flexible to manage errors
https://yups.io/www.instagram.com/reel/DdOFgxdlMjv/?stkn=MWR...
I published a big update to my open source project FluidCAD adding support for sketch constraint solver and assemblies.
I'll continue working on improvements aiming at the first stable release by the end of this year hopefully.
Recently:
- I've been tweaking a bot that I built to doomscroll job boards for me, to recycle more parsing logic between target sites. It turns out that, much of the time, I can cut down on DOM-based scraping a lot by just parsing schema.org-based JSON-LD. Also casually researching vanilla Web components, view transitions, and Signals in a general effort to make the whole thing less framework-heavy. (Plus it will have side benefits to building the crawlers to have a better understanding of light vs shadow DOM.) Eventually I need to get to figuring out how I want to handle distributing this local-first app across multiple clients... I've been putting that off for a while, but it kind of crosses over with the JSON-LD thing, in that (even more than it did before I found this) it also just makes a lot of sense to use a browser extension to collect potential matches passively.
- 3D printing experiments. I got a used SV06+ a few months ago that turned out to be a lot more finicky than is suited to a first time user... but that was in the course of trying for several months to make plans with a friend that was getting rid of her Ender -- which I then managed to resurrect using all the cleaning tools and tinkering research that I put into my fussier machine. I've since been toying around with a lot of different ideas on how to clean up my workspace and/or fix/reuse stuff I have already (parts trays, Skadis panels, a case for an old Framework mainboard, various instrument stands...) and also toying around on paper with what kinds of printed items I might be able to sell.
- Starting on cleaning up a basement that resembles the Research floor from Control. Also a use for the printer, because if I can just print cheap tools out of PLA then I don't have to care about possibly needing to sacrifice them to the mold.
- Various Coursera stuff. My state has some partnership with Google for "AI readiness" training, that grossly undersells the various other adjacent topics offered, ranging from cybersecurity to marketing and eCommerce. Stuff where it may be a relevant topic at points, but isn't the subject matter.
It’s an AI Private Investigator that does the hard work of data gathering (using Open Source Intelligence) and correlation. Used by over 70k investigators including government agencies.
I'm learning on how to move away from computing into violin making and repairs.
I've been building a framework for web, ios and android native development at https://github.com/vmsp/flypath.
It's based on the Server-Driven UI philosophy where the backend streams both code and UI into a frontend that just knows how to render what it's told. This is pretty cool because it makes it makes over-the-air updates possible.
It also follows the batteries-included philosophy of Rails. Has an ORM, background and cron jobs (all based on Postgres), Django-style migrations, JSX Emails and pretty great FFI that's built around a simple `"use native"` directive, in the React Server Component fashion).
I'm working on Solace¹, a programming language that targets JavaScript, but is not a superset, like Typescript. The idea is, to allow zero-runtime-cost safeguards, like Optional Values and Error Unions (syntactically they look like Zig's), decent pattern matching and Traits. There's still a lot of work to do, though, because some of the approaches I went for, don't hold in all cases (generics are tricky).
Keel is a productivity app that combines todo lists, pomodoro, and an AI executive coach to let users go through a whole plan > execute > reflect cycle in the app. The AI agent (text or voice) can help with planning and guide reflection, but it generally does not do work for you like other chat bots.
The android app is in beta now and the iOS app is in development.
I had a bunch of extra Fable credits, so I spent about $10k running autoresearch loops on 200 of the top github repos with frontends to try and speed up the frontend performance. I distilled them down into a leaderboard of the most common wins, and built out an autoresearch loop that takes those learnings and applies them to your repo.
Works with your existing claude/cursor/codex sub in a cute custom TUI.
I just submitted a Show HN for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687032
Online container planner in 3d
Just started:
1) bad apple on my kernel (OS)
2) language model + inference engine from scratch
3) sketchdaily.net, but you give it your own pinterest board of references instead of the preselected ones they have
Because my work life is mostly LLM promoting, I’ve gotten back into hobby robotics, which I think has a low chance of LLMs taking over anytime soon. Designing and building a robot that can build a wooden hardwood deck using the edge-screw method.
I'm decompiling an obscure 1998 computer game using an LLM agent skill that I'm simultaneously developing from papers and books on reverse-engineering (a subject I've never previously engaged with) with the aim of migrating it (well, at least its assets) to the browser: https://esoteria.pages.dev
Here's the skill: https://github.com/gavmor/x86-cpp-reversing-skill
It's all slop, but it's battle-tested and producing results. It's quite fun and inspiring to see some of these assets like textures and geometry that are improperly decompiled, bit shifted or something like that. produces a lot of abstract, glitchy art.
To make sure that my process and results are reproducible, I've gotten back into maintaining Concourse CI pipelines. They were very useful when we were shipping a fork of k8s for VMware, and now they are a fun way of shipping cyberpunk billboard sprites to Cloudflare buckets.
I got back into Concourse in order to attempt a more rigorous approach to generative AI experimentation as well. Unfortunately, there are just so many odd techniques, configurations, loras, and utilities striking my fancy that my experiment pipelines have exploded into the dozens, and Concourse is not a large enough or a high-level enough organizing principle.
A few side projects!
- an open source AES67 hardware receiver/decoder - based on my friend Jessie's work [0]. I want speakers to have ethernet ports and to use an open/inexpensive stack. it's hard because physics/timing are brutal (1ms sync is ~not enough), but that's what makes it a great problem.
- an open source embroidery machine - based on my friend Owen's work [1]. Owen found Brother PE-150 machines which are readily available on eBay for ~$100 as they only work with proprietary 90s-era CF cards which nobody has (or sell for more than the machine). he designed a replacement motherboard (!!) and is running a fully open stack. it's wild.
- a ~$20 tiny cute display you can have on the side of your monitor, and display things on - realtime airport view from flightaware? a mini terminal? you can grab a display today [2], all that's missing is a 3d case (email me for firmware/OS code! I'll share it, just haven't had time). friends Frank and Sophie are working on a similar GUD-compatible display as well! [3]
- my friend Antoine has been working on Python bindings to Canonical's dqlite, a distributed sqlite-variant with raft-based failover and transactions (only C and Go clients existed) [4] - this will soon be a structural ("load-bearing"! haha!) part of Disco, a project we've been working on for a few years which lets you run your own PaaS. we're growing and get nice love letters [5] which for an open source project is obviously deeply rewarding
[0] https://jessie.grosen.systems/projects/aes67-receiver
[1] https://owentrueblood.com/blog/2024/12/10/reverse-engineerin...
[2] https://www.waveshare.com/rp2040-touch-lcd-1.69.htm
[3] https://bsky.app/profile/sophie.engineering/post/3muxysxhpck...
I've been working on a collection of native AI/ML operators for TouchDesigner on macOS. Think of it as a happy marriage between the interface of TouchDesigner but with some of the features you know from ComfyUI.
https://www.patreon.com/MickeyvanOlst/posts/meet-aml-macos-1...
Typically TD for the Mac has always been a bit underserved, by leaning into some of the frameworks that exclusively exist on macOS I'm hoping more people will see it as a viable platform for this kind of stuff.
I worked on my AI agent that feels like a unix util. This month I changed the way it writes and edits files
All in one platform for hosting agents
- Minimal setup - Any agent harness - A session is an actor - Opinionated infrastructure - Performance on the critical path
Building https://typequicker.com
It's a personalized & data-driven typing application that targets your weak points
I've been working on a typed, functional-imperative, full stack programming language with IDE support: https://www.firefly-lang.org/
a replacement for Octopus deploy https://rolloutrhino.com/ (marketing page is mostly a placeholder). Octopus is super expensive for our company and scales poorly if you have lots of small projects. I've got pretty much everything working really well, and the main thing I'm working on is improving the UX for all the workflows I do most often. It is mostly built around what I wanted from the tool, but before I release it I'm looking at supporting various other ways people use the tool. It's been a fun project so far.
A new UI library made with zero dependencies (native web components). I just made it public as I actually use it for my personal projects since past year.
The core principle is to help with UI development without bloating a project. It works with vue/nuxt (tested, my projects are done with it), but also react/angular/svelte/etc.
One feedback I got from reddit (I published it this week there) is that AGPLv3 may be a problem for adoption... still not sure if should I use MIT.
I have been working on cost models and coupon ladders for businesses.
If either of those are interesting to you, please reach out!
For example, I am helping some restaurants learn exactly how much each item on the menu costs, what the margins are, and how much profit each dish is bringing in because I integrate with their PoS system.
It's all a part of GetSetReply which is turning into a small suite of tools for SMBs
Compute is precious, so I’m building a k3s/k8s-based macOS/Linux GitHub Actions runner.
I’m spending like $25/mo at least in GHA minutes.
Then working on securing and tinkering with my homelab. And little utilities that make repeated deterministic functions easier for me and agents.
Web bluetooth for ios (via safari extension). It's already way better than any 3rd party browser available in appstore.
I am working on a code forge that can work offline for the collaborative stuff. https://juju.bi
I got laid off at the beginning of last month so put a little time into some personal projects I thought might be fun.
https://dstld.news - I have always wanted a personalized news site so I built one using a few news APIs with AI summaries.
https://hn.wreet.xyz - I'm a big fan of skeleton.dev and wanted a HN frontend with all the fun themes.
Nothing too exciting, just trying to find the joy in making again.
I'm trying to build a tool site that has all the tools you'll ever need. I slowly add some each week.
I haven't been working on it as of late, mostly because i'm a bit deflated from software in general, but I started working on a programming language I called Grasp.
If lisp is a list processing language, grasp is a graph programming language.
The idea was that most other data structures can be represented with a graph ( adjacency matrices are matrices, a tree is a type of directed acyclic graph, a list is a graph where each node connects to at most two nodes, etc) and so if you designed a programming language where the language is itself a graph, much like how lisp is itself a list, you could get other esoteric programming languages like APL, forth, lisp, and so on as DSLs of Grasp. Also any program you write would be its own CFG.
I started it but honestly its mostly a hot mess of vibe-coded garbage. But I may get back on it and try to clean it up.
An analytics store for Postgres on S3 using DuckDB as the query engine
I'm building editor and flasher for BMW engines maps (n13, n20, n55, s55, b58, s58) and TCU maps (ZF8HP45 and ZF8HP50) as well as a remote access ENET IOS and Android app.
Still hacking away on Raygum - a nice place to keep your music brain.
I don't even know what that means.
I spent some with reverse-engineering a neural network accelerator (NNA) inside a Chinese WiFi camera SoC: https://github.com/inoop/t41-pluto. I used Claude to reverse-engineer the hardware, and then implement an ONNX compiler and runtime so I can run my own models. Basically I now have a $20 AI smart camera.
Contributing larger PRs to terraform-provider-aws because apparently my contributions so far do not have enough lines of code as a metric. Getting familiar with Floci for usage with Terraform over LocalStack since it is a true open source project rather than freemium. Also getting my AAS from Maestro. Ride or die since I can not afford college anywhere else despite their current accreditation issues with COE.
I've been working on https://pronto.stream/, I wanted to mess around with MCP and building a world news system to power the decision making and surveillance of other systems I would likely curate.
I was curious about formats more efficient for agent communication than JSON and also proving if the framework I curated could handle the load and traffic.
It's been really fun to observe.
I’m working on a 52-part series about retention.
Each week I research one part of retention, teach it, and apply it to two real-world products I built.
I’ve published five lectures so far, and think the series should be useful to anyone here building a product: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFp5nmjrQeug
I am building OtaKit.app, a cheap, fast, and simple CDN-based over-the-air updating tool for Capacitor apps (and soon for React Native too)
A local AI-adoption consultancy business for SMBs where the differentiator is I physically show up at your office and actually talk to your team. With the slopification of cold outreach and social posting, I think the future of business development is going to be very personal.
I am working on these open source projects:
https://github.com/office-42/word42
https://github.com/office-42/math42
we are building https://www.d5s.tech, using our own software to automate our own company (the boring bits)! having a blast doing it and steadily automating more and more
and... whenever i have some spare gpt-6 astra left i am working on a R.U.S.E reimplementation alongside some other threejs experiments
I'm further along in my funemployment project:
https://github.com/mcdirmid/cleanroom
So far I have bazel macros up that can produce tested code with a ~30GB MoE model (Jundot/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-oQ6-mtp, I can get ~90 toks/sec on a M3 Max!) using cleanroom separate implementation and test development (and then comparing them until both are correct). Over the last month, however, I found that my bottleneck is in the specifications: as I further divided my components into separate parts (since smaller components are easier to write and test), I started hitting problems with specifications becoming badly ungrounded (code depending on knowledge they cannot access, so something is just hallucinated).
So I redid the format, e.g.
https://github.com/mcdirmid/cleanroom/blob/main/update_with_...
The spec format is designed to be declarative and very modular, and ya, an LLM is primarily writing the specs as well, so I hope to create some sort of formal reasoning framework that the specification can be translated into (by an LLM) so that ungroundness feedback can help the LLM write better specs. Also, I found that it really is much more robust to change/refactor/add features via the spec first and then align changes down to test and code, then to make changes to the code directly (even without using the system, just asking a frontier model to look at the guides and do the alignment itself directly).
I think I'll be ready to do a release over this next month, which means:
- Supporting a build system other than Bazel to express DAGs. Honestly, this could be anything, I just chose Bazel for convenience (easy to express graphs in Starlark), but it assumes a monorepo world that I don't think many developers use.
- How do I even package this? The advance of using Starlark is that I can generate python code to call into the generated python code directly. If I move away from that, I need to figure out what this really looks like as a binary.
- More demos. Right now my only project is the code for the system itself (the classic "the first program of a language is the compiler for the language"). I just can't think of many interesting things to do in Python that aren't agent related (I can support other languages, like Java, Typescript, or even C++, but I'm hitting choice paralysis).
An Openclaw, Hermes Agent type system that is meant to be ran on a home server, built in Rails with a Tauri 2 front-end.
TagLib-Wasm, a universal media tagging library. It's sort of what Mutagen is for Python, but for TypeScript/JavaScript.
https://charleswiltgen.github.io/TagLib-Wasm/
It works in browsers, Node.js, Deno, Bun, Cloudflare Workers, and Electron apps.
I've been working on https://searchforjobs.app/ I'm trying to add the resume creator for using the right keywords for a job posting. I'm also trying to add more data visualizations are more job posting sources to scrape.
Inbound message AI assistant. Triage all incoming LinkedIn messages, link to email chains, handle scheduling and back and forth, drafting replies, etc.
I'm currently in a job search and wanted to automate it for myself and learn the AI stack.
If anyone wants to try it out lmk!