alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (November 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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A while ago the invoicing app I used (Harvest) jacked up their price about 10x, so I decided to build one for myself.
And I did: https://hourbun.com/
Just an intuitive and fast time tracking and invoicing app built for people and teams like me who want a quick and reliable way of invoicing clients without paying a premium or suffer through bad UI/UX.
I've been working on a port of Pokemon Crystal for a specific ESP32 dev board with a round amoled screen.
The goal was to have a basic pokemon themed tamagotchi clone with step counting that motivated me to walk more. It snowballed into a full fledged rust port of the whole game, with a completely redesigned UI meant for round screens and touch controls. It's got bluetooth and wifi trading, autosave, contextual action buttons, etc.
The most experimental and interesting feature is an auto play mode, which keeps the game advancing while you walk in real life, letting you take over at any time and keeping a log of any interesting event along the way.
Not launched yet, but I have a very preliminar landing page for it here:
I was chatting with a user of Eternal Vault (eternalvault.app), and we discussed about a grave problem that I always knew we had, but I just wasn't 100% sure how it could be solved.
It was about what happens if Eternal Vault itself shuts down where people are putting their trust in something to be there when the time comes when they are no more and their trusted contacts wants to unlock their vault.
We chatted on reddit, and I majorly worked towards making it all work even if Eternal Vault went under someday (I hope it doesn't)
This is what I am thinking about: https://eternalvault.app/continuity/
I’m making a digital real watercolor kit.
I’m a software developer and watercolor painter so my goal is to use real world painting techniques and have the results feel and look real.
Modeling the physics of paper, brush bristles, pigments, water, color mixing, drying in real time using gpu.
Built in rust using wgpu.
Currently looking for iPad beta testers if anyone is interested (supports Apple Pencil or finger).
Been continuing on my Korean journey and found I wanted a better way to make flash cards and learn from sites I visit / Netflix / YouTube.
I made Jupjup (https://getjupjup.com) as a chrome and Firefox extension that lets you save words and phrases from all over and then do spaced repetition to remember them. My Korean has improved dramatically since I’ve started using it.
I’m working on Loop: a mobile-first companion workspace for coding harnesses. I spent several months holding my newborn in one hand and trying to talk to agents one-handed on my phone. Every mobile UI is still based around chat, which is a really poor mobile UX when you’re doing multiple things at once!
So I built Loop around the idea that agent results are the important unit of work, and you should be able to navigate them easily. The goal is to make interacting with agents via your phone feel familiar and intuitive based on the mobile UX we’ve all come to expect.
Loop runs on your own computer — no account, no server, no app store — and pairs using a Cloudflare quick-tunnel-generated QR code. It wraps the agents you already use (Codex, Claude Code, Pi, OpenCode, Antigravity, Muse Code, Grok Build, or any ACP agent), each keeping its own context, tools, sign-in and billing — local models through Pi or OpenCode work too.
GitHub is here: https://github.com/j-asefa/loop
I'd love feedback from anyone else who builds from a phone.
I'm building an open-source "spatial workspace for directing AI coding agents like an engineering director".
I got overwhelmed by walls of text of parallel Claude Code sessions. This limited the sessions I could steer in parallel to about 5. I knew there had to be a better way, and I found one: A canvas per project. Work laid out as cards. An agent in a worktree per card. Chat condensed to WhatsApp-style back and forth, not a litany of tool calls. Result is usually a narrated demo video that I can comment on by voice to have the agent go another round. Remote-control from my phone. Remote workers to scale beyond my machine. Everyone I know who tried it has stuck with it so far.
https://github.com/sadilek/obeya – looking for feedback!
Still working on my Minecraft MCP project. The models have good image analysis now so I'm feeding them topographic maps of the terrain and they build using Starlark scripts.
This keeps the tool calls low and it's fast enough to work in voice mode.
Almost 12 years on Micro https://micro.mu. something I keep trying to kill and won't go away. Started as a Go framework now more of a personal assistant and home server. I stepped away for a few years and came back to it to try fulfil the goals of the original mission which was a Google alternative or superapp. It's not really for anyone else at the moment even though I post it here frequently. Probably needs a ground up rewrite. Currently working on an android app. It also has a pwa.
A few Apple container plugins.
https://robertderose.github.io/container-krun-runtime/
It’s an alternative VM engine that uses libkrun. The main purpose is that libkrun supports returning memory back to macOS when the VM releases it. It also has better performance in some areas, but it’s only been tested on my M1 laptop and I haven’t added nested support yet because I only have an M1
And https://robertderose.github.io/container-compose-plugin/
It’s a full docker system running inside Apple Container’s machines with automatic localhost port forwarding, automatic shutdown if nothing is running, and exposes a tcp socket so you can use most tools by just exporting your DOCKER_HOST environment variable.
I have a few other projects but they are still in earlier stages
A private, paid, ad-free and personally customizable search engine: Uruky [1]. It was launched earlier this year and reached 400 MAUs and €2k MRR last month.
A simple EU static and app hosting service: PodBy [2]. It was launched last week, and is at €10 MRR.
Thank you for asking and for your suggestions!
[1]: https://uruky.com
[2]: https://podby.com
https://skymap.rulkens.com A browser based open source universe explorer. I'm in between jobs currently and finally took time to work on my passion project. It started with just visualizing some galaxy surveys, but it got a little out of hand and now includes everything from hi-res tiled earth/mars, Gaia star field (16M stars), a milky way renderer and much more.
It's so amazing to have the ability to gather and parse publicly available scientific data and actually visualize it in real-time. It's one of those projects I'm learning a lot from and can keep going with (the universe is a big place :)). As a software developer for 20+ years, its been mind-blowing and often also frustrating to have Claude generate code that I deem good enough. About half of my time has actually been spent on refactoring, building quite some skills in guiding LLMs in the process. I guess that part still hasn't changed in a growing codebase.
https://www.intelligrade.de/en
A SaaS for teachers and schools that helps them create, conduct and grade exams and tests (with safe exam browser integration to prevent cheating). Grading happens automatically for almost all segment types, for free form text we have an optional AI integration. I recently added an MCP server so teachers can bring their own LLM with fairly fine grained permission controls for it. It’s hosted in the EU with options for schools to self host with a license.
Currently we are in a pilot phase and are yet to make our first sale but we are reaching out to schools and gave out some pro accounts for free for people to try out and feedback has been great.
We are just two people, a teacher who was dissatisfied with the tooling in the field and me, who engineered a solution that we believe is genuinely better than what’s out there.
I've been disliking the recent trend of LLMs releasing with very promising and high benchmarks, only to disappoint by failing simple tasks or sanity checks. Plus, benchmarks don't really tell you about the LLMs' stylistic choices.
So I made 'Model Style not-a-Bench' to be able to quickly eyeball various LLMs, most preferably at 4-bit quants, under 100GB weights (excluding storage offloads like Qwen Flash Next's approach).
My own programming language called: dia (stands for do it all).
Aims to be a full batteries included language + standard libraries, so that building both with and without AI assistance is effortless and can reuse the building blocks without having to reimplement things. Wrote more about the why here: https://dia-lang.org/vision
Most notable such case is the UI library, where you can take out just text rendering, or event/input system, or the signals-based reactive library, and reuse them in other contexts.
some other notable features: - vey inspired by rust in syntax and type features - batteries included library containing a full cross-platform gui library including a prosemirror-like wydiwyg text editor - rust like memory safety, uses arenas for cyclic objects so that the language doesn't need lifetime parameters like rust, easier to reason about for generic code - transpiles down to c, then compiles to anywhere C can run - has its own native JSX-like syntax called DSX, any functions with the right signature can be written in DSX notation, not just UI components - incrementally compiled, has HMR (hot module reload) - effortless C interop (dia compiler ships with clang). no need to write manual wrappers for libraries (but sometimes need to write a short manifest file to map dia's memory safety with most c libraries' manual management)
More information here: https://dia-lang.org/ (Not open-sourced yet, waiting until the base features are stable)
I’m working on ai interviews for system design prep.
I’m currently in a beta phase giving people free access for feedback. If you’re prepping for interviews and want to give it a try let me know
It was born from the fact that whenever I prep for system design I spend a lot of time revising and learning material (as well as drawing from my experience) but whenever it came to the interview I just seemed to struggle to put that together to design the system I was given.
My custom harness Xi - complete with code mode in clojure, guarding by rules, mult player etc: https://xi-agent.com/
I'm working on a diffusion inference engine. I dislike node editors like ComfyUI and wanted a decent python API to control it. The first version was another python/PyTorch variant which was decent but still way too slow to my liking.
I ended up rewriting all the inference in C++/CUDA and I'm finally getting close to limits on the devices I tested. The benchmarks are still a work in progress, I plan to add high resolution comparisons (1536^2 for images, and 1344x768 for video) to give insight in how well this scales.
I've built two directory app websites as a fun way to track some topics that I’ve been interest in.
One is https://bannedbookshelf.com which lists books that have been banned for whatever reason, or have been yanked off Amazon for being too ‘spicy’.
The other one is https://fangamesdb.com which tracks the decompilation and recompilation scene which is exploding now with AI reverse engineering tools.
WhatsApp released the Agent API but it needs a constant poller to run which sucks as all my apps are serverless that scale down to zero when there's no traffic. So I built Unpoll (unpoll.cc) that takes care of polling, cursor, webhooks and retries. You can simply add your agent's token which is stored encrypted and then send & receive messages by plain old HTTP requests and webhooks.
Lemme know what you guys think and happy to provide a free month to you as beta testers!
Varios projects all here: https://univerlab.org
I'm building a self-hosted media server for video, like Plex or Jellyfin. I'll be opening the beta in about a month.
Features:
- No paywalls, bandwidth limiting, or crippled behavior. No login required.
- Single go binary, deployed via Docker.
- Reaches your home server from anywhere with no port forwarding, no VPN and no paywall, even behind carrier-grade NAT. No Tailscale required.
- Cast to another device. You can use any logged in device as a playback screen.
- Watch together, with voice support: Play synced video with friends, and also chat voice. You can also mix this with casting to another device.
- Dialogue boost and loudness levelling for every film.
- Real adaptive quality, tuned for a home's upload.
- Hardware transcoding, full quality in every supported browser.
- A library that explains itself: what the scanner saw, why each title matched, guesses marked for you to check, and a disk that's gone missing shown as missing instead of its titles silently vanishing.
- Your data stays yours: The database is a rebuildable index, metadata corrections can be written back as NFO files that Kodi and Jellyfin read, and an automatic backup keeps what can't be re-derived (watch state, preferences, shares).
Security is a primary concern:
With the ever increasing pace of hacks and CVEs and AI-assisted intrusion, you simply can't be too careful anymore.
- The core (which talks to the network, handles the API, users and the database) never opens a media file or runs FFmpeg.
- A separate media node does every file read and every transcode. It has no network access and talks to the core only over Unix sockets.
- FFmpeg runs under Landlock and seccomp with no path to the file and no socket. All it can do is read and write streams.
- Small dependency tree on an allowlist, pure Go with no cgo, secrets sealed at rest and never logged.
- The library can be mounted read-only, so even a full compromise can't encrypt or delete your media.
- Cryptographically signed chain for servers and releases.
I built an app to help me develop healthy habits and routines on my computer. IT blocks sites/apps based on a schedule and tracks my activity for later analysis.
I had simpler versions of this earlier but never something comprehensive. It was also my first AI assisted development project. I've been using it personally for around a year. I polished it and released it as an open source project last month. It's specific to Linux (which is my primary platform)
The website is at https://glockerapp.com/
I'd posted this earlier on HN hoping to get some feedback but didn't get any traction https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50349646
For the past year and half or so, I have been building https://rationalgrid.ai with the goal of bringing together a multi-player LLM interface (based on a underlying graph data structure) and publishing platform, for people to work together to explore deep questions.
It has been tough going, and not really found an audience yet, but would appreciate any thoughts / criticism's.
(Built using Elixir / Phoenix / Live-view / Cytoscape - an amazing stack for web / AI)
I quit my job a year ago to launch https://docuview.ai.
It’s been sort of a whiplash experience, but ive been so much happier building this business than I was working.
Real estate is a space that’s very close to me, so I was able to see the demand for a product like this long before I went searching for it.
I’m not alone in the space, but we’ve focused on building a product that’s opinionated enough to where the other players would be taking a risk by trying to copy the things we do. I think this was a good move.
We won’t be the largest player, but we don’t have to be. And we build the product we ourselves want, not a product that kinda fits everyone but every user only uses 20% of.
I’ll probably never go back to a job :)
My pet project is this match tracker for League of Legends: https://scout-for-lol.com
Essentially it posts notifications to Discord when someone starts/ends a game with a pretty image.
All your games are saved to a datalake and you can create competitions or scheduled reports over your community's matches.
I've been working on this for ~4-5 years.
Hey HN!
My co-founder Abhishek and I are master’s students at the University of Ottawa who got tired of buying cheap furniture every time we moved apartments.
We decided to build Usefulls ..starting with the Nomad 23, a standard 23 kg checked suitcase that physically converts into a twin-door wardrobe cabinet. When you take the removable wheels off, circular bumps on the base seat into grooves on top of another case, letting you stack them into a full-size modular wardrobe.
We’d love your feedback on the concept, the physical design, or how we're approaching modular furniture/luggage!
You can check it out here: https://usefulls.com/
I’ve been working on Beacon, which just got approved on the App Store! It’s a mobile app to instantly answer “which friend is free to talk right now?” and summon them in a single tap.
Send your beacon to a group, and everyone gets a gentle ping. The first person who answers gets connected for a 1-1 call, and for everyone else the signal drops silently. It does not log any missed calls so there’s neither pressure to answer nor pressure to return calls.
Overall it works really well! It’s best if you're able to join with 4+ friends/family you’d like to chat with more. I have dozens of connections in the app now and it feels like absolute magic to me. I tap the button to send my beacon to everyone and get a random friend on the line.
I'm working on an IoT automation platform built on top of AtomVM that lets AI agents control a fleet of devices, including device management, telemetry, OTA updates, etc.
The idea is to expose device capabilities (sensors, actuators, cameras) as tools via MCP, effectively giving AI agents the ability to interact with the physical world.
Currently, the platform supports all flavours of the ESP32 and has partial support for the RPi Pico 2 W.
The backend is Elixir/Phoenix, the firmware is Gleam with occasional Erlang.
I'm currently building AssetJay, an asset management tools for companies without IT departments. When I grew my startup to 25 people, I always tried and failed to keep track of all the devices and peripherals we owned, so built https://assetjay.com to make it easy to do.
I’m building a voice-first second brain for Apple Watch. The idea is simple: capture thoughts instantly from your wrist using the Ultra’s Action button or Siri keywords, without needing your iPhone nearby (using cellular or wi-fi).
Audio is transcribed using EU-based speech-to-text with zero data retention, then turned into searchable notes and summaries.
Basically, I want to capture a thought before I forget it, without pulling out my phone.
If anyone’s interested, I might consider publishing on the app store.
Still working on Kavla, my open source SQL canvas https://github.com/aleda145/kavla
I'm very excited by adding interactivity. I have a new "knob" feature that pops out when you type {var}. It infers the column's type and values.
`SELECT * FROM hn_posts WHERE score>{score}` will grant you a slider that goes from 0 to 6015
Titanic Browser demo (no login, it's all WASM): https://app.kavla.dev/
Also been working on a "chat to data ingestion pipeline". Not sure where I'm going with this but I like the idea? https://github.com/aleda145/pompos
I'm working on Hale, an abstract distributed systems language.
It's a traditional systems language in the sense that you have fine control over how resources are used, but it's abstract in the sense that you have to come to an agreement with the compiler about your intent around the resources, rather than directly declaring the machinery.
It's a distributed language in the sense that there is a higher level structural abstraction in the language that situates computations of the program within a recursive graph structure. Part of that structure incorporates message broker semantics. This gives the compiler a unified view of programs across arbitrary process boundaries. The structural abstractions also enable an effects+formal verification syntax within the language, which allows programmers to codify architectural decisions that are then checked by the compiler.
The compiler itself is infrastructure aware, and the highest layer of functionality it handles is configuring the environment into which applications deploy. The single language handles everything from individual memory allocations to distributed fleet deployments.
The language is close to v1, and I'm currently building a fully distributed inference-as-a-service application with it. Arbitrary hardware/supply matched against arbitrary callers/demand in real time.
https://github.com/hale-lang/hale https://github.com/hale-lang/voice
ArtCraft and the Craft Apps. https://getartcraft.com
We're going to open source everything. Software, SaaS, infrastructure, weights, platforms, protocols.
We're going to bridge local and cloud compute in a seamless way.
We're building an app factory for high throughout development. Reverse engineering tools for non-technical people. We're going to make high quality libraries that others can remix.
We're going to make all of this agentic and AI/CLI first class.
We're going to open source everything and make the world hacker-first again, like Web 1.0 with P2P and RSS and APIs and IRC.
Join us!
For Halloween I made a VR survival horror game for meta quest 3/3s.
- https://sxp.studio/aftercorp
The cool thing about that game is that it uses a realtime environment mesh reconstruction algorithm that allows me to create an approximation of the world 3D geometry and project a dummy “flashlight” with hand tracking. I think I’ve only seen one other game do that technique on quest (some laser tag game).
It runs at 60fps with a tight GPU budget. Consequently it’s not the most beautiful game, but it’s actually pretty fun, immersive and can scale to all sorts of environments. I’ll be porting it to iOS next (handheld AR style).
I'm working on a shared calendar for couples. I attempt to build a distraction-free experience inside the app and to keep it as a PWA.
Django + HTMX + SQLite, Hetzner VPS - feedback is welcome.
I'm making a replacement motherboard for the Nokia 1100 that runs Linux and supports LTE. I have the software working well on a MangoPi dev board and I've designed two PCBs: one "test fit" board that just breaks out the phone keypad/LCD to pin headers, and the actual board with everything on it. Now I just need to order the PCBA which is super expensive :)
It uses an allwinner T113-S3 SoC and the Quectel EC25 LTE module, and I've made sure voice calling works over LTE, at least on T-Mobile in the US. (this is tricky bc of carrier rules)
video and photos of MangoPi test setup and my board layout here: https://constcast.org/n1100c/
Two of my flagship projects I've been working on lately:
Video Commander - A desktop application suite of video encoding, inspection and quality analysis tools (ffmpeg, vmaf, mp4box). I now have quite a bit of paying customers!
Cargocat - Also a desktop S3 client that I created out of some of the components I've done on Video Commander. Newly launched, so still slowly gaining some traction.
Both are built with Rust + Tauri and React. Happy to answer any questions.
A small tema and I are currently building https://scenema.ai, a platform for creating whiteboard and 2D animated explainers. We initially started Scenema to deal with character and voice consistency in cinematic AI videos. Most video models can only generate 5-10 second clips. More recently that has gone up to 15s. If you wanted to create any meaningful video longer than that, it becomes incredibly difficult to manage your characters and voices.
We ended up moving away from cinematic films and started focusing on explainers for two reasons: 1) we consume a lot of explainers and wanted to produce our own, and 2) traditional animated explainers are very expensive to produce and time consuming.
It took us a few months to get here but we’re now able to generate minutes long explainers ( up to 30 minutes) with studio-level animation across whiteboard and 2d. Here are some examples:
https://scenema.ai/explore/what-is-audio-compression-dinner-...
https://scenema.ai/explore/do-opposites-really-attract-what-...
https://scenema.ai/explore/every-salon-service-is-a-chemistr...
Working on / dog fooding my graph based recipe app[0].
There are more things I'd like to do with the graph concept, like linking two user's recipe trees if they were imported via the same URL. Really trying to to avoid features that I think would be cool that don't provide any functionality.
There are still a few features I'd like to implement that are more in the vein of nice to have in any recipe application, like nested recipes, temperature conversions, volumetric ingredients amounts to mass conversions, etc.
But I've been using it for new recipes and converting my old recipes I have written down in the margins to this format and I've been happy with how usable its been in these early stages.
https://evalship.com is what I'm spending my time on most - approaching it as Trello for evals; a platform that should be good enough for most people.
Also spending too much time on https://extraheadroom.com to support existing users
and too little time on passion projects https://nommer.ai and https://criticaster.com
It's been a productive year :-)
An app-only lunch bowl chain that can execute very complex customisation without breaking. We've built "cook augmentation" that takes over decision making and QA, added an app-only ordering (accessible to the agents) and ended up with a frictionless experience where you just tell your agent "I'm hungry" and we cook a fresh, hot, delicious bowl that's good for you.
Currently at prototype stage, raising angel round in order to do a live pop-up.
Hmm. A lot of smaller projects that seem to be slowly integrated into agent skills. I am admittedly moving into agent world very slowly.
Though now, with the specter of raised prices on the horizon, the local only portion of my setup gained some additional focus.
Still, from the fun mini-projects:
- attempting to replicate testing whether agents elevate inferred persona, memory, or background context above explicit user requests ( https://bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-10-07/study-clau... ) - a few hackaton entries - my llm rpg got some few additions ( still nothing I am willing to publish ) - first working and useful unraid app;p
I am building https://withthislink.com
It's a site for couples to create a wedding invitation website where guests can RSVP right on the invitation. You get a personalized link for an invitation with different domain options.
I think it looks neat and turned out rather nice.
I got tired of always having to update my wife, and my family members résumés. So I created https://theresumechef.com It's private,free to use, no pay walls or monthly subscriptions.It has10 resume templates to choose from to get you started.The final resume can be exported as a PDF, or stored on Google Drive or Dropbox in JSON format. There are still a few issues, but I've learned a ton by just creating and launching this project. I have some exciting new product ideas, but I'm currently waiting on my Dutch KvK number to accept online payments with Stripe.
I am rewriting LaTeX from scratch in zig. Byte compatible with pdfTeX XeteX and luaTeX.
It’s faster at compiling, better errors with modern DX.
I've been working on a pi extension for running agent swarms. Paired with deepseek, this has been performing really well for various research tasks.
https://pi.dev/packages/agent-horde
After every run, it generates a postmortem which I then use to iterate on the protocol. I call it poor man's RSI.
I continue to work on Akariq my travel eSIM business [0]. No app or account required. I have expanded my offering to 200+ countries. In the next 1 week to so prices will come down further in Europe and Caribbean regions.
A lot of people from HN have bought travel eSIMs. I’ve received messages of support plus most people have switched over from Airalo which is expensive and generally doesn’t connect to the best network in the country.
I am trying to build a better place for people and companies in tech to find jobs and talent. Recently I redesigned the whole platform but everything is pretty much work in progress.
A free, open-source browser extension called Karaoke Pitch that lets you adjust the pitch of a YouTube video (and optionally store that chosen pitch for later).
I find it to be a great way to practice singing/music.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/karaoke-pitch...
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/karaoke-pitch/facck...
https://github.com/djeastm/karaoke-pitch
The Firefox one has 40 average daily users and the Chrome one has 287 installs as of today.
There was a big jump in late October that might have had something to do with Halloween? I have no idea if people do karaoke more on Halloween. Still no ratings yet for either version, but maybe someday someone will.