alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
1. Vibe coding a microcontroller firmware project. I'm using "vibe coding" in jest here because I'm actually an experienced coder, but this was a chance to try using the AI coding assistants for a clean sheet project at minimal risk. I'm going on 63, and could easily finish my career without AI, but where's the fun in that?
One amusing thing I've noticed is that every time the AI generates code with a hard coded hexadecimal constant, it's a hallucination. My son suggested feeding all of the chip datasheets into the AI and see if the constants improve.
2. Finally converting my home semi-hobby electronics business (something like a guitar effects pedal) to machine assembled circuit boards.
In my free time this year I've been working on a full stack JS framework called Torpor: https://torpor.dev (https://github.com/andrewjk/torpor)
Components are JS functions, containing UI that is (mostly) HTML, with reactivity only via proxied objects.
To test it out I built a distributed social media/microblog site called Redraft: https://redraft.social (https://github.com/andrewjk/redraft)
It's edge native (with a Cloudflare deploy button in that repo) with your posts stored in an SQLite file. You can log in to your site to post and comment on your own posts, and use a web extension to comment on posts from people you follow wherever they are on the web.
There are many bugs and missing features, the documentation is patchy, and it's probably riddled with security holes. Give it a go if you're feeling brave!
Working on NetBox Designs: https://netboxlabs.com/blog/netbox-designs-introducing-decla...
Infrastructure architects think in terms of building blocks in "high-level designs" and those building blocks are often socialised/expressed in Visio/Spreadsheets. Thinking in building blocks is now more necessary than ever because of the sheer size of the infra being designed/deployed.
This approach is problematic after the design phase because there's a lossy translation to where the low-level design lives, often referred to as the Source of Truth, like NetBox.
NetBox Designs allows users to express composable, versioned, and templatizable building blocks that can be rendered to low level designs. No lossy translations, and you can always check in the future "does my LLD still match my HLD and if not, where?"
I have just released a map of median rents in Berlin [0]. Now I'm improving it. I want people to enter their search criteria, and get an idea of how rare and expensive their desired apartment would be.
This will help people set clear expectations for their apartment search.
Just launched a restricted browser for kids for iOS: https://weblock.online Now testing on my kids. The idea is that the browser is whitelist-only, so kids can open only approved websites. I receive a notification when they want to visit an unknown website and I can allow or deny it. Works great for my family, hope it will be useful for someone else.
Simplification of my digital self. Removed most of my online accounts. Removed all my VPS's. Removed most apps from my phone except core ones. Cancelled a lot of online subscriptions.
In the real world finally moved everything to USB-C. Gave all my old cables away. I have two chargers in my home and a handful of C to C cables. Everything connects to everything now.
Home is now downgraded to a dumb home. Lights work on physical toggles. No hubs or sensors anywhere. Heat and AC is with a dumb panel on the wall.
It feels freeing.
https://pistepal.app/ - a ski map app - built at breakneck speed over the last few months. I believe this is the only ski map app that offers turn-by-turn navigation!
Screenshots in the App Stores, e.g. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pistepal/id6754510927
Still a little bit rough around the edges but hopefully will be / is in decent enough shape for the start of the ski season (just about happening now..)
Currently figuring out the right balance of free tier & daily trial. Priced at $10/month and therefore significantly undercutting the competition, hopefully this is enough to gain entry into the market. (May need a more generous daily trial though, admittedly 10 minutes is not really enough to actually try it out on the mountain).
Seems ad spend is necessary to get any kind of traction...
Feedback welcome!
Open source Nerf blaster simulator, for both spring and pneumatic blasters.
https://github.com/btrettel/blastersim
The core simulator part works, but I don't yet have a user interface or documentation. Probably just going to be text input files to start, maybe a GUI later. Recently, I'm mostly working on testing.
The simulator is object-oriented and basically allows one to build up a blaster from separate control volumes and connections between control volumes. This is useful as it allows the same core simulator framework to handle different blaster configurations and even variants of them. For example, someone asked me to make the spring piston able to pull a vacuum on its back side due to not having sufficient flow. That's easy here as I just need to add another control volume and the appropriate connection onto the basic springer configuration.
I’m building PaperDrop it's a research workspace that turns PDFs and new arXiv papers into something you can actually work with (notes, questions, cross paper comparisons). Would love feedback from people who read a lot of papers: https://paperdrop.xyz
It's still early prototype / beta, but wanted to share it anyway!
This is actually pretty much as done as it's going to be (could use some nicer UI feedback, i.e. how you actually use the app) - it is actually just a demo for an effort I undertook to mod Datastar to support nested web components. I am writing it up as we speak!
Instructions: you have to answer three questions; each one will auto-submit once your response goes over 100 characters; the answer to the third question is your "post". It's a proof of concept of a friction intervention for social media to encourage slow thinking before posting (and hopefully reframing negative experiences in the mind, it's kind of dual purpose).
I'm working on EACL: http://github.com/theronic/eacl
EACL (Enterprise Access ControL) is a situated ReBAC authorization library based on SpiceDB, built in Clojure and backed by Datomic. EACL queries offer sub-millisecond query times and has replaced SpiceDB at work (CloudAfrica).
'Situated' here means that your permissions live _next_ to your data in Datomic, which avoids a network hop and avoids syncing to an external AuthZ system like SpiceDB, so all queries are fully consistent.
EACL is fast for typical workloads and is benchmarked against 800k permissioned entities. Once you need more scale or consistency semantics, you can sync your relationships from Datomic to SpiceDB 1-for-1 in near real-time because there is no impedance mismatch between EACL & SpiceDB.
Read the rationale for EACL here: https://eacl.dev/#why-was-eacl-built-the-problem-with-extern...
IMO, if you need fine-grained permissions, EACL is currently best-in-class for the Clojure ecosystem. EACL is especially suited to Electric Clojure applications and can be used to populate menus in real-time.
EACL would not have been possible to build solo in my spare time without modern AI models to rapidly implement specifications and test against human-written tests.
Here is a ~7-minute screen recording of EACL used from an Electric Clojure application for real-time ReBAC queries: https://x.com/PetrusTheron/status/1996344248925294773
Trying to build a small-scale ISP/hosting provider domiciled in Canada. We really want to be able to rent real rack space to enthusiasts who would like to benefit from having stuff in the datacenter but don't want to take on the opportunity cost to get started. It came out of my own desire to have a machine in a DC rack.
This week we've been writing a bunch of "reviews" of self-hostable software since a lot of our friends are curious about this space but don't have a good understanding of how to get started. https://blog.colocataires.dev.
I’m building a planner that automatically plans employee shift schedules based on their availabilities and roles.
There’s many different solutions out there but I’m carving out a niche where we deal with complex shift assignment problems.
For example one of our customers has specific union rules that need to be followed when assigning work and we ensure that they are compliant.
Our backend relies on an MIP solver as well as heuristic search to refine plans.
I'm currently working on something that lets you describe a hardware product in plain English and get actual manufacturable files out — PCB, enclosure, firmware, the lot.
Very early days still. Whilst I created a fork of toon for Kicad (called TOKN (https://www.mikeayles.com/#tokn)), with the intention of using a reduced token format to generate schematics using LLM's, I could get the models to follow the syntax correctly, but they didn't have the knowledge. So I was then going to create a whole RAG system, but got distracted by this current project.
There are people out there doing AI schematic generation, like flux.ai (which is incredible (and incredibly well funded)), but 90% of products, especially at proof of concept stage, are basically a microcontroller, some power, probably usb, and some IO, bluetooth/wifi if you're lucky. So we can use a library of pre-validated subcircuits and slots them together on a grid. Routing's deterministic, so if it compiles, it works. (sorry, deeppcb & Quilter!)
The enclosure side is more fun: once the PCB's done you've got real dimensions to work with (board size, mounting holes, where the connectors poke out), so I use an image model to generate some concept art, then feed that to an openscad generating model as visual inspiration alongside the hard constraints.
Basically trying to get a full hardware product pipeline done automatically.
Building a simple service that allows one to post live activities to mobile devices (iOS to begin with).
It started as something I wanted to build for myself. I have a Bosch dishwasher that lacks any glanceable indication of how far along it is. Bosch provides an app, but checking the progress takes too long to be useful.
I figured live activities was a good fit, and then realized that I am not alone in wanting something like this. So, I am trying to make it into something usable for all the home automation tinkerers.
Purposefully not building software but cold calling 100 businesses in my niche. Starting at 1 call per day for 10 days, then 2 calls per day for 10 days, then 2 conversations per day for 10 days, and scaling up until I reach 100 calls. Exposure therapy as well as product discovery wrapped in one.
A personal photography website for myself using a bunch of AI services to enable automatic tagging, color extraction, and hopefully some novel discovery methods.
I really like the color discovery features - I wanted something like this to exist when I was trying to find prints for my house with specific color harmonies.
I’m working on a deterministic execution layer for AI systems.
The idea is to treat LLMs as constrained components inside explicitly defined workflows: strict input/output schemas, validated DAGs, clear failure modes, and replayable execution. Most “AI unreliability” I’ve seen isn’t model-related — it comes from ambiguous structure and hidden assumptions around the model.
We’re exploring this through a project called FACET, focused on making AI behavior testable, debuggable, and reproducible in the same way we expect from other parts of a system.
Still early, but the goal is simple: less magic, more contracts.
Working on making Rust accessible to all with engaging content
https://aibodh.com/posts/bevy-rust-game-development-chapter-...
https://aibodh.com/posts/bevy-rust-game-development-chapter-...
https://aibodh.com/posts/bevy-rust-game-development-chapter-...
Open sourcing a system where you might have notes in markdown to build a knowledge base, and review them according to a schedule, but also Anki like flash cards attached to each note.
All notes are simple markdown file stored locally.
I’ve been using it to benefit my research and make the knowledge to stick better on my head for several years. My base is more than 400 markdown notes now, and I sync them to a private GitHub repository.
I am still plugging away at https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/hex/en-US/today , a daily word game for language learners.
Since hacker news last saw it, it’s been translated into English, German, Spanish and Chinese. If, say, a Chinese speaker wanted to learn more English words, then they could go to https://threeemojis.com/zh-CN/play/hex/en-US/today and play the game with English words with Chinese definitions and interface. This is the first cross language daily word game of its kind (as far as I know), so it’s been a lot of fun watching who plays which languages from where.
The next challenge that I’m thinking about is growing the game. The write ups and mentions on blogs add up, the social sharing helps, but I’d really like to break into the short form video realm.
If you read interviews from other word game creators, every successful game has some variation of got popular riding the wordle wave, or one random guy made a random TikTok one time that went super viral, and otherwise every other growth method they have tried since then hasn’t worked that well and they are coasting along.
So, sans another wordle wave, I am working on growing a TikTok following and then working on converting that following into players, a bit of a two step there, but that’s how the game is played these days. https://www.tiktok.com/@three_emojis_hq for the curious. Still experimenting and finding video styles and formats that travel well there. Pingo AI and other language apps have shown how strong TikTok can be for growth, so I think there’s something there. That’s all for this month!
I'm writing https://github.com/controversy187/kerbalbook, which aims to be a hobbyist's guide to orbital mechanics, spaceflight, and maybe astrophysics. All this through the lens of a Kerbal Space Program walkthrough.
Some months ago, I saw a tweet from @awilkinson: “I just found out how much we pay for DocuSign and my jaw dropped. What's the best alternative?” Me being naive, I thought “how hard could would it actually be to build a free e-sign tool?”
Turns out not that hard.
In about a weekend, I built a UETA and ESIGN compliant tool. And it was free. And it cost me less than $50. Unlimited free e-sign. https://useinkless.com/
Making a totally unnecessary and overly elaborate magic item system for my game https://www.chesscraft.ca based on Diablo 2 items. Is it the most reasonable next thing to do to expand the business and monthly revenue? Hah, no.
But unlike my day job, this is my project and I get to do what I want. This is my code therapy.
For the past week, I’m working on creating device with a screen to show my indian parents if i’m in a meeting or not. So they don’t trouble me and come in my room unannounced when im in a meeting.
It’s build using ESP32 and a small screen which shows On and Off and the time till meeting is over. I learnt Fusion 360 and designed a small snap fit case and got it 3d printed.
I have a small electron app running in my mac os system tray which connect to esp using BLE and it also checks if Mac Camera is in use (using Apple logs) and then communicate it with the device.
Calling it Door Frame. Had quite fun making it as i learnt 3d design, c++ code using Platform IO and other fun stuff. Even designed a small binary protocol to exchange data over BLE
SecurityBot.dev is an all-in-one uptime, performance, security, and SEO monitoring tool. I launched it a few months ago and have been iterating on it ever since. Later this week SecurityBot.dev will log its 1 millionth uptime check which is pretty cool to see.
It includes the usual uptime monitoring service that you see everywhere else, but also features such as a PageSpeed Insights monitor (https://securitybot.dev/pagespeed-insights) and a broken link checker (https://securitybot.dev/broken-link-checker). I continue adding new monitor types as I personally need them (and also based on use feedback).
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/options-at-the-money-premiums/...
I am working on the android version of this app. It is a tiny tool for options trader to see all the premium on one screen. Here is the reddit thread where I initially launched it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Optionswheel/comments/1nlelbp/i_mad...
If you trade stock or options, would love to get your feedback! Thank you.
I was thinking about FizzBuzz and thought it might be cool to benchmark various LLMs to see the highest number they could go before they got it wrong. FizzBuzz is cool because you can test whether the model's can generalize to any other game (divisors of 3 and 7 instead of 3 and 5 for example).
Fun, short and sweet experiment to run over the weekend, with some mildly interesting results :)
I'm building a utility to help DJs find "play-out" versions of tracks they already like[1]. You can play with it here[2]. Streaming services are optimized for Radio Edits. But to actually mix a track, I usually need the Extended Mix, Club Edit, or a specific Remix. Manually searching for the "DJ version" of every single track in a 50-song playlist is tedious administrative work that kills the joy of digging.
Remixify automates the search while leaving the selection to you. You paste a Spotify playlist URL, and it helps you or provides you a good starting point for digging. It groups the results by the original track so you can quickly preview and save the versions you want to a new playlist.
We don't try to recommend new music or use AI to guess your taste. It just finds the usable versions of the music you already selected.
A place to find and be found for twitter users only right now. As a silly project I am trying to make not a social network, but an extension of another social network. So far its going OK. It also functions as a link-tree like site with profiles: https://meetinghouse.cc/x/simonsarris
Eventually I might open it up more widely, or make a different globe per social media network.
I'm building an app that takes a screenshot every hour from some news websites. It's is a small python script running on my raspberry pi 5 and for now I'm saving the images there. I'm planning to build a front-end app to explorer how each website changes over the course of a day, focusing only on the top of the landing page.
I've decided to take a break from working on Pirsch Analytics (pirsch.io) until next year and focus on some side projects instead:
1. Shifu (https://github.com/emvi/shifu) - a code-based CMS with admin UI. It's really easy to set up, written in Go, free and open-source, and I already sold a few websites using it. It can be used as kind of a framework to build more specialized features into a website and takes away the maintenance hell from managing a WordPress installation or a similiar CMS with tons of plugins that break with every update.
2. Zenko (working title, repo is private for now) - a very simple and no-bullshit project management software. It will be free and open-source, but I might offer a hosted option for a few bucks (like $20/year for all users of a team). I mainly build this for ourself to replace Linear, because we don't really make use of it. Don't get me wrong, Linear is awesome, but we basically only need an advanced Todo list. Main goals:
* Pull updates on the dashboard by yourself, instead of receiving notifications all the time via email
* Keep it simple stupid - no unnecessary features, no AI, just the bare minimum
* Cheap (for the hosted version, free if self-hosted) and easy to host (again written in Go)
* No feature-creep
3. Last but not least, I'm working on a "game engine" written in Go and SDL2. I do this for fun, but it is coming along nicely and teached me a few new concepts already (like ECS in Go).
Working on a low cost email service. Ditched Gmail for my custom domains to avoid lock-in risks, and I believe devs really need stupid-cheap ($10/yr 5GB, unlimited mailboxes/domains/aliases/SMTP/IMAP/webmail) high-quality hosting that nails deliverability with zero spam tolerance. Bootstrapped this instead of pricier options like FastMail. Thoughts?
A prompt engineering tool that takes vague prompts and transforms them into context-rich JSON/XML structured prompts. Fully customizable and tracks prompting history safely in tab session, automatically injecting context and learns style.
Makes outputs of any AI so much better due to restructuring and breaking down requests into instructions AI can easily execute upon and mitigating risk of hallucinations. Perfect for complex tasks like coding and content creation.
Exists as a free chrome extension right now. Would love if you tried it and have any feedback!
Email me at [email protected]
https://opaledx.com / https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal
open source browser first server-less markdown document workspace and publisher, contending to be a free obsidian alternative
storage is done in indexeddb or it can utilize opfs to work on a local file directory
comes with git integration
can publish to aws cloudflare vercel and github pages
built with shadcn react and typescript
I want to become a software professional, but I don't really know how I can do it. Focus on studying for many certificates or go to work or study at a higher level in school... Now AI is developing very fast; Claude can code very fast for every feature in my project, so I think I'm about to lose my job.
Working on cargo like tooling for cpp. It just let you jump start a project for different build systems(vcpkg, bazel and meson). I am also planning to bring CLion features build on docker, ssh to cli with tui setup. Docker side is close to complete working on ssh for now.
I've been working (very slowly) on a cross-platform UI library written in C. It uses as much as it can from the OS without outright using the native widgets for everything. Rather the focus is on letting the user of the library customize the look of the controls as they see fit.
It's unfortunate but native UI (as in, using the native controls with their native look) has mostly died off in my opinion, at least for complex cross-platform applications.
You can try to do it in a cross-platform manner but it never works well. Want to implement a tab bar like VSCode's? Win32 tab bars do not support close buttons (need to be custom rendered) and Cocoa tabs it doesn't even make sense for them to have a close button. In Cocoa you're supposed to use either the windowing system to do tabs (similar to Safari tabs) or custom render everything (like iWork).
So I say screw it, make it look as you wish.
The design of the API is somewhat DOM inspired (everything is built up of divs that can be styled). It's pure retained mode for now, I still need to think how I'll make reactivity work.
On macOS it uses a custom NSView to implement "divs". Drawing is done with CoreAnimation layers. Text editing is handled by a nested a NSTextView control with a transparent background. Could also host a web view in a similar manner. Context menus are native.
On Windows it uses a custom C++ class that stores Windows.UI.Composition surfaces for drawing (could also use DirectComposition + Direct2D). Text editing is handled by a windowless RichEdit control (ITextHost/ITextServices). Context menus are native Win32.
On Linux it uses a custom QWidget with a nested QTextEdit control for text editing. I'm thinking of experimenting with Qt Quick for hardware accelerated rendering like the other two.
We want to speed up adoption of custom AI, but most people suck at building it (no expertise, money, time, etc.).
We thought, what if you could "Vibe ML" your way to it? Allow any AI engineer or PM to build custom AI directly from their current implementation.
So we built these agents that orchestrate the entire life-cycle of custom AI. We start by hooking into how you use AI, prepare/label your data, detect the best recipes for your task, fine-tune, and deploy it for you. Really tried to simplify the entire process.
We aren't entirely sure about the UX/UI patterns. We aren't going chat first because if most people don't know where to start with ML, how in the world are they going to prompt it!?! Instead, we auto detect the AI tasks you've built and go from there.
Working on migrating Hopp's [1] overlay window, which we use for drawing the remote cursors, from winit + wgpu to gpui. I used claude in the weekend to make a prototype and now I want to make a gpui app, which will replicate all of our requirements, in order to see what is missing and if I need to contribute upstream. I am planning to write a blog post when the migration is over.
Basically personalized meal planning and grocery integration. Since the Show HN I posted a couple months back I've been incorporating user feedback to add things like meal prepping, better ingredient reuse across meals, and cooking style preferences.
One of the biggest points of feedback has been adding more grocery stores but I'm really limited by who has APIs to actually integrate with, which is basically just Kroger and Instacart. Walmart has an API but ignored my API access request. Would love to hear if anyone has ideas on how to approach this.
Reading practice and assessments for k-12 students, with reporting and tracking for parents, tutors, and teachers. It uses speech to text and quizzes to assess the students reading ability. It picks up skipped words, substituted words, along with metrics on speed and pauses.
I have been testing it with my 2 daughters and its finally at a spot where I don't have to drag them to test it against their will and they are showing improvement. I am working on the marketing now. I have gotten some interest from private tutors but I have a feeling it will be great for the homeschooling community.
Thanks for any feedback! Please leave first reactions as the marketing page is what I am iterating on right now. Don't hold back!
Site where you can read and generate graded Chinese stories, in order to learn Chinese. What's a graded story? It's one written with the vocab of a {X} year old. Words are often repeated, so that you can learn from the left-and-right context. I normally pay for book versions of these, so I thought, why not make one that's online and free?
https://craftcx.com - Working on various aspects of trust and observability around the performance of AI Customer Support tooling. How's the support agent performing? Are the resolutions you're billed for "good" resolutions, or just deflecting the customer without helping?
I'm trying to build a native postman alternative using Rust + Iced. I want it to use .http files as its collections and .env files as its environments. So that data is stored in plain text and easily editable by AI and usable by other apps like VSCode rest client.
Checkout Sugar - A Dev Team That Never Stops.
Autonomous AI development for Claude Code. Delegate tasks, Sugar executes continuously—building features, fixing bugs, shipping code.
https://sugar.roboticforce.io/
https://github.com/cdnsteve/sugar
Pretty pumped, 22 stars and growing!
I’m finishing up Haskell Brain Teasers (https://pragprog.com/titles/haskellbt/haskell-brain-teasers/)
It’s much shorter than my first book, Effective Haskell, and leans more advanced, especially toward the end. Although the format is puzzle focused I’m trying to avoid simple gotcha questions and instead use each puzzle as a launchpad for discussing how to reason about programs, design tradeoffs, and nuances around maintainability.
Embar: https://github.com/carderne/embar
A Python ORM, inspired by Drizzle and the like. Whenever I come to Python I'm frustrated by the ORM options. They generally lack type-safety on inputs and outputs, or useful type hints.
SQLAlchemy is an institution but I think it's hard to use if it's not your full-time job. I check the docs for every query. I want something simple for the 80-99% of cases, that lets you drop easily into raw SQL for the remaining %.
I'm going to keep hacking at it, would love to from anyone who thinks this is worthwhile (or not). Also: - The interface for update queries is clunky. Should I add codegen? - Should I try to implement a SQL diffing engine (for migrations). Or just vendor sqldef/similar...?
It is a workflow graph automation site (drag and drop and connect nodes), but is a toy and only allows a local user and local models (both transformers.js and tensor-flow mediapipe), so costs me nothing. Mostly text stuff at the moment, but working on a slate of image stuff this week, may get to audio and video as well, we shall see.
I’m kicking off my 2026 book club! It’s probably a bit different from book clubs you’re familiar with.
Each of us is reading sixty books over 2026, five a month, where every book is self selected by each member.
It’s small, six people, all brought in by application only.
You can check out our shared bookshelf here! (Heavy inspiration from Stripe Press)
https://bookshelf-bookclub.vercel.app/book/cmj4pfpom001gqsbj...
(swipe left/right on mobile, up/down arrows on pc :))