alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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Working on https://ottex.ai/ - BYOK alternative to Wispr Flow and Raycast AI shortcuts.
I love global voice-to-text transcription (especially when working with Claude Code or Cursor) and simple AI shortcuts like "Fix Grammar" and "Translate to {Language}".
I realized I was spending around €35/mo (€420 a year) on two apps for AI features that cost just pennies to run.
So I built Ottex - a native macOS app with a tiny footprint. Add your OpenRouter API key and get solid voice-to-text using Gemini 2.5 Flash, plus any OpenRouter model for AI shortcuts.
Trying to grow this newsletter - a roundup of the most votted and commented AI links from HN. After 11 issues I am at 221 subs, most of them from Reddit posts (I post a short description of the top 5 links on several AI subreddits). Not sure how long this will work, I feel like I spam these subreddits.
I want to launch on Product Hunt soon and maybe add it to some newsletter directories, but I have low expectations.
I post here on HN a link to each issue after I send it, maybe that will get from traction one day.
https://github.com/continusec/htvend/
htvend is a tool to help you capture any internet dependencies needed in order to perform a task.
It builds a manifest of internet assets needed, which you can check-in with your project.
The idea being that this serves as an upstream package lock file for any asset type, and that you can re-use this to rebuild your application if the upstream assets are removed, or if you are without internet connectivity.
Has an experimental GitHub action to integrate within your GitHub build, archiving assets to S3.
I've built a web app primarily for my Hiking Club but then my plan is to also sell it to others.
'Vibe coded' this in about a week recently. The app is also available in English and has a demo account available.
I wrote about the building process on my Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7404469...)
an iOS app that unlocks the hidden sensors in your AirPods, turning them into a real-time AI posture coach for work and workouts on iOS.
I've been building out my portfolio at https://verdient.co.uk/ and writing more blog posts about applied maths on my blog at https://tom-dickson.com/
Most recently I've been having fun extending the functionality on a website I use to host tools that help me structure and plan workouts - https://ironvolume.com/
I'm making a web app that let's you create a QR code that you print and stick on your shop door or car windshield. When a stranger scans it, you'd get a notification on your telegram account or email without exposing your details. Kinda like a pager.
As a medical student, I'm making a site of free tools for medical trainees, the biggest being a rank list tool to balance logical factors and gut ranking as well as pairwise comparisons/maps/etc. https://medcompass.tools/rankcompass. Might adapt to other avenues to help people pick housing and other things that require ordered lists and decision tools!
I also make interactive tools for artists at https://artres.xyz.
I've been super inspired by all the amazing things I've seen on Hacker News.
Working on Infralyst: https://infralyst.io
Self serve AWS cost savings for Terraform users. Connect AWS (read only role via a Terraform module), GitHub and Terraform state. Infralyst finds underused resources and opens a PR to downsize, gated by best practice checks so it doesn’t suggest sketchy changes.
Free: 3 downsizing PRs per workspace. Pro: $99/mo unlimited PRs. Looking for early users and blunt feedback from teams running AWS + Terraform.
If you try it and mention you came from HN, I’m happy to set you up with an early adopter discount.
I'm again toying around with the idea of building an ActivityPub Server built around the principles of RDF, JSON-LD and the Linked Data Platform. [0]
It can work already as a "Generic" ActivityPub server and it can be made to work with Client-to-Server API, but given that there are not mature clients for that, I am now in the middle of an exercise where I am taking the existing server and implementing Lemmy's and Mastodon's APIs based on top of it. Once I can get any Lemmy and a Mastodon client working, I will then start changing their own SDKs, and then I can replace calls from their application-specific APIs with direct calls to Linked Data server.
[0] https://activitypub.mushroomlabs.comhttps://github.com/baalimago/kinoview
An agentic media player, intended as home media server for.. uhh.. seasonal vacation videos with subtitles. I've experimented a lot with different "levels" of AI automation, starting from simple workflows, to more advanced ones, and now soon to fully agentic.
Pretty good practice project! All written in Go with minimal dependencies and an embedded vanillja-js frontend built into the binary (it's so small it's negligable)
I’ve been knocking around and getting various false starts on three ideas for a while…
- a videogame. I've got a pretty killer idea in an open niche, but the indie market is so massively oversaturated that it feels impossible to get eyeballs.
- a next-generation post-RSS newsreader. But news is so depressing these days. I think most of the world wants to ostrich and I don't blame them.
- a reboot of Svpply, my own shuttered startup. I'd love to just make (another) thing that's about excellent clothes and shoes and artisanal pocketknives, but the way the economy is going, this feels grotesque. I was lucky to make it the first time when luxury goods were attainable _and_ normal people could pay for necessities; that window has closed.
I added Nvidia PhysX to GameMaker. https://youtu.be/CNy4D0Kfu34 I have a public alpha launching in two weeks, so this video is unlisted at the moment. Nervous but I'm pretty happy with the current API.
Nonoverse: an iOS logic puzzle game (nonograms!), I’m working on adding a new batch of levels. I’m considering a garden theme for extra cosy vibes, but I’m still in the planning stage and drawing assets right now (in inkscape, no AI).
Also PolyGen, an app for “low poly” wallpapers - I’ve sent an update with bug fixes for latest devices and iOS versions; it’s currently being reviewed, when you read this it might be live.
https://wordcollector.netlify.app An offline dictionary in your browser. Dictionary is pulled from the open source wordnet dataset and cached in browser as a sqlite database. Installable as a PWA as well. Working on adding a study mode to review words that you’ve looked up in the past to help commit them to memory and adding synonyms and antonyms. Plans to add multiple languages in the future so you could use this as a language learning tool as well.
https://monofocus.lovable.app/
Yup, it's another task manager.
I made it for myself to help me focus on one task at a time, hence the name.
It implements my number one productivity hack of picking a task and setting a timer. Time spent on a task increments.
Data is stored locally in the browser although there is a sync option i wouldn't shake a stick at if I hadn't built this myself.
Plus it's a PWA! Those are lovely.
I'm polishing up the second edition of "Hidden Markov Models and Dynamical Systems." The book explains several state space models and connects them to ideas about chaos. Here's a link to a pdf draft: https://www.fraserphysics.com/book.pdf and here's a link to source for the book: https://gitlab.com/fraserphysics/hmmds Once you install the source software, you can build a pdf for the book by typing "make book". I think that makes it reproducible research.
I’m working on Paperboy (https://www.paper-boy.app/) a self-hostable service that generates a personalized daily research digest from recent arXiv papers (and optionally a few other sources).
It fetches new papers, scores them against a “research profile,” then produces concise summaries plus a short “why this matters” style rationale, and outputs an email/newsletter-like HTML digest. There’s also a small API for generating a digest, checking status, and previewing the render.
I built it because keyword alerts and generic newsletters were either too noisy or missed the stuff that was actually relevant to what I’m working on right now.
I am currently on the job hunt and made a job application tracker. It's a CSR React app that uses LiveStore (https://livestore.dev/), a reactive state library built on top of WASM, SQLite, and OPFS. The app enables you to track applications, leave notes and updates, and gain insights into your data, while storing your data completely within the browser.
Trivyn: Ontology-first knowledge platform. Runs on a single machine, via a single executable. I wanted a simpler alternative to the large complicated enterprise products that tend to dominate this space.
I'm really trying to get a private beta out the door by Christmas. I do plan to have a free version for academic/personal use.
Backend is written in Rust, uses oxigraph for its triple store.
Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:
https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.
https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.
https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".
I'm migrating my current Google Sheets solution to a web application that I will primarily use for expense tracking and budgeting. I'm learning Golang so this is a perfect opportunity for me to build something meaningful.
Two main aspects will be to do Exploratory Data Analysis and to forecast expenses.
For later stage, I am planning to create a conversational interface for the application that I will use to do basic CRUD operations as well as capability to "talk" to my data and to do simulations using hypothetical yet real scenarios in future.
Web: The Good Parts, as seen by someone into dataviz
- scenes composed of SVG shapes, text, etc.
- web-worker rendering everything on the offscreen canvas;
- elements positioned via yoga-layout;
- optional JSX layer to define layouts, no support for React components inside the layout (yet);
- using Skia now, maybe Rive Renderer / Vello later? — I'd love to migrate to WebGPU eventually,
- first-class view transitions: no white screen, no jumps after the initial load, no things appearing/disappearing without a proper transition);
- fontkit to calculate everything re fonts and shape text — no more DOM-provided measurements;
- integration with Remotion to render videos.
Short-term goal is to reach MVP for slides/dataviz tool, and I'm getting close.
Trying to stay at maximum FPS while sacrificing loading time and, sometimes, the battery life.
A tool to build labeled object detection training datasets from large-scale satellite/aerial imagery collections: https://github.com/noahgolmant/label-tiles
Web maps usually join together lots of small images called tiles (this is why you see square patches as google earth/map loads). They do this by querying a "tile server" API. It turns out this standard can also be leveraged to label and fine-tune models on map imagery. In my day job we built infra to efficiently serve imagery through tile servers for map visualization. So I wanted to test out ML applications of that infra.
I'm working on https://www.numeromoney.com/pricing I don't even have the home page put together yet so marketing is still on the starting blocks! It's web app for helping to understand how you spend your money. I'm keeping it as simple as possible while trying to surface clear information about a persons spending. It came out of personal need (young families are expensive, it turns out!), and the existing products out there - YNAB etc were just too focused on budgeting. I just wanted to know where my money goes so I can focus on where I'm not spending it well.
Creating an we autobattler game https://lfarroco.itch.io/mana-battle It is being a good experience to learn how to work with shaders, and how well Electron apps run
https://saveam.app & https://planam.app (all WIP)
Basically building a read-it-later app and a work todo-list app to my personal taste.
I’m building an online memorial product in China, currently used via a WeChat mini-app and web pages by local governments and cemeteries for digital remembrance.
I’m now exploring a global version (web + app) for families worldwide — especially those separated by distance.
The current product is in Chinese, but the idea is universal. I’d love feedback, and I’m open to marketing or distribution collaborations.
Product (Chinese): https://www.yunmu13.cn/products/
As we pile more and more abstractions on top with AI, I have been on a really fulfilling quest fueled by curiosity to go more low level.
I've been doing a lot of assembly, C, WASM and plan to top it off with a look at GPU instructions and PTX. I haven't learned as much as in the last two months in years, it's been great. And surprisingly everything has turned out to be much simpler and easier to implement than expected once demystified.
Now to be fair, AI has sometimes given me pointers when I didn't fully understand something. Using Gemini 3 for free has been nice in that regard. However I consciously try to only implement code myself and to actually make sure I learned something that sticks.
I am working on a little browser extension to copy github pull requests into the clipboard to share them in chat apps for reviews. I am used to manually ping people with the link and found that having the pr title and the link format github uses makes it easier for people to understand what they are about to review, and potentially makes for a quicker review :).
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/github-pr-pretty-li...
We’re a group playing floorball (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floorball#:~:text=Floorball%20...) once a week and needed a simple way to know we got enough players to play.
I’ve been mostly vibe coding RecurAt (https://recur.at) to get a feel for coding this way and been learning a ton about frontend development at the same time.
Next.js app hosted on Vercel.
http://github.com/samdc73/talimio
I’m still exploring new forms of AI-powered learning tools.
The latest thing I’ve been working on is an adaptive mode inspired by the LECTOR paper [1]. Where each lesson is a single learning concept with a mastery score tight to it based on your understanding of the said concept, so in principle the system can reintroduce concepts you didn’t fully grasp later on, ideally making separate flashcards unnecessary.
It can be self-hosted if any one want's to give it a try!
Working on my app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mintflow-netstack/id6742394218
As an engineer working on networking and fiddle with various networking OS on router and switch, I finally port my favorite fd.io vpp to darwin platform and built a app to management multiple VPN/Proxy in one profile.
Also in this project I start writing some rust code with many years experience in C but rust's memory and high performance really impressed me a lot.
Building the most effective typing application
This is something that started as a passion project - I wanted to see just how effective of a typing application I could make to help people improve typing speed quickly.
It’s very data driven and personalized. We analyze a lot of key weak points about a user’s typing and generate natural text (using LLMs) that target multiple key weak points at once.
Additionally we have a lot of typing modes.
- Code typing practice; we support 20+ programming languages - daily typing test - target practice; click on on any stat in the results and we generate natural text that uses a lot of that (bigrams, trigrams, words, fingers, etc).
Created a community based poll where we vote and comment on a different stock every week.
https://www.assetroom.net/diamond-or-dud
Would love feedback.
A 2-4 player casual card game that's similar to Exploding Kittens. It'll be free-to-play on mobile and I've been focusing more on marketing these days (mostly running ads, creating short form content, and reaching out to influencers).
I'm using Unity for the front-end, and Node.js (just because I'm already familiar with it in terms of dev + liveops) for the gameservers.
Making music with the machine!
Album here: https://open.spotify.com/album/3e6k9eiGUlOBcoI2yd3DrM
Written about the process here: https://songxytr.substack.com/p/on-making-music-with-the-mac...
I’m working on 2zuz, a product search engine that optimizes for the users rather than the advertizers.
The goal is simple: if you search for something specific, you shouldn’t have to scroll through ads, “inspired by your search”, or completely-irrelevant junk. You should just only see products that actually match exactly what you’re looking for.
Right now it searches across a few large stores and I’m iterating on the ranking and filtering. If you buy a lot of stuff online, I’d love feedback on where the results feel clearly better, and where they still fail compared to Amazon/etc.
Link: https://2zuz.com
Hosted dashboard for your personal weather station.
I had some custom build scripts and sites for my dad and myself and was thinking I could make a simple SaaS out of it. Super early and didn’t advertise anywhere yet since the actual dashboard is very simple right now but it works and I keep adding the features I want to use myself.
Example dashboard: https://warnitz.weatherstage.com/
If you want to try it out, I suggest you write me at hello at domain and I will get you going. Let me know the type of weather station you have!
I've been working on an award flight search tool -- theres so many interesting problems to solve: - How do you bypass bot detection? - How do you achieve fast loading results? - How are you able to teach users how to get the best deals possible w/ award travel.
Theres so much more to do in terms of reliability (bypassing bot detection) and onboarding new programs (right now, only American, jetBlue, Delta, Virgin Atlantic and Alaska are supported). But progress has been good and im excited about it. https://awardlocker.com
I created this simple stock management system. This was a good experience building an end to end product since I have been a front end developer all my life, building this has been an amazing experience.
https://stockflow-drab.vercel.app/
Here is the github URL : https://github.com/codingbbq/stockflow
Appreciate any feedback on the application or review on the code..
Thank you
I’m working on Gluze (https://gluze.com) as a choose your own adventure story builder app. Trying to build stories where the reader gets to navigated and guide the journey.
I'm working on something called Kopi: a CLI tool that replaces the slow process of restoring massive production database backups on a dev machine with a "surgical slicing" approach, spinning up lightweight, referentially intact Docker containers in seconds: It spins up the exact schema of your source db and generates safe, synthetic datasets in seconds. It can, if you want, also replicate the actual data in the source DB but with automatically anonymized PII data.
It can replicate a DB in as little as 9 seconds.
It's Open Core: Community Edition and Pro/Enterprise editions.
Still a WiP --> https://kopidev.com
https://github.com/werdl/qforj
Open-source theatre tech cueing software (I don't want to use MacOS to run QLabs)
SellerMate [https://sellermate.neilvan.com]
I'm currently improving this order queueing and sales recording web app for small coffee shops. Made primarily for my friend's coffee shop. Data is stored locally, and the app is fully functional when offline. There is an optional "syncing" feature to sync data with multiple devices which requires a sign up. This is a Progressive Web App built with Web Components. The syncing is made possible with PouchDB/CouchDB. Completely free to use.
https://opensciencearchive.org
I’ve started building a domain-agnostic scientific data archive, inspired by the Protein Data Bank. It handles the deposition, validation, curation, storage, and searching of scientific data, with plugin interfaces for domain-specific components.
The goal is to accelerate AI-for-science efforts by making it easy for scientific organisations to spin-up professional-grade data infrastructure in a matter of days. “PDB-in-a-box”.
Buckaroo - the data table viewer for jupyter.
I recently integrated Lazy Polars and running analytics in background processes so I can reliably provide a fast table viewing experience on dataframes that would normally exhaust memory of the jupyter kernel. Analytics are run column by column and results are written to cache, if a column fits into memory individually, summary stats for the entire dataframe can be computed.
Here's a demo video of scrolling through 19M rows, and running background summary stats.
A purely functional and asynchronous effect system for F# which started as my thesis in university. It's inspired by ZIO and Cats Effect for Scala and has its own fiber system for scheduling functional effects.
I don't have much time to work on it now a days, but I try to keep up it as much as I can. I also don't have ambitions about getting a lot of users (if any), but I really enjoy working on it :)
I'm looking at how to introduce unique, borrowed and GC'd reference types into the IR for my VM/runtime.
I'm inspired by the language Lobster's compiler that specialises functions to arguments of either reference type as a way of doing something analogous to using "escape analysis" to allow objects to be owned by the stack. I think that perhaps specialised functions could be re-merged, with compile-time checks replaced with very cheap runtime checks taking advantage of "upper byte ignore" bits in pointers.
The VM will also need to support not just managed source languages, but also languages where unique and borrowed references are statically checked and possibly stored in objects.