alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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I'm building a newsletter called Tech Talks Weekly[1] where my readers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts[1] published that week.
In January, I've released a paid tier[2] where my subscribers additionally get:
1. Access to my internal database of all the talks and podcasts since 2020 (+48,000 in total) where they can search, filter, sort, and group by title, conference/podcast, view count, date, and duration.
2. See the list of the most-watched talks over the last 7, 30, 90 days, 6 months, and 12 months based on number of views.
3. Get category-based view of new talks & podcasts by tech stack, language, and domain (Software Architecture, Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, Data, ML, DevOps, Security, Leadership and every major language & ecosystem)
[1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/what-is-tech-talks-weekly [2] https://plus.techtalksweekly.io/
Many of my enterprise customers face the microservice hairball problem. Adoption of microservices has been "too succesful". There may be 200-400 microservices, and ownership may be lacking. The number is typically growing fast, because it is easier to create a new one than use an existing one.
So I started to work on a side project called "Arch Ascent" for addressing these situations. It seems like it is becoming a kind of a architectural governance tool for visualizing and validating software system dependencies.
- Dependency Graph — Syncs projects from SonarQube and visualizes component dependencies using Cytoscape.js, with graph algorithms for detecting cycles (SCCs), clustering (Louvain), and computing coupling metrics
- Visions — Workspaces for exploring architectural scenarios. Each vision can have multiple versions/variations with different layouts while sharing the same definitions
- Layers — Named groupings of components (e.g., "Domain Layer", "Team Ownership", "GitLab Groups") that can be visualized as colored regions on the canvas
- References — Named sets of components defined via Tag expressions, layer membership etc.
- Statements — Architectural intent constraints that can be evaluated against the actual dependency graph, such as existence, containment, exclusion, cardinality etc.
The plan is to also incorporate Grounds, which are Intermediate stable states on the path from the current situation (ground zero) toward a vision. Each ground represents a releasable milestone that moves the architecture closer to the target vision without necessarily fulfilling all its statements. Grounds enable incremental architectural evolution with well-defined checkpoints.
Stack: Django, HTMX, Cytoscape.js, pyparsing for natural language parsing of References and Statements.
During the holidays, I’ve experimented with some ideas. I wondered if it was possible to make money in 2025 using simple, nano banana wrappers, thr answer is yes!
for example, RecolorLife.com and Headshoti.com generate around $800 USD.
Now I will expand for real estate.
Pretty cool ideas here already!
I'm working on a subscription-based short-form video site called NICKEL[1]. I felt gross about using YouTube but wanted to share my gaming clips, so I made my own thing. Then I thought about making it sustainable so here we are. I'll have an update to the mailing list out in a few hours, I'm "building in public."
My feature-complete deadline is April 15th and I think I'll make it. If you want to check out the UI, visit the explore[2] page. I have it setup to redirect to a public video while I work on the intended UI (a design challenge I've never tried before but we've all seen). I'm thoroughly enjoying figuring out how streaming video works and how best to optimize things.
---
[1]: https://nickel.video
Vim-inspired, as in it's minimal and fast, text editor on the web. No modal-editing yet but, once the current natural input mode is decoupled, clients can bring their own modes/controllers via the extension system.
It's meant to be embeddable and hackable, serving as a building block for custom IDEs as opposed to being IDE-like VSCode. I felt the web IDE space was uninspired with apps built around VScode/Monaco effectively being hosted a VSCode instance with a pre-installed extension and config.json. (Aside: perhaps there's a business opportunity for VSCode-as-a-service where client apps simply bring their own config). I'm dogfooding this library in building an algo trading IDE.
Ships 2kb and smoothly handles 50+ million line files. 1 billion lines with the high-capacity extension. Also, it can function as a TUI or terminal on the web because the core implementation concerns efficiently rendering plaintext in a fixed-width grid layout.
For my home lab, I built a 3 node Talos (from https://www.talos.dev/) cluster from older Dell Optiplex systems. I am using:
MetalLB - https://metallb.io/ load balancer
Traefik - https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/getting-started/quick-start-with-kubernetes/ ingress
Local Path - https://docs.apps.rancher.io/reference-guides/local-path-provisioner storage
An alternative front-end / game discovery service / price tracker for GOG's catalog. Mostly manually enhancing the data from the API (90% heuristics, 10% human effort, as the total dataset isn't large enough for it to be worth doing otherwise), and offering a wider range of filters for it all.
I'm grouping all related products together for a more complete overview, and have recently added library import, where I mostly 'solved' the issue of GOG not recognizing that you own certain games if you got them as a freebie or as part of a since-delisted deluxe edition. Just now starting in on incomplete "series" listings, seeing what'd be involved with making them contain all relevant games, and then exposing that.
I'm working on Daestro[0] - a job orchestrator that can directly integrate with cloud providers like AWS, Vultr, DigitalOcean and Linode to create instances for jobs to run on and destroy when done.
Currently I'm working on following features: - Multi user support (Team) on project level - Then I'll look into whether to add support for OIDC/SSO now or not - Alert on slack - Webhook support
I'm in the final stretch of self-publishing my debut sci-fi novel Sector 36. Been working at it for almost 2 years. I'm waiting for the final print proofs to make sure things look good before the "official" 1/31 launch date.
I vibe coded the book website over the holiday break - https://sector36.space/
I've been serializing chapters on Substack - https://sector36.substack.com/
Recently have been focusing on a personal assistant type of thing.
I've been building it with the agent sdk and any time I want an additional skill, I create it
Examples: parse this pdf containing my credit card bill and add all transactions
Given it has a db, I've been using it to save notes, ideas etc.
Been fun
I'm branching out and trying something ridiculously different than anything else I've ever done before, I'm gonna try to create a video game that plays on people's sexual attractions, and tries to distract them while the player tries to complete a series of challenges/activities. It'll be like a little laboratory experiment, with NSFW graphics and the player having to remain focused while other things try to distract them.
I've never created a game before, less so a NSFW one, and I'm not sure how it's gonna go, but it is very different compared to other things I've done before. The game itself is done in Rust, compiles to WASM to be run on the web, and I've found 3 artists and one voice actress who is helping me with the art/audio stuff. So far a lot of fun, although managing a fleet (4) of contractors is less fun, although still new so a little bit of fun :)
Spending the past few weeks building a memory layer for AI Agent's. Sync's with your business apps or remembers preferences in a consumer setting.
Planning to support a self hosted version soon -- if you'd like to give it a try ping me,.
I'm trying to make a Chinese Hanzi variant of Wordle called Handle 汉兜 [0] available as a Discord activity/app so my Discord groups can have fun solving puzzles just like we've been having with NYT's official Wordle Discord app[1]. A Discord app is just a webview or iframe embedded inside Discord that you can launch.
[0]: https://handle.antfu.me [1]: https://discord.com/discovery/applications/12117814899314524...
Personally, been making a low fidelity exalidraw-like calendar app: https://letswalnut.com.
There’s a real-time collaborative workspace-oriented version, too.
Professionally, working on “Magic Draft,” a feature in Ditto to help designers and writers create the “draft and a half” directly in Figma, which uses a hierarchy of all your context (text, Ditto metadata, the design, your style guides, etc) to write really good starting point copy.
I'm working on a CUDA implementation of Forman-Ricci curvature-based clustering (I checked online and saw that there is currently no GPU/CUDA implementation, so I thought why not do it). Hopefully it would help with my CV.
Github link: https://github.com/dangmanhtruong1995/Ricci-curvature-cluste...
Working on CiteLLM, an API that extracts structured data from PDFs and returns citations for each field (page + coordinates + source snippet + confidence).
Instead of blindly trusting the LLM, you can verify every value by linking it back to its exact location in the original PDF.
I'm working on a native MacOS Postgres client: http://github.com/ravelantunes/Searchlight I've been slowly chipping at it over the last couple of years as I find time, and I like it enough to already use it as my primary client (although still buggy here and there).
Trying to visualise magnetic fields of a floppy disk.
So far I can see magnetic fields on a magstripe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8nM4Z-hkTw with two polarisers (one of which I rotate in the video, which is contained in a 3D printed holder with gears I made).
I'm awaiting some different polariser film, to see if I can get it to work with a floppy disk.
I’m working on a small iOS app for streaming my own media directly from a NAS.
I built it because I wanted access to my music (and videos) on my phone without running a full media server like Plex or Jellyfin, and without syncing files locally. The app streams files directly over a VPN (WireGuard / Tailscale), mainly via SFTP/FTP, and plays them as-is without re-encoding or server-side indexing.
You can browse folders directly, or let it build a lightweight local index for faster artist/album browsing on larger libraries. It started as a personal tool, but I’ve been polishing it after some feedback and opened a small TestFlight beta:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/PaQAsGcM
Still early and rough in places, but it’s already replaced my own setup.
Hey there!
For the past month I’ve been working on a creative / VFX / 3D tool that connects Apple devices into an all-in one node editor: https://subjectivedesigner.com/
With it, you can build interactive experiences, connect device sensors, compose shaders with AI models, orchestrate real-time data flows, and create projects that span across the entire Apple ecosystem. I’m posting about it regularly on social media and you can see some of it here: https://x.com/sxpstudio (Though it’s still early and most content is on socials thus far).
It’s done fully in SwiftUI + metal and also a good occasion to ramp up on agentic-powered software engineering. So far it’s been a lot of fun and working really great for me. And to be clear I’m absolutely not talking about vibe coding :-)
I’ve been putting together a rather silly slide-puzzle game for MENSA-level players: things like arranging the tiles by chemical element name according to atomic number, arranging countries by surface area, etc.
It’s absurd and will probably appeal only to the descendants of Ken Jennings.
I updated a really outdated, but surprisingly popular repo for linear programming:
https://github.com/JWally/jsLPSolver
I'm tinkering around building "JARVIS" (I didn't want to come up with a clever self deprecating name - this works) - a personal project to manage my life. Integrates into Google Mail, Google Calendar, Trello, GroupMe, EveryDollar. Basically it nags me to do grown up thing and is a better UX than Google Calendar/Trello - I just talk to it and ask it things.
Also experimenting with a new Claude-Code flow; give the bot its own AWS account, Put a bunch of tickets on my personal JIRA, be persnickity about what constitutes "pass" and tell the bot "follow these instructions, pull down tickets until there are no more. Your branch cannot merge until you have integration tests passing in your own dev env first" (I use AWS CDK). Then let it loose to build. The instant feedback loop that Claude has with Build-Code->Deploy to AWS->Run Integration Tests->Address Failures is really nifty fwiw...
I posted this earlier but realized that I had pointed it at a different "What are you working on" post. I think this one (david927) is the defacto "official" one.
Anyway, I built a way to chat with the documents in this post (updates live). https://nthesis.ai/public/702445eb-f0e4-4730-b34f-f34eb06dd6...
Or you can do a basic text search: https://nthesis.ai/public/hn-working-on
Still an AI time tracker that watches your screen.
Currently experimenting with a proactive agent, Don, that pops up like clippy and also works over email.
https://donethat.ai All the data security measures here: https://donethat.ai/data And other tools out there: https://donethat.ai/compare
Over the last 2 or 3 years I've been building a Common LISP implementation in Go so that Go packages can be utilized by LISP code. Building a REPL with lots of interactive features was rewarding as was taking up the challenges of the object systems (CLOS and Flavors) and generics. Just open sourced it at the start of January. https://github.com/ohler55/slip
Still working on my tool for creating custom Tailwind-style accessible color palettes for web and UI design:
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
There's millions of tools that try to autogenerate colors for you using algorithms and AI, but they usually ignore WCAG accessible contrast requirements, don't let you customise the tints/shades, don't let you create a full palette of colors, and the colors often don't look right on actual designs.
This tool is meant to make customising tints/shades intuitive and quick enough in a few clicks via a hue/saturation/lightness curve editing interface that you won't want to rely on autogeneration. There's also a live mockup showing how your palette looks on a UI design that checks pairings pass contrast requirements, to guide you as you tweak your colors and to teach you the WCAG rules.
You can then export your palette to regular CSS variables, Tailwind, Figma or Adobe for use in your designs.
Really open to any feedback on features that would be useful! I think the only way I can make it simpler to use is to make it more opinionated about how your palette should be designed so interested in any thoughts about that too.
A beginner-friendly programming language for 2D games where multiplayer is automatic. Intended to be an engaging way for teenagers to learn to code by making games they can play with their friends. Like a blend of Scratch and Roblox. I've been working on this for 3 years!
Been working on canine.sh for about 2 years now.
It’s an open source project that basically turns your kubernetes into a developer friendly PaaS.
Just crossed 2k apps on the cloud version, no idea how many people run it locally, and thanks to a generous sponsorship from the Portainer folks, I’m able to work on it close to full time.
I needed some pixel art for a different project, so I made 8BitSmith, a simple pixel art & sprite generator.
I'm expecting it is pretty niche, but animations tend to be very time consuming for people like me, and getting quick sprites that I can drop into a platform is a big time saver.
The project was 90% vibe-coded and I documented the tech stack here: https://www.8bitsmith.com/tech-stack
I'm still working on my Web Server Library .NET Core
I'm rewriting from scratch : https://simplew.net/v26/
Building https://lenzy.ai - helping products built around chat with AI (think Lovable or Cursor) reduce churn and prioritize product improvements by analyzing their user's chats.
I started about 3 months ago, focusing on making my 2 early adopters happy. One of them is ready to start paying soon!
https://fuzzygraph.com - aspires to be the most beautiful equation graphing app
I’m building a quantum photonics experiment that is a variation of the quantum eraser.
One aspect that HN may find interesting is my use of Bayesian optimization to control and perfect key experimental settings. About a dozen of the wave plates and other optical components are motorized and under computer control.
Given a goal metric like "maximally entangle the photon pairs" the optimizer will run the experiment 50-100 times, tweaking the angles of various optics and collecting data. Ultimately it will learn to maximize the given cost function.
This sort of thing is commonly done with tools like Optuna during NN/LLM training to optimize hyper-parameters, but seems less common in physics especially quantum photonics. I'm using a great tool called M-loop to drive the optimization, which was originally developed for creating Bose-Einstein condensates.
I am devoting 2026 to focus on my rpg. The one differentiator here is something I am still not seeing: proper use of LLMs in games. The current batch is all lazy asset generation, maybe logic coding and what not, but not anything that could make the world actually feel alive.
Obviously, it all comes with its own sets of issues, but I am working through those as they come. But it is still a slow move solo.
SourceMinder: A “code index” tool that finds symbols in a codebase and creates a single table sqlite database for the index. It uses tree-sitter to parse the AST and add the symbols and what they are (function, class, argument, etc) to the db. I currently have it working with TypeScript, C, Go and PHP. I’m working on adding Perl next, after someone requested it here on HN.
Was really impressed with Claude ability to port models from cuda PyTorch to MLX, so that’s what I have been doing last three weeks; basically I have Mac to test ported models and Gradient vm with PyTorch and Nvidia gpu, Claude can run code in vm, investigate layers and deep analyze the model mechanics and then reimplement them on local Mac with MLX. So far completed port of various models mainly in audio domain, achieving pretty substantial speeds for inference on my machine. Models ported with numerical parity to originals: facebooks omnillingual ASR, Sam-audio, Nvidia sortformer. Planning on releasing this in repo soon.
Working on some new Bluesky tools and trying to learn more about the AT Protocol. Have been working on this following:
- Skyscraper, an iOS native app for Bluesky with focus on Liquid Glass UI. Launching hopefully in a ~week, and TestFlight available at https://testflight.apple.com/join/RRvk14ks
Then also working on a website/web tool that does the following: - A keyword/term notification service that observes the Bluesky Jetstream for usages of the term and sends email alerts.
- Provides an HTML/JSON backup archive of any Bluesky account. Quick way to archive popular accounts, politicians, public figures, etc.
- Trending Hashtag lists, to see what is trending the last hour, day, week, and month.
The web services all are available at: https://api.getskyscraper.com/tools/
Today I built Octocat juggler. It's a GitHub badge that shows in how many repos are you working. By default it links to some stats.
Example: https://github.com/JaviLopezG Url: https://octocat.yups.me/ Repo: https://github.com/JaviLopezG/octocat
Over the holidays I built a simple website which lets children (of all ages) easily draw something and then bring the sketch to life using AI and a prompt.
Only shared it via Show HN so far, and am still regularly getting some creative submissions. Will be sharing it at an art festival later this year so kids can have a more active role when visiting.
I had a day-dream about nutrition labels for generative works, I made this site to feel it out:
https://disclosure.launchbowl.com/
A little cool tech detail, I didn't want a backend or to store the information of people's reports anywhere. To get around the requirement, I made the form deterministic and populated on load from a data stream of bits (form is made from booleans or bitfields) from a decoded base-64 query parameter. A cool side-effect of this approach is I can update the query parameter in the URL in real-time as you fill out the form so if you reload it remembers your form without any local storage or cookie use!
I finally decided to promote my gitignore pattern Python library, pathspec, from v0.x to v1 after 12 years or so.
I'm thinking of reviving my Python SQL parser prototype I have half done. Or maybe resume my Mako template plugin for PyCharm.
I'm working on two projects:
https://helmtk.dev is a toolkit for helm chart maintainers, including a structured template language than can compile into helm templates, and a test suite tool for writing tests in javascript. Super handy I think.
https://blog.atlas9.design is about building a better software experience by solving more of the common stuff from the start: IAM, builds, API design, etc. I'm currently designing and building a Go-based framework to start.
I’m working on Security Level 5 (SL5), which is basically “nation state grade security” for frontier AI systems. The core idea is that if a model’s weights or training artifacts could enable catastrophic harm, you should treat them like top-tier secrets and secure them accordingly.
One piece I helped with is SenL, a “sensitivity level” framework for AI labs. It’s like a practical clearance system for AI assets. Not everything in a lab is equally dangerous, so you label assets by sensitivity (weights, training data, eval sets, agent tooling, deployment configs, etc.), then tie that label to concrete controls like who can access it, where it can run, what logging is required, and what monitoring / two-person rules apply.
If anyone’s curious, SL5 is here: http://sl5.org/ and the SenL framework is part of the published artifacts.
I'm working on a continuous chain-of-thought reasoning architecture for generative AI models.
It is similar to Meta's COCONUT. However, instead of the training forward and backwards passes of the reasoning tokens being done serially (slow), they are done in parallel (fast). At inference the reasoning tokens are still decoded serially. The trick is that even though training was done in parallel, the reasoning tokens are still causal and you still get the benefits of increased computational circuit depth.
The kicker is that the architecture is modality agnostic (it doesn't rely on language for its chains of thought), and I want to use it to bring COT reasoning to protein and anti-body generation. Basically, I hope for it to be the OpenAI o1 or DeepSeek R1 for domain-specialized scientific AI.
Mafia Arena -- Benchmarking LLMs for EQ
The only problem I have is that it's so effing expensive to run those games that I can't have a good number of games to claim to be any sort of legit benchmark. BUT so far the games that I paid out of pocket and ran are looking good and I think there is merit to this.
also had lots of fun building on top of Cloud Flare and solving some distributed systems problems while building this.
if you can help me run more games (for science!!) let me know!
Working on a list of examples and by extension, a greater understanding of the appeal to Ludditism: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...
I’m working on a proxy MCP server that lazy loads tools to save tokens https://github.com/mquan/nimble. It includes a dashboard for connecting and configuring MCP servers.
Nothing as impressive as others here... but I have a few little things
--- Todo or else ---
The main thing is a new Go CLI called "todo or else". It scans your project for TODO comments and checks that they have deadlines
This allows you to hold yourself accountable for completing them
You can verify other things like whether TODOs have owners
I'm using Tree Sitter which means it can handle most programming languages (although, I'm shipping with a subset, as the grammars can get quite big)
I'm hoping to release this cross platform in a couple of weeks
--- Video: How PSX games were developed ---
A ten minute YouTube video about how PlayStation 1 games were developed
The tools, languages, and practices that were common in this era
Also the computers, software, programs used for creating assets (eg Irix Framethrower for SGI)
I'm hoping to produce a 10 minute video on my YT channel (jbreckmckye). Currently in the writing stage
--- Black Noise ---
A small, command line program for playing white noise
I think it would be a nice utility to have for focus sessions... maybe to double as a sort of pomodoro timer
My first mobile app! It encodes and decodes SSTV images, allowing you to send pictures over sound waves. Mostly used by amateur radio operators... even though the ISS sometimes also broadcasts SSTV images!