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 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 working on Increader, an incremental reading platform.
You put in all your bookmarks (also pdfs or epubs) and it puts them in a queue and tracks your progress. Read for as long as you want to and if you get bored with an article you just move on to the next one. Supports highlights and annotations as well as creating spaced repetition cards out of those annotations.
Really reduces the friction for me to start reading and it has made a noticeable difference to my media consumption throughout last year.
Started out as an exploration into the incremental reading concept, but it's become my primary interface for reading and I use it every day.
I haven't really talked about this to anyone yet, but it's getting to a point where it's polished enough for others to use.
It's currently completely free and you can try it without entering your email.
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.
I'm building a Postgres-native workflow engine using pgmq for queues and TypeScript worker. Workflows compile to definitions (SQL rows), letting Postgres orchestrate the DAG as state machines. The TypeScript DSL is type-safe with inferred inputs/outputs across dependencies with full autocomplete.
Declarative and functional in nature. Just a manifest wiring functions into a DAG and a Postgres SQL functions that manage the graph of state machines. Simple in principle and very opinionated.
Replaces 240 lines of manual pg_cron -> pgmq -> Supabase Edge Function boilerplate with 20 lines of explicit DAG definitions. Currently Supabase-only (leverages their primitives) but planning to make it agnostic for vanilla Postgres setups.
Live demo / explanation here: https://demo.pgflow.dev
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.
Gymlocity (https://gymlocity.com) - All-in-one gym management platform for small gym owners.
Building this for personal trainers with home gyms and small 1-2 location owner-operated facilities. The big players (Mindbody, etc.) are overkill and expensive for this market.
Core features: class scheduling, member booking, Stripe payments, and workout programming (the part most gym software ignores - trainers still use spreadsheets or generic apps).
Stack: React 19 + Vite frontend, ASP.NET Core 10 API, PostgreSQL, multi-tenant architecture so each gym gets their own branded experience.
Currently polishing the member dashboard and workout tracking UI. The goal is something a solo trainer can set up in an afternoon without needing to call sales or sit through demos.
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.
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
https://replays.lol/clipper - A spin off from my main startup's product that lets Twitch streamers review their viewers' league of legend clips. Zero friction as we handle the recording of clips ourselves using bots that load up people's previous games using the League of Legends game client. Went live with my first medium-size streamer yesterday, excited to see how this goes!
Similar to Cameo but hyper specialised for league of legend streamers, if this shows some traction we'll expand to other games, and then to other industries (think a tennis star reviews one of your tennis points, beats out a generic happy birthday message?)
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
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!
Trying to bootstrap a PKI certificate trust chain for facilitating trust projection and information verification online. Think of it as the ability to do something such as age verification at scale via a peer-2-peer ish mechanism instead of sending your government id to a porno service.
We are experimenting with Keybase key holders as CAs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46576590
And also .gov email holders:
https://blog.certisfy.com/2025/12/using-gov-email-addresses-...
It's all self-service and requires no sign-up or download of anything, the app (https://certisfy.com/app) is an in-browser app and all the cryptography happens in the browser.
I’m working on ApprovIQ, a tool for construction certifiers. Someone who wants to get something built will work with one of customers to get their project approved before construction. They’ll typically go back and forth on dozens of documents each of which must be checked over for compliance - drainage, water quality, fire safety, the list goes on.
Despite being intensely technical and detail-oriented, certifying construction is still mostly done by hand over email!
Our niche is full of folks whose lives we can improve with a portal for document management & comms, plus a sprinkle of AI for document understanding.
If you know someone - anyone - wrangling too many documents via email. Please reach out.
I’m interested in ocean container shipping, so I built a Google Sheets add-on to automate the process of tracking shipping containers. It’s called Container Tracker and I just got it live on the Google Marketplace. https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/container_track...
Main workload is done by the backend (serverless functions).
I am currently working on a HubSpot extension (that uses same backend) with the goal to target few other platforms where users work, and integrate the functionality into their daily workload, as opposed to having it as standalone website or mobile app. I have fun doing it.
Updating my workout app with final touches. It’s local first, with self-hosted backup server as an option.
It’s text based, so it is basically an advanced editor/viewer for one long text note.
I'm working on https://www.hessra.net/
We've built a new auth platform with some new identity primitives and capability-style tokens using biscuits.
Right now, I'm trying to figure out ways to apply it and am looking into offering integrations with extremely fine-grained access control that wouldn't have it otherwise. So adding a fine-grained access layer in front of stuff like backend-for-frontend (BFF) systems, brownfield stuff with poor auth, or even OAuth stuff that just have really coarse scopes.
Are there any integrations out there that people want but the access control is bad for them? I'll build one for you!
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!
As a former JPMorgan Chase engineer, rebuilding the Chase Travel UI so it doesn’t suck (there was never a role available on that team while I was there): https://rkdvis.com/chase-travel
A domain-agnostic, open source scientific database.
“Protein Data Bank-in-a-box”
A domain-agnostic, open source scientific database.
“Protein Data Bank-in-a-Box”
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 just completed a holiday project this week to measure the kids screen time using an Arduino device and a web app! I got frustrated trying to get so many parental control apps to play nicely, in the end this seemed like a bolder new approach to the problem.
I blogged about the whole build and coding project [here](https://partridge.works/screenie-christmas-project-2025-26/)
Code for the Arduino and also the web app is Open Sourced [here](https://screenie.org/get-device/selfbuild)
And you can play with it [here](https://www.screenie.org)
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.
After watching the movie „The Amateur“ I started to build myself some confidential looking tools just for fun using C and deployed them as CGI programs.
A one time secret tool https://iotdata.systems/apps/secret.cgi
A password generator https://iotdata.systems/apps/pass_gen.cgi
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 bought a 300 litre aquarium about 6 weeks ago for the living room. Added soil, plants and water. Have spent the last 6 weeks watching plants grow, and snails that smuggled in on plants, multiply. I over fertilised it and left the light on accidentally for a couple of days whilst I was away and experienced an algae bloom, which was interesting. Added some cardinal tetras and amano shrimp yesterday and have spent a lot of time just watching them potter around. Has been a nice change from looking at a screen.
Building "human perspective maps" using non-linear dimensional reduction algorithms to visualize the "human value manifold" from hundreds of agree/disagree/pass statements, like Google Maps for complex large-scale conversations:
https://patcon.github.io/polislike-human-cartography-prototy...
Just paint with colors, click a painted group, and see what differentiates your painted groups. (Chrome on iOS has issues fwiw)
This is building on the philosophy of democracy-bolstering tools like Pol.is, which I've worked with (as a researcher/practitioner) for almost a decade
I'm working on https://cloudventory.io – AWS inventory search for teams that don't have the budget for high-end cloud management platforms.
Cross-account, cross-region search. Need to find an IP? Easy peasy. Need to find all the cruft Todd left behind? Search "todd" and see every todd-test-server-1 and todd-alb hanging around.
I've added insights for security, ops, and cost savings – minimal right now but expanding.
Early access/MVP mode. Feedback welcome.
Continue to work on my project for remote private access: https://github.com/connet-dev/connet
Just released v0.12.0 which has a lot of package cleanup and some important bugfixes. Next, is making the relay infrastructure much more lighter, requiring less synchronization.
Personally, I'm using the hosted version[0] (which is just a repackage of the open source version with dynamic with tokens) to expose my NAS and syncthing web UIs to manage them while I'm away. Sometimes even through my phone (with termux)
Using Claude Opus 4.5 to query time-series data.
I have GBs of time-series data in a TimescaleDB database. It’s more complicated than this, but the gist is: I use natural language to ask questions about relationships in the data, Claude Opus 4.5 generates queries, and it finds patterns.
For example, I classify tens of thousands of news articles using different classification models. Then I ask Claude to write a query that tests for statistically significant changes in the time-series data at specific intervals after a given classification of article—and it finds patterns.
It passes train / test split validation. It will train on 2 years of data (2023 and 2024) and being able to effectively predict movements on the time series data using the classified news articles on the last year of data (2025).
ScreenRecord.in: https://screenrecord.in I have worked remotely for most of my career and have found screen recording a useful tool to share ideas or ask questions. I liked the UX of Loom but always wondered if one could do it without installing any app. Turns out you can! Given today's browsers especially on desktops one can do a lot of things. ScreenRecord.in can record screen, webcam, mic and system audio if the browser supports them. Chrome has the best compatibility. All recording are stored in local storage I am figuring out what features to add.
Eidetica, a planned decentralized database for local-first applications. I'm building out unstable features to get it to a point where I can show off the concepts but it's still fairly brittle.
I recently added better backend support for deployments, converted everything to async Rust, and setup Nix/Docker releases. I'm planning to build out some better example apps and workflows next, but everything will stay pre-alpha/unstable for now so that I can avoid getting locked in to any foundational issues. There are still a number of low-hanging breaking issues blocking the end-to-end usage which I'll need to address.
I'm working on an AI (Aethas, https://blog.aethas.ai) that preps context before my meetings, sets reminders, makes design drafts, summarizes meetings, and drafts follow-up emails without me asking. Basically trying to have an entire personal AI like Jarvis that has the same context as me but acts on it automatically. Uses my Obsidian for knowledge, Claude for reasoning, pull data from written notes... Still early days but it feels like magic when I use it.
I’m building Shannot, a human-in-the-loop sandbox for AI agents on production systems.
Instead of filtering commands with heuristics (which agents work around), it dry-runs entire scripts in a PyPy sandbox, captures every command and file operation, then shows you exactly what will happen before anything executes.
I’ve just added checkpoint/rollback so you can undo changes if something goes wrong. Currently working on example scripts for common sysadmin tasks (nginx config, log cleanup, cert audits, etc.)
I've been working on the same tool since 2024 where I thought it might be a good time to build a tool for all the people who will build their own tools, eventually they will need to market it.
So I built a SEO/GEO Automation Tool for Small to Mid-Size Businesses who don't have a full-time team for that. [0]
The goal is to provide teams visibility across all the channels — Search and AI and give them the tools needed to outrank their competition. So far so good, the fully bootstrapped venture has grown over the last year and I've built quite a few big features — sophisticated audit system, AI Responses Monitoring, Crawler Analytics, Competitors Monitoring etc.
A system-agnostic language for magic spells with a compiler capable of producing the magic wand movements, incantation, hand signs or magic circle required to perform the spell
I am building an open-source, cross-platform desktop app for building and providing code-related context to chat based large language models. [1].
I found that sometimes I would rather interact with a chat interface to debug an issue or brainstorm architecture solutions in my repos. Agents are great for giving the model access to everything and letting it figure it out.
By manually prompting, it forces me to keep my metal model of the codebase up to date, and it allows me to provide just the context I want to the LLM.
I did a full circle: Graduated from doctoral studies, I'm working on automating science. Built an arxiv-like repo for science written by ai agents (https://ai-archive.io). To help scientists use this website and AI in their research, i wrapped opencode with ai-archive's mcp server and agents preconfigured. I then let people test this opencode bundle and contribute to the repo with a sandbox environment online (running opencode in container). Figured that authorative scientific repo requires grounding by real scientists and labs and therefore I am now negotiating implemeting automated science where I just finished my doctoral studies...
I'm still working on my Web Server Library .NET Core
I'm rewriting from scratch : https://simplew.net/v26/
PlanMixPlay - https://www.planmixplay.com/
A live-performance software with a focus on creating 'musically connected visuals'. Currently, the biggest connectivity is probably tightly tied lyric visualizations. Some recent examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRHLzuUBz5o - She Wants Revenge - I don't want to fall in love
or if you prefer Mashups:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_Xq8Dh4NEw - The Lovemakers – Shake That 50 Cent (50 Cent vs. The Lovemakers)
I've been building Nottawa for ~4y now and it's finally out in the open!
Nottawa's a free macOS app for making live audioreactive visuals. I'm trying to position it as a 100% free, batteries-included alternative to Resolume and TouchDesigner.
Not a tonne of users yet, but I'm hoping to get some traction in 2026. Would love love love to hear some feedback!
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.
An iOS app made for saving locations. It’s called Pyxis: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/travel-journal-pyxis/id6639617...
I’m not a developer by trade but I’ve been learning iOS dev for about 6 years now. It’s become my project that I just keep working at since I personally use it a lot.
The app lets you save your favorite locations, add notes to them, add photos, check weather, tag them for better organization, and archive those tags for future trips. You can also mark off locations that you’ve been to already: think breweries or a coffee shop when visiting a new city.
For the next update, I’m working on a task list functionality for each location. The idea came as a shopping list based on which stores I go to but it can work for any other context as well. This way I can get rid of my shopping list from my task apps.
In terms of weather, I’m also adding historical averages to the forecast to have some sort of context to the weather.
Also leaning more into marketing these days (hence this post) and designing a new icon with some custom art work to give the product some sort of personality. I started learning affinity design to just do it myself so I learn some design software along the way.
Anyways, if you download it, I’d love to hear some feedback. :)
Warenkorb+ (German for „shopping cart“): https://github.com/Lars147/warenkorb_plus
A browser extension (Chrome & Firefox) for simplifying my online grocery purchase workflow from Cookidoo to Knuspr.
I was tired of my weekly workflow of copying, pasting & sorting the grocery page for each item.
Also launched my first Hugo blog. Really nice experience so far. Wrote more detailed about the extension as my first blog entry: https://lars147.github.io/blog/
I have always assumed this is about individual projects, but let me try talking about our team effort. We just launched exe.dev, and have lots of projects. In particular, we are spending a lot of time on file systems. The easy one is copy-on-write VM cloning, which existing software provides for us. More interestingly, I believe the standard cloud approach of putting everything on a NAS by default is wrong. Doing better here is going to require doing unusual things.
Finally, we decided to open source the exe.dev agent, Shelley. https://github.com/boldsoftware/shelley
I built an experimental system to test whether an autonomous AI can propose actions freely but be structurally prevented from executing side-effectful actions without explicit authorization. The system consistently blocks unsafe filesystem, shell, and network operations and produces a trace and diff proving nothing changed, even under adversarial pressure. The goal was to see if refusal and non-action can be enforced and verified at the execution layer rather than relying on prompts or logging.
Over the holidays I built MakersHub.dev – a community platform for developers and creators building with AI tools. Whether you're a complete beginner exploring AI coding for the first time or an experienced professional showcasing advanced work, the goal is to have something useful: learning guides, project showcases, discussions, a tools directory, and news. Still early but actively building it out. https://makershub.dev
building a GPS tracker for my cats who like to wander outside.
some features:
- no monthly subscriptions
- location via GPS/GNSS
- a screen that hangs on my fridge (akin to marauders map, to see where the cats are at all times)
- the location data stays local always.
The tech will be extended to more products - a watch for adults, kids tracker etc. Will release here once I have all the tests completed!
1. Zig-clr. "Borrow checking and other safety analyzer for zig"
https://github.com/ityonemo/clr
2. Molecular biology editing software. Will plug in to agentic ai workflows
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