alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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I've been working with my wife on Uruky [1] for a couple of months, now. It's a EU-based Kagi [2] alternative (privacy-focused and ad-free search with domain boosting/exclusion rules).
We've been using it with friends and family semi-successfully (hashbangs work for edge cases we're still working on).
It's really difficult to get bigger indexes other than Mojeek and Marginalia to want to work with us and improve the results further, so that's something I've been researching more, lately. EUSP (the new Ecosia/Qwant-effort-related index) has finally replied to me last week, but I'm still waiting on an API key.
If you're interested in trying it for a few days and are a human, reach out with your account number and I'll give you a couple of weeks for free. We're pushing improvements daily.
[2] https://kagi.com
P. S. It's weird to see this duplicate (posted less than a week ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874385), but this post has a lot more comments!
I’ve been working on something we call the Functional Universe (FU), a modeling framework and experimental codebase that treats systems as sequences of irreversible functional transitions, rather than objects evolving against a global clock.
It started as a computational experiment, but it’s been interesting how naturally it lines up with ideas from QM (aggregation vs collapse), relativity (proper time), and distributed systems (event-driven causality). Still very much a work in progress, but already useful as a way to think clearly about time, causality, and scheduling in real systems.
- Concept>> https://github.com/VoxleOne/FunctionalUniverse/blob/main/doc...
- Code >> https://github.com/VoxleOne/FunctionalUniverse/tree/dev
I've been building a flutter django app around sharing and using checklists.
I use it myself by iterating on checklists and then tracking my usage of them and recently added orgs for privately shared checklists.
So it's easy to create an org around a shared task and then create a run through that task and track.
https://llmparty.pixeletes.com/experiments/universal_ui
I tiny experiment/joke about chatbots :)
https://sampler.meiji.industries/
I built a TUI sampler which cherry-picks my favourite features from modern & vintage hardware samplers, DAWs, plugins, outboard FX gear, and DJ equipment.
If you know what an AKAI MPC Live, MPC 3000, SP404, SP1200, BOSS RC-202, Alesis 3630, Serato Sample, S950 filters, and stem separation does, then you'll love seeing these "greatest hits" up in a terminal interface.
Last year while on vacation in Costa Rica, I started scratching my own itch for locating and organizing samples, which quickly evolved into adding more and more features while keeping it tactile and immediate. It was too fun to stop so I kept going. After a few days I was happily making beats in it, and since then it's only gotten better.
It's live and totally free to use, and works in macos & Linux (Windows soon). I'm about to launch v1.0 now, just working with folks in the community to round out the Factory Kits a little more for users new to beatmaking.
Turns out, making beats with no mouse and a terminal interface strikes the perfect balance of hardware feel and software power, and I'm loving the result. Been sharing it with folks in my beatmaking sphere and have plans to continue expanding its reach through more collaborations, contests, and in-person events.
Hope it brings you as much joy as it does to me :)
I am trying to make a cheaper, straightforward easier to use observability platform with a good core offering without going overboard on features. Based in Europe.
https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture
It's a lightweight screen recorder for macOS that lives in your menu bar. It's built with SwiftUI and ScreenCaptureKit, uses the native Content Picker to select what you record, and supports ProRes 422/4444, HEVC, and H.264 — including alpha channel and HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. System audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.
No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac.
A project builder.
I often have ideas, then spin cycles on starting the project, getting auth in place, making a marketing page, doing SEO, building and configuring pipelines for mobile app release, etc, etc.
My project builder just takes a name, a few configuration options (do you need payments? Analytics?) and spits out a templated build with Terraform that I can 1 (okay maybe 3) click deploy to GCP + App Stores.
The nice thing (I got help with Claude Code) is that now all my projects are in one place, I have a dashboard where I click in to and edit the code (with hot reloading - it deploys code-server and the applications in a small Kubernetes cluster, each project has its own pod) and when I am done editing I just click Deploy and it updates the "production" service in Cloud Run.
Not really interested in selling it as a service or anything (it's a bit too opinionated for that), but it's a very fun project to work on. I need to make Git + Versioning of the code work right now you only have a single copy of the code which isn't great!
A Jellyfin music client for Linux written in Rust and GTK:
https://github.com/Fingel/gelly
I thought it would be pretty simple, but here I am almost 6 months later still adding features. The positive feedback has been nice, though! People seem to appreciate (like I do) that its fast and doesn't use Electron or some other cross platform toolkit. Learning a lot.
It's not vibe coded. Sad that I have to make that qualification these days, but here we are.
I've been working on the demo for Globs, a daily puzzle game about finding the hidden theme behind a jumble of tiles:
https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs
It was inspired by 2025 by thomaswc, a 45x45 connections-like puzzle. Globs jumped off from there and it's been very fun to make. I have AI generating the puzzle groups and it keeps surprising me everyday with what it comes up with. I've got demos up for over 20 different languages, and many different sizes of puzzle. Just recently, I got the puzzle to be generated daily for American English, British English, High German and European Spanish. It can also do custom theme puzzles like the following:
Big YC https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=big...
Jumbo HN https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=jum...
There is still some bugs I am tracking down (open the page in a private browser if you hit stale data) but the game has really come together lately and been a lot of fun, I hope you all like it!
I've been working on this project, which lets you create interactive Valentine’s Day invitations for your special someone. You can pick from a set of templates, add your own message or photo, and share it easily.
Currently, adding CMS feature so that user can edit their info right in the website and get the link instead of them hosting themself or editing the code.
I built a Pokédex for zoo trips for my girlfriend:
https://www.mikeayles.com/#zookeeper-wip
It lets you take photos of all the animals you see to collect them, when you 'capture' a new animal, it gives you fun facts about them.
I seeded it with UK zoos, but there's no reason it can't work elsewhere.
It was built because the signage at a zoo we went to was terrible and we had no idea what some animals were, so it matches your photo with the list of animals to the best of its ability.
I've been on and off attempting to reverse engineer old Sierra games in Godot. I've brought in AI to build tooling to speed up asset extraction from the old game files which has been a huge help. I just got building placement working last night which was a huge win.
This is part of a small hobby where I try to recreate aspects of old games myself to see how I would implement them. I eventually hope to have the skills to create the kind of game I miss playing when I was a kid 30 years ago.
Slowly but steadily implementing support for version 3 of the Wasm specification in my wasm parser (written from scratch): https://github.com/agis/wadec
A tiny web app for busy weeknight cooking.
You tap in what ingredients you’ve got, add a time limit + a couple of preferences, and it gives you 3 genuinely doable dinner ideas with step-by-step recipes (no “manage your pantry”, no endless scrolling).
It’s early, but people seem to like the “use up what you’ve got” angle. Feedback very welcome.
I love making games, and I’ve been building a no-code game engine by extracting reusable components every time I ship a new game. It started as me scratching my own itch, and now it’s turning into a real platform.
Each game adds more building blocks to the editor: multiplayer, event systems, NPC behaviors, pathfinding, etc. I build a system once, and then anyone using the editor can use it in a click. For game logic, I recently added a visual event system I’m really excited about. It’s kind of like Unreal Blueprints, but focused on 2D. You pick a trigger, wire conditions, and chain actions in a node graph [1].
Big challenge right now: most people who want to make games needs assets, and don't know how to get/make them. So I’m building a marketplace where pixel artists can upload tilesets/characters, and unlike itch.io, assets are usable directly inside the engine. No ZIP downloads or import setup, just browse and drop into your game. A preview here[2].
Also, if you want to use the editor but ship elsewhere, you can export terrain, animations, and hitboxes to Godot 4. Nothing is locked in.
The engine/editor is at https://craftmygame.com if anyone wants to poke around! And you can test a games here[3][4], and 1 multiplayer game I've tested IRL in a bar [4]!
[1] https://youtu.be/8fRzC2czGJc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hScOK_naYnk
[3] https://craftmygame.com/game/e310c6fcd8f4448f9dc67aac/r/play
I'm designing small 3D printed rc boat and I want to make sure it floats so I'm using slicer to calculate displacement but the geometry is getting bit complex, so now I'm fighting openscad to make it boolean my volumes correctly.
https://concludia.org/ - I've mentioned it here before, it's a site to help people reason through and understand arguments together. No real business purpose for it yet, it's more an idea I've had for years and have been wanting to see it through to something actually usable. You can graphically explore arguments, track their logical sufficiency/necessity, and make counterpoints. It's different than other types of argument theory that just have points "in favor" and "against" because of how it tries to propagate logical truth and provability.
Can't really share any useful link at the moment, but I’ve been working on a solution based on the C1001 mmWave sensor. It collects telemetry throughout the night, including respiratory rate, heart rate (BPM), number of turnovers, apnea detection, and overall sleep quality - you just need to hang it around the bed. The data is sent to a server, which generates a nightly report and passes it to an LLM for analysis.
I've decided to do it simply because of my grandmother: she dislikes bracelets and smartwatches because they’re uncomfortable and she often forgets to wear them. A contactless device could be much more practical for her and for many people like her.
A tool for creating CSS color palettes for web UIs that pass WCAG accessibility standards for color contrast, where you can fine tweak all the tints/shades quickly using a hue/saturation/lightness curve editing interface:
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
Unlike most tools based around autogenerating colors, this is more of an editor that lets you fully customise all the tint/shades to your liking with a focus on accessibility. This is important when you've got existing brand colors to include and want to find accessible color combinations that work together.
Would love feedback in general and especially from designers/devs who have different needs in how they go about creating branded palettes!
It's an infinite canvas that runs SQL.
I've been working with data my entire career. I feel like we need to alt+tab so much. What if we just put it all on a canvas?
Currently very WIP, but there's a simple titanic demo available!
Built with tldraw and duckdb wasm, running on cloudflare durable objects
Sorcery - open source app and protocol that, together, let you share source code links that open in each user's favorite editor, right on the linked line.
Supports VS Code, Neovim, IntelliJ/JetBrains Family, Zed, etc.
About to do the first beta release this later this week.
The protocol is "srcuri" (pronounced, "Sorcery")
This site is: https://srcuri.com/
Source code: https://github.com/browserup/sorcery-desktop
I'm working on lots of projects. My favorite is what I call "context bonsai" where I'm giving LLM harnesses the ability to surgically edit the context. It's available as a tool. You can say "remove that failed debugging session and write a summary of what we learned." Or you can take a more hands-on approach and say "remove messages msg_ID1 through msg_ID2". The removal leaves a summary and keywords, and the original messages can be pulled back into context if the LLM thinks they're useful.
I would really like people to try it out and report bugs, failures, and successes.
https://github.com/Vibecodelicious/opencode/blob/surgical_co...
I'm currently trying to get the LLM to be more proactive about removing content that is no longer useful in order to stay ahead of autocompaction and also just to keep the context window small and focused in general.
Tritum, the cross-platform IDE for legal work: https://tritium.legal
`brew install tritium` (macOS)
`winget install tritium` (Windows)
`curl -f https://tritium.legal/get | sh` (linux)
Check it for free out and let us know your thoughts!
Working on pg-fs, a postgres backed file system abstraction for ai agents. So I agents can be given their familiar file primitives, without
https://github.com/DumbMachine/pg-fs
A version of it powers my local rubber duck thoughts and voice note store. Like an explicit chatgpt memory store, helps with information fomo cause I know finding the needle in haystack would be easy.
I always wanted a minimalistic CSS framework for my projects, so I started to create my own: THINK
THINK is a modern CSS-first UI framework built on semantic HTML, custom elements, and data attributes. Uses :has(), container queries, and density scaling. No classes, no build step.
It‘s work in progress but I‘m pretty happy with the outcome so far, especially the data table component and automated Insights. I know it‘s not AI driven - but it works pretty okay for quick insights on the loaded data.
https://github.com/Leleat/git-forge
From the README: "[git-forge is a] simple CLI tool for basic interactions with issues and pull requests across GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, and Forgejo".
Right now, I am looking into better testing. Currently, I do testing by mocking the forge APIs and then running git-forge against them with TypeScript. But not everything is testable that way. The TUI is pretty much untested. So I now want to port at least the tests to Rust (I am probably gonna leave the mock API in TS) and need to look into how to tests TUIs, which is a bit of a challenge since not only is Rust my first "systems programming language", I am also not knowledgable in Terminal/TUIs...
I also am building Phaestus, a 0 to product system, that builds entire products from scratch.
https://www.mikeayles.com/#phaestus-wip
It is capable of creating a PCB (and outputs gerbers, bom, pick and place files), an enclosure (written in SCAD, outputs an STL for printing), and firmware, which it's able to compile using a pio runner on railway and provides a binary, but also has a webserial flasher for ESP32's.
There is a blog here, but i've been focussing on getting things finished, as I built it for a hackathon ending today.
I need to update the blog & writeup, because I have the first product it created, a bluetooth remote control. It wasn't without issues, but I have a working PCB, in an enclosure that was printed from it's design, running firmware it generated.
I have been working on "scratch milling"[0] PCB's at home using my vinyl cutter/plotter and a engraving bit.
Inspired by Robin Debreuil his process and videos (see video the article and several forum posts). He is using a CNC but I figured regulating pressure is more important then depth, therefore my experiments with the plotter.
Currently dialing in the pressure/speed and amount of passes on a single layer copper board.
[0] https://hackaday.com/2020/07/10/making-pcbs-the-easy-way/
I just released Configmesh this week. It's a macOS app (with CLI companion) for e2e encrypted syncing and backing up of dotfiles and application configurations. You can sync for example stuff from ~/.config/, Application Support, *.plists, and so on, and add config sync to apps that don't support it natively
Fresh off the press
Working on https://allscreenshots.com - a screenshot API for developers.
I got frustrated with existing screenshot services choking on cookie banners, rendering half-loaded pages, and serving bloated images. So my co-founder and I built one that auto-dismisses cookie consent dialogs using Playwright heuristics, serves AVIF-first from Cloudflare R2, and supports geo-distributed rendering so you can capture pages as they'd appear from different regions.
Spring Boot + React + PostgreSQL. Bootstrapped after selling a previous ecommerce SaaS.
Currently documenting the whole build in a 30-day series on the blog if anyone's into that sort of thing.
I’ve been experimenting with a live win probability predictor for the 10-player arcade game Killer Queen. The goal is to predict the winner in a causal, event-by-event fashion.
Right now I’m struggling to beat a baseline LightGBM model trained on hand-engineered expert features. My attempts at using a win probability head on top of nanoGPT, treating events as tokens, have been significantly worse. I am seeing about 65% accuracy compared to the LightGBM’s 70%. That 5% gap is huge given how stochastic the early game is, and the Transformer is easily 4 OOM more expensive to train.
To bridge the gap, I’m moving to a hybrid approach. I’m feeding those expert features back in as additional tokens or auxiliary loss heads, and I am using the LightGBM model as a teacher for knowledge distillation to provide smoother gradients.
The main priority here is personalized post-game feedback. By tracking sharp swings in win probability, or $\Delta WP$, you can automatically generate high or low-light reels right after a match. It helps players see the exact moment a play was either effective or catastrophic.
There is also a clear application for automated content creation. You can use $\Delta WP$ as a heuristic to identify the actual turning points of a match for YouTube summaries without needing to manually scrub through hours of Twitch footage.
I launched https://rebrain.gg/ a few days ago.
It's a bit like Reddit but focused on learning. (Doom learning instead of doom scrolling)
You 1) upload a source 2) direct the kind of questions you want to be asked 3) start answering (and if you get the answers wrong, you can discuss the problem with "AI").
You can read other people's sources, questions, answers and their discussions with AI too.
And if you're learning the same thing as other people, you can join communities to share sources/questions.
It's still very early on, so I'm very interested in any feedback.
Built my own Spotify recommendation egnine after getting tired of Spotify’s repetitive recommendations.
You get to choose the genres you're interested in, and it creates playlists from the music in your library. They get updated every day - think a better, curated by you version of the Daily Mixes. You can add some advanced filters as well, if you really want to customise what music you'll get.
It works best if you follow a good amount of artists. Optionally you can get recommendations from artists that belong to playlists you follow or you've created - if you don't follow much or any artists, then you should enable that in order for the service to be useful.
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".
A south african wireguard-based consumer VPN service - surprisingly complex under the hood, about 6 months in the making so far!
Apple app store review is the biggest hurdle currently
A high-performance 3D game engine and editor in Rust. It has the ability to deploy to WebAssembly and WebGL2, delivering console-quality visuals and near-native performance right in the browser.
Currently building a multiplayer cozy farming game, inspired by Animal Crossing. Reach out to our discord if you are interested in learning more: https://discord.com/invite/mHsQayQNdp
Keep working on MatGoat (https://matgoat.com/en/) - management software for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and other martial arts' academies.
I train BJJ and kept hearing the same pain points from academy owners regarding attendance tracking, communications, missing payments, etc.
So I built a tool for martial arts academies in 2024 with belts progression, automated payments, attendance tracking, and a tablet check-in system. Nowadays I'm still onboarding new academies every week and working a bit more on the marketing side to keep growing.
I've been working on my 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. 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. 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
https://azayrahmad.github.io/win98-web/ Another Web-OS remake of Windows 98 made with vanilla JavaScript. There are already a lot of Windows web remakes, especially in this age of AI. So for this passion project I intend to make it as accurate as it could ever be without having to emulate actual Windows 98.
Currently it has:
- Accurate recreation of Windows shell with start menu, taskbar, windowing system.
- Full desktop themes customization (color, cursor, sound, wallpaper, screensaver). All Win 98 default Plus! themes are included.
- Persistent local file system & mounting local folder as removable disk with ZenFS.
- Support playing Flash games and run DOS games (save game persisted). Yes, you can play Doom and copy your savegames to continue.
- Some accurate remakes of Windows 98 apps, some made by me (Solitaire games, Minesweeper, Notepad) some are existing ports (Pinball, JSPaint, Webamp, etc).
- Some other fun stuff
If you're interested in Windows 98, this is for you. You're also welcome to contribute or fork it to create your own version: https://github.com/azayrahmad/win98-web
I'm still building https://techposts.eu - the Hacker News for Europe!
Some stats so far:
- 200 users
- 378 startup jobs
- 500+ posts
- 2800+ funding rounds
- 1700+ startup companies
- 5000+ investors
The next part of the project is Tech Posts Intel: a lead gen tool using statistical methods to predict which companies should have a funding round coming soon. I'm hoping to soft launch it this week.
I'd love to hear anyone's feedback on the website. Advice on how to get inbound links in 2026 would also be greatly appreciated!
https://github.com/tannn/freethoughts
Inspired by a TED talk I saw [0] where the researcher from Microsoft displayed a program with AI assisting with thinking while someone was reading and annotating a document. They claimed it was a way to sharpen critical thinking instead of killing it. They didn't release the product, but I figured it was cool and useful, so I've spent the weekend creating it. It's been a great way for me to practice using agents, and I've learned a lot from this process.
Forge – A 3 MB Rust binary that coordinates multiple AI coding agents via MCP https://github.com/nxtg-ai/forge-orchestrator
Forge is an orchestration layer that sits between AI coding tools and your codebase. It's a single Rust binary (~3 MB, zero runtime deps) that runs as an MCP server over stdio. Any MCP-compatible AI tool can call it.
MIT licensed. Whitepaper with the full architecture: https://nxtg.ai/insights/forge-whitepaper
I've been working on a browser extension to make Hacker News easier to use. No, not change the UX, but just some nice conveniences. Keyboard navigation, inline replies, dark mode, a nicer topcolors page, and many more features. I am hoping to add some social features, like being able to follow someone. All in a well-tested and extensible codebase that has minimal impact on the site. Open source, GPL...
Orange Juice
Borrow This And Improve It - an app for tracking repairs to a thing (right now it's bicycles only, planning to extend to other things like leaf blowers and electronics) and giving away half broken things or repaired things to others but with the advantage of also giving away the repair history for something. So for example, I found a bicycle in the trash, fixed it up with a few new parts (less than $6) and soon I'll try to give the now repaired bicycle away to a new home, plus a QR code that links to its repair history. The idea being that knowing how something was fixed once will make it more likely that it would be fixed again.
How Home Alone My House - A fun app I'm making with my children using computer vision. The idea is I can scan the room with my camera before unwittingly walking into their traps and becoming a hapless adult who didn't pay close enough attention to tripping hazards and choke lines.
I'm working on a language learning framework based on the ideas of comprehensible input and spaced repetition learning.
The idea is you take a book you want to read, and it gets translated but also rewritten to match your current learning level. And as you read/listen it introduces new words to learn, reinforced by spaced repetition.
We're taking a trip to France this summer and I'm hoping to have something usable for at least a couple months before we go.
Currently working on the mechanics of extracting content from ebooks.
Still working on
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - map of the Internet domains
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds - database of RSS feeds
- https://github.com/rumca-js/yafr - very simple RSS reader
- https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy - crawling project
- https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - another RSS reader
The second bubble there is a tool for 3D visualization and analytics of Claude Code sessions. The sample conversation is the one that made the tool itself!
That was a fun toy I learned a lot from. I’m not expanding that but am working intensely on the first bubble:
thinkt a CLI/TUI/Webapp for exploring your LLM conversations. Makes it easy to see all your local projects, view them, and export them. It has an embedded OpenAPI server and MCP server.
So you can open Kimi and say “use thinkt mcp to look at my last Claude session in this project, look at the thinking at the end and report on the issues we were facing”.
I added Claude Teams support by launching a Team and having that team look at its own traces and the changing ~/.Claude folder. Similar for Gemini CLI and Copilot (which still need work).
Doing it in the open. Only 2 weeks old - usable, but early. I’m only posting as it’s what I’m working on. Still working on polish and deeper review (it is vibe-crafted). There’s ergonomic issues with ports and DuckDB. Coming up next is VSCode extension and an exporter/collecter for remote agents.
Im working on ebpfence https://github.com/CucumisSativus/ebpfence
I want to create a tool that would automatically block the stealers from stealing your previous credentials or crypto wallets. I had this idea after the Shai-Hulud attack
It's an experimental side project, but so far it looks very promising.
I spent about a week, writing this[0].
It’s a special UIKit map package, designed to be integrated into SwiftUI, as map support is a big SwiftUI Achilles heel.
I have integrated it into another package (a SwiftUI admin tool, that isn’t public), and it works exactly as I planned.
I often do this kind of thing. If I can break some module out of my work, and publish it, I spend the extra time, polishing and documenting it. No one else really cares, but it forces me to do a really good job, so I get an extremely high-Quality component, that I don’t have to worry about, later.
[0] https://github.com/LittleGreenViper/BigJuJuMap