alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
I'm building Dropnote, a small tool for physical businesses.
Someone who is physically at a place can scan a QR code and leave a short message in their browser. No app, no account. Messages are asynchronous; staff reply when available. This is not live chat. It's meant for in-the-moment feedback or questions that don't justify interrupting staff or becoming public reviews.
Constraints: async only, anonymous by default, no customer tracking, messages tied to specific physical spots
Free early access until Sept 30, 2026 (+ one extra free month). No credit cards (no payments yet). I'd love to hear your Feedback. Thank you.
Building a zero-persistence messaging tool where everything lives in memory and dissolves after use.
I'm thinking all the time about what the "best" way of using local AI agents like Claude / Codex / Gemini is. I'm trying to figure out the best UI/UX. There's so so so much that hasn't been explored yet.
Mainly I'm working on a task dispatch dashboard called Prompter Hawk that is designed to be the best UI for task management with agents. If you've been trying to parallelize by running multiple claude code terminals or codex terminals at once, this tool replaces those terminals and fits them all into one view with an AI task tracking board. It sounds more complicated than it is. It's a harness for Claude / Gemini / GPT models with a GUI that speeds up all your workflows. Rather than using sustained chat mode, all Prompter Hawk tasks are fire-and-forget. You just give the task description and come back when it's done. Parallelism first.
Some example highlight features:
-One dashboard view that shows all your parallel sessions and which tasks each agent has in progress and in their queue. Also shows recently completed tasks and outputs. This is my attempt at the ideal "pilot's cockpit view" for agentic development.
-Tasks are well tracked by the manager: see their status, file changes, and git commits. One click task retry. Get breakdowns on cost per run. Tasks can be set to automatically recur on a given schedule. Everything goes into a persistent local DB so you can easily pull up task data from months ago. Far far better user experience than trying to pull up old chat histories IMO.
-Timeline view and analytics views that give you hard stats on your velocity and how effectively your agents are using and updating your codebase. See unique stats like which of your files your agents read the most and how many daily LOC and commit changes you're doing. See how well you're parallelizing workloads at a simple glance.
-Automatic system diagram generation
-Task suggestion feature. If your agents are idle, they can draft tentative tasks to carry out next, based on the project history and your goals. This makes keeping multiple agents spinning actually much easier than you'd think. You don't need to be a multitasking context-switching god to do this.
I haven't shared it much (not even a Show HN) because the landing page isn't converting well at all yet, though I have some reddit ads doing well. I've had a bunch of free users sign up and a handful of paying users too. Looking for users or just feedback on anything! Sorry for wall of text.
afaik a blocker on making useful internal agents is connecting to data sources and then exposing that data to said agent
im building Satori to fix this -https://www.usesatori.sh/
would love feedback!
I plan to pursue a master's degree in computer science this year.
Two things for my document translator https://kintoun.ai :
1. Trying to improve the translation quality by giving LLM more context.
2. Fixing the issue where PowerPoint slides layout may become a bit messy after transition because of different text density between western and CJK languages.
A suite of tools for storyboarding/animation in grease pencil :)
Fetching every church from IRS data; using a small local Mac mini LLM to match to their Google result, fetching site and (eventually) running a data enrichment LLM pass to determine various positions, metadata, and services offered. I just really wanted to see the data in aggregate. My current match rate is 30% with qwen2.5-14b. Doing my best to avoid spending a lot of $ on the processing even if the Mac mini is slow.
Stretch goal: start transcribing sermons (most churches link to videos) and using a LLM pass to look for toxic traits. Speak truth to power about how a lot of them turn a blind eye to this political moment.
We’ll see how it goes.
For the last couple weeks I have been building dwata and I am going to submit today for Google Gemini Hackathon.
https://github.com/brainless/dwata
dwata is built on the idea of multiple, task-specific agents. Right now it has only one agent that can be run on an email to extract regex patterns for financial data. This enables high performance data extraction from emails or documents (in future) without sending each email to an LLM.
dwata has an email scan which tests simple keywords and regex patterns, groups by sender emails, sorts by number of emails per sender (highest first), and filters out groups where the emails do not seem to be from a template (typical transaction emails are from templates). This is deterministic code in Rust. Then dwata can use the regex builder AI agent to take one email from the group and build a regex pattern to extract extensive financial data - (optional) who sent, how much, (optional) to whom, on which date, with (optional) reference ID.
The generated patterns are saved to local DB and run for the email group (by sender) which was used to generate the regex. That gives a very high performance, AI enabled financial data extractor.
Soon, I will focus on events, places, people, tasks, health and other data. All data storage and processing is local. I am testing exclusively with Google Gemini 3 Flash Preview but dwata should be able to run really well on small LLMs, ones up to 20b parameters.
I am preparing for launch, the builds are not ready yet, but if you want to try, you can compile (Rust and npm tooling needed). Sources to nocodo will also be needed (https://github.com/brainless/nocodo).
Indiehacking so couple of serious things and then some just starting out and some mostly for myself.
Serious ones making over 2k/mo https://bestphoto.ai/ - AI Img/Video tools https://aieasypic.com - Original version of above, still making some money
New things not making money yet https://admakeai.com - AI ads generator for facebook ads. Made mostly so I have a easy way to prompt for stuff and keep track of good AI ad prompts. Have been using it to make static image ads for BestPhoto and actually have over 40 conversions at $~45/conv. Pretty good considering my previous attempts with my own handmade ads using canva was like $80-100/conv. but most of the time FB wouldn't even spend anything from my budget before
Fun stuff/for myself:
https://xhdr.org/ - Made like a few months back when twitter was allowing HDR images in your profile pictures, they patched it like a week later, but was fun while it lasted. Still works for facebook, keeping it up for FB video ads, I've noticed people abusing this a lot when scrolling on FB recently searching for good ads, so I'm guessing it works? Good way to get attention of people on iphone quick
https://framecall.com - Saw people making cool AI motion videos using the claude code skill with remotion, so packaged it into an actual web app you can use as a chat instead of through terminal. Harder than expected to get all the tool calling(and auto continue) stuff to work, similar to how claude code works
TranslateVoice(name TBD) - An iphone voice translate app where you tap microphone button and it uses 4o realtime to translate between you and someone else. This was originally one of the biggest thing I was hyped about as a usecase when 4o released but when I tried it on their app, it just didn't do prompt following well at all it would randomly try to communicate with the user instead of strictly translating, just randomly cutting off someone before they finish speaking etc. Currently have 3 modes that work, that if no one else uses I will be using:
1. Interpreter mode: Basically User 1 speaks to phone in their language, phone talks to user 2 in their language, user 2 replies to phone in their language, phone replies to user 1 in their language etc. Just pure translation, with chat history transcribed in each other's language
2. "Friend mode": You tell it a general goal, "I want to get immigration documents, I need to know the requirements" it then basically acts as if its a friend you called to help with translation and gathers everything while talking back and forth with User 2 and then at the end goes back to user 1 with all the info.
3. Stealth mode: Airpods in, it will transcribe and translate everything being spoken and tell you what to say based on initial goal or you can also write extra instructions in the chat. This is currently the only non-working/buggy one I'm trying to figure out before releasing this, since both will be speaking in same language its hard for model to know who is user 1 and who is user 2 automatically.
First time I'm creating an Iphone app fully vibecoded(react native so I understand whats going on frontend wise at least cause of react). Not looking forward to the app store review process. And I know this is likely something someone already made but its probably paid and I have like $25k in Azure credits I can burn anyways.
X-Ray Feed – A Chrome extension to visualize the Twitter/X algorithm
I got tired of guessing why my timeline looked the way it did, so I built a tool to reverse-engineer the "Heavy Ranker" logic in real-time.
It’s an MV3 extension that overlays the hidden weight of every post directly in the feed. It distinguishes between organic content ("Thunder" nodes) and AI-injected recommendations ("Phoenix" nodes) so you can actually distinguish following vs. algorithmic fill.
The scoring is based on a log10(Engagement) * 20 formula to visualize velocity. I originally built it just to clean up my own feed hygiene, but it turned out to be a pretty useful arbitrage tool, identifying "flops" (good topics from big accounts that failed due to structure) that are worth rewriting.
All the analysis happens locally in the browser. Would love to hear what you think about the scoring accuracy.
PyTorch compiler and runtime for WebGPU!
nblm.link Links to publicly accessible Google NotebookLM notebooks. 100% free - you can add your own if you want, I just have to approve them, which I do as time allows - usually at 2am :-P
We're building a repairable and fireproof e-bike battery at https://infinite-battery.com :)
Guitar plugins, looking for partners
quantifier-dsp.com
I'm starting cold weather veggies indoors for my spring garden and preparing the soil.
I've been playing with various mineral amendments for years and produce some extremely tasty produce I have yet to see matched in stores (even the organic section).
#dungeon26 https://adungeon.com
It's a creative project in which I add a new room to a mega-dungeon over the course of a year, resulting in 12 levels and approximately 30 rooms per level at the end. All the tiles are created by me using my own tools. It's a lot of fun and something I can do every day that I feel like I can enjoy for a year.
It's focused on OSR/Shadowrun. It's also taught me a lot about dungeon design and creation.
(1) I've somewhat stumbled on a persona as a Fox-photographer who strongly communicates that he is a public affordance which (a) helps me get better photos of people, (b) gets me flagged down by people telling me about interesting things going on like
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116021033821248982
and (c) results in handing out several business cards a day
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/115901190470904729
and I'm within sight of having to reorder cards. I just finished a landing page for the cards (before they went to one of my socials)
but having to reorder the cards I am planning on making a next generation card which has a unique chibi and unique QR code that will let me personalize the landing page for cards, particularly I will be able to share a photo just with the person who has the card.
============
(2) I've been doing heart rate variability biofeedback experiments and I have this demo
https://gen5.info/demo/biofeedback/
which is still not quite done but has source code at
https://github.com/paulhoule/VulpesVision
It works with most heart rate monitors that support the standard BTLE API not just the H10. I run it on the Windows desktop with Chrome and with Bluefy on iPad. Once it displays the instantaneous heart rate I can control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayer_waves
by following the slope of the instantaneous heart rate, breathing out when it is slowing down and breathing in when it is speeding up. This greatly intensifies the Mayer_wave and increases the SD1 metric. I think this drops my blood pressure significantly when I'm doing it. This needs better instructions and some kind of auditory cue so I can entrain my breathing when I am looking at something else. Longer term I am interested in incorporating some other biofeedback gadgets I have like a respiration monitor (got an abdomen band and a radar which could probably even read HRV if I had the right software for it) and a GSR sensor, and EMG sensor, etc.
I'm working on a sewing pattern software to make patterns with code. It has a bunch of useful features like chopping up the pattern into a PDF for printing. But the thing that really made this software nice to use is the timeline I implemented, where you can go back and see how the pattern is constructed with each segment. It makes debugging so much easier. I have it so you can put different curves into groups, so you can see how just the sleeve is constructed, for example.
I will definitely consider adding timelines to future software I make, it's an awesome feature.
Just Godot things: https://github.com/invadingoctopus/comedot
Still no actual game of course :')
Web based mapping and navigation application that basically does everything all the other products don't do. Raceline analysis, driving aids, Dakar rally, CANBUS, OBD, Nightrider for race cars? or something. Passion project whatever. Investors get lost.
Like a lot of others, I'm working on replacing apps that I use that aren't just perfect for me. So I've been working on a local "Hey.com" replacement that lets me have multiple "feeds", real search and offline use.
Verimu - we're trying to help medium and small businesses across the EU get up to speed with the new Cyber Resiliance Act requirements (which start in September!) trying to make it as frictionless as possible - drop in a github action and you are good to go. Web based dashboard coming soon!
The State of Utopia[1] is currently fine-tuning an older 1 GB model called Bitnet, so that we have something beginning to have the shape of a sovereign model that can run on the edge. We think having model sovereignty is important for our citizens, and we are working on tools for them to easily further fine-tune the model straight from their browser. We are currently running a 30-hour training run on some simple hardware and through webGPU, so that no trust or installation is required.
We made it possible to run the model in webGPU and it is pretty fast even in that environment. You can see the porting process in my last few submissions, because we livestreamed Claude Code porting the base model from the original C++ and Python.
In a separate initiative, we produced a new hash function with AI - however, although it is novel, it might not be novel enough for publication and it's unclear whether we can publish it. It has several innovations compared to other hash formats.
We are running some other developments and experiments, but don't want to promise more than we can deliver in a working state, so for more information you just have to keep checking stateofutopia.com (or stofut.com for short).
Our biggest challenge at the moment is managing Claude's use of context and versions, while working on live production installs.
Everything takes time and attention and Claude Code is far from being fully autonomous building new productive services on a server - it's not even close to being able to do that autonomously. We feel that we have to be in the loop for everything.
[1] eventual goal: technocratic utopia, will be available at stateofutopia.com
Editor/IDE in Go. Mainly as a challenge to replace JetBrains.
https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono
I've been working on a deep seabed simulation, specifically to simulate polymetallic nodules for cobalt/nickel mining in Project Chrono. Development has stalled as I scan my nodule samples to enter them into the simulation (half of my samples were stolen from my porch, which delayed things), although the sim works just fine. The idea is you could take what I have now and, in project chrono, load a vehicle and test deep sea nodule mining using different designs.
It comes with a rigid (fast but wholly inaccurate) simulation, as well as DEM (which will make you cry and want to build a new computer). Having lots of fast cache helps with the DEM sim
Funding for https://infinite-food.com/ - seeking $100M - now finalizing four strong patents in the non-military drone space. Had a couple of false start time wasting lawyers, but now it's home run time. We've got what seems to be a few simultaneous nice technical edges over the multibillion dollar investments in civilian aerial delivery of food from major early stage players to date. Can't wait to close, itching to get to market and start generating some proper California lunch money.
Simultaneously, working on some technical demonstration materials, including novel fabrication and supply chain, plus some reduced BOM strategies for greater efficiency in mass manufacturing (once we get cash over the line). Bit of electronics in there, some mechanical. Keeps me interested so it's not 100% admin.
Also getting back in to badminton, super fun, losing weight nicely, feeling better every week.
New ideas? AI government will have its day in our lifetime.
I'm a filmmaker. I'm working on a tool to make movies with AI models:
https://github.com/storytold/artcraft
It's not like ComfyUI - it focuses on frontier models like Higgsfield or OpenArt do, and it is structurally oriented rather than node graph based.
Here's what that looks like (skip to halfway down the article):
Improving path-planner for 3D metal printing slicer project to reduce internal localized stress.
Designing closed loop micro-position 4-axis stage driver section v0.2.
Other stuff maybe three other people would care about =3
LLM thingz
https://codeinput.com - Tools for PR-Git workflows
Currently experimenting with semantic diffs for the merge conflicts editor: https://codeinput.com/products/merge-conflicts/demo
You can try by installing the GitHub App which will detect PRs who have a merge conflict and create a workspace for them.
Chess67 - Website for Chess coaches, club organizers, and tournament directors
Chess67 is a platform for chess coaches, clubs and tournament organizers to manage their operations in one place. It handles registrations, payments, scheduling, rosters, lessons, memberships, and tournament files (TRF/DBF) while cutting out the usual mix of spreadsheets and scattered tools. I’m focused on solving the practical workflow problems coaches deal with every day and making it easier for local chess communities to run events smoothly.
I'm currently unemployed and I started using Codex a couple of weeks ago so lot's of simultaneous projects, some stalled
Pre-codex:
Local card game: there's a very specific card game played in my country, there's online game rooms, but I want to get something like lichess.org or chess.com scale, oriented towards competitive play, with ELO (instead of social aspects), ideally I would get thousands of users and use it as a portfolio piece while making it open source.
cafetren.com.ar: Screen product for coffee shops near train stations with real time train data.
Post-codex:
SilverLetterai.com: Retook a project for an autonomous sales LLM assistant, building a semi-fake store to showcase the product (I can fulfill orders if they come by dropshipping), but I also have a friend and family order which I should do after this. 2 or 3 years late to the party, but there's probably a lot of work in this space for years to come.
Retook Chess Engine development, got unstuck by letting the agent do the boring busywork, I wish I would have done it without, but I don't have the greatest work ethic, hopefully one day I will manually code it.
Finally, like everyone else, I'm not quite 100% content with the coding agents, so I'm trying to build my own. Yet another coding agent thingy. But tbf this is more for myself than as a product. If it gets released it's as-is do what you want with it.
trying to get rid of microwave radio harassment for the past 2 years and counting
I'm learning about "AI programming" by working on some toy problems, like an automated subtitle translator tool that can take both the existing English subtitles and a centre-weighted mono audio extracted from the video file and feed it to an AI.
My big takeaway lesson from this is that the APIs are clumsy, the frameworks are very rough, and we're still very much in the territory of having to roll your own bespoke solutions for everything instead of the whole thing "just working". For example:
Large file uploads are very inconsistent between providers. You get fun issues like a completed file upload being unusable because there's an extra "processing" step that you have to poll-wait for. (Surprise!)
The vendors all expose a "list models" API, none of which return a consistent and useful list of metadata.
Automatic context caching isn't.
Multi-modal inputs are still very "early days". Models are terrible at mixed-language input, multiple speakers, and also get confused by background noises, music, and singing.
You can tell an AI to translate the subtitles to language 'X', and it will.. most of the time. If you provide audio, it'll get confused and think that it is being asked to transcribe it! It'll return new English subtitles sometimes.
JSON schemas are a hint, not a constraint with some providers.
Some providers *cough*oogle*cough* don't support all JSON Schema constructs, so you can't safely use their API with arbitrary input types.
If you ask for a whole JSON document back, you'll get timeout errors.
If you stream your results, you have to handle reassembly and parsing yourself, the frameworks don't handle this scenario well yet.
You'd think a JSON list (JSONL) schema would be perfect for this scenario, but they're explicitly not supported by some providers!
Speaking of failures, you also get refusals and other undocumented errors you'll only discover in production. If you're maintaining a history or sliding window of context, you have to carefully maintain snapshots so you can roll back and retry. With most APIs you don't even know if the error was a temporary or permanent condition, of if your retry loop is eating into your budget or not.
Context size management is extra fun now that none of the mainstream models provide their tokenizer to use offline. Sometimes the input will fit into the context, sometimes it won't. You have to back off and retry with various heuristics that are problem-specific.
Ironically, the APIs are so new and undergoing so much churn that the AI models know nothing about them. And anyway, how could they? None of them are properly documented! Google just rewrote everything into the new "GenAI" SDK and OpenAI has a "Responses" API which is different from their "Chat" API... I don't know how. It just is.
Ending genocide omniversally now every timeline with every breath.
EGONETWEB, now recruiting.
Kill your ego so we can stop the killing.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
A personal finance app called “Predictable” that takes chaotic sloshes of money and turns them into steady streams of cash. You tell it “I receive this much money weekly/monthly/on the first and fifteenth/when Mercury is in retrograde, and I have these expenses at other various intervals” and it evens everything out into a constant weekly flow of cash by, essentially, buffering. Any overflow or underflow goes to a “margin” bucket which basically tells you how much you could spend right now and still have enough for all your recurring expenses.
Currently making it just for myself but curious if anyone else would find it useful.