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 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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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
Working on the Mecha Comet (https://mecha.so/comet), a modular handheld Linux computer.
Biggest challenges: - How to explain the different use-cases/possibilities in a clear way - DX for any hacker who comes across the device with/without hardware experience
We're working on learning/pedagogy infrastructure that models the learner by using AI to build a knowledge graph: https://parsnips.notion.site/knowledge — this is in contrast to the common black-box approach of "use some RAG with a large context window and hope for the best".
In the above article, we list a few applications that we think this could be helpful for: life skills, management/sales training, personal coaching, etc. We'd love to demo the software if this sounds interesting to you!
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/
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've just started a new personal project, a C++20 library for running composable visitors over data documents and data models with JSON/CBOR semantics, DOM-less.
Basically, if you define a data model with bindings, you can inject data into it or extract data from it by running SAX-style visitors. You can use serializers/deserializers for standard formats like JSON/BSON/CBOR/CSV, or you can define custom formats for formating structured data however you want to. You can also run a serializer visitor on a deserializer to convert between formats. You can compose filter visitors to extract a subtree or filter out keys. And it's designed to fit on microcontrollers with very limited dynamic memory allocations, because it either streams data on-the-fly or works directly with the underlying data format in a big preallocated buffer.
I worked with libraries that offered a subset of these features before in my professional career (even built one myself), but recently I've had an epiphany (a document can also be used as a data model) that makes me think I can create something elegant and unique.
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
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.
https://llmparty.pixeletes.com/experiments/universal_ui
I tiny experiment/joke about chatbots :)
I am working on an impression style city builder called Tutankhamun: Builders of the Eternal. I am the solo developer.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4009620/Tutankhamun__Buil...
https://radius.to/ - a Meetup.com alternative of sorts - with fairer organiser pricing for smaller groups. I posted a Show HN [1] here a while back, got tons of great feedback, and have been slowly improving it since, with little marketing. Planning a re-launch here soon.
Slowly but steadily implementing support for version 3 of the Wasm specification in my wasm parser (written from scratch): https://github.com/agis/wadec
I'm working on a (somewhat) realistic surfing game. Tired of arcade-style games, I decided to try my hand at something closer to the real sport, focusing on realistic breaking waves, speed generation and carving, rather than impossible air combos.
After one year of development, it's going better than I expected, so I'm considering building a demo to gather feedback and see if there's enough traction for working towards a Steam release.
Even if that's not the case though, it's been a blast learning about game dev in Unity/C#, as well as 3D modeling and animation in Blender!
Recently on my blog: https://bryanhogan.com/blog
Currently in Shanghai but will move to Tokyo next week. Once I'm in Tokyo I'll publish a few posts about AI assisted coding and product creation.
Also adding a few things to my ideas page: https://bryanhogan.com/ideas
Other things I'm working on:
- https://dailyselftrack.com/ - Got into working on it again, mainly solving some UX problems currently.
- https://game.tolearnkorean.com/ - Learn Korean words quickly, words go from easy tasks (e.g.) matchings pairs) to more difficult ones (writting it), currently still needs some slight adjustments, and then I'll release an Android version.
- https://app.tolearnjapanese.com/ - Wanted to learn Hiragana quickly, used my existing project as a base to build this. Needs some adjustments as well, feedback is highly welcome.
- https://tolearnkorean.com/ - Since I'm learning Korean, and also working on an app to better learn Korean, I also want to make a guide on learning Korean, improving my own skills by teaching others.
Recently, I got banned from Reddit for sharing my local news summarization website (www.cafelutza.ro) - for the Romanian market. So I figured you know what, I've been trying to bring this product to Reddit in the hopes of having better discourse around the news, but instead I realized, I was looking for smart discourse around a subject, which I haven't been able to find on Reddit or elsewhere, so I created Exppit (https://www.exppit.com) that basically gets experts to debate your topic of choice.
I'll admit it's terrifying to share this here because I don't know how to keep costs under control. For now only myself and my friends have used it.
Also trying to make a podcast out of it, which I enjoy listening to while I do some road trips: https://open.spotify.com/show/1fFwWMWJBJYIZmyz9cnrKB
Solar-powered data center in a desert.
Fully off-grid using solar, batteries and Starlink for uplink. Focusing on AI inference at the beginning. Currently building our first prototype and testing cooling solutions.
I'm working on ArkWatch (https://watch.arkforge.fr) - a monitoring API that you can use with just curl, no signup required.
The insight: most solo founders need basic "alert me when this changes" monitoring, but existing tools force you through signup flows, credit cards, dashboards you'll never use. So I made it dead simple:
curl "https://watch.arkforge.fr/api/check?url=https://your-site.com&[email protected]"
I built this because I kept forgetting to monitor my own stuff. Now it's live and I'm trying to get my first 5 beta testers. The challenge is marketing - I'm a developer, not a growth hacker. Learning as I go!
What's been your biggest challenge with your current project?
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.
We ran into the annoying Envoy 503 bug in our prod and needed some quick tools to help figure out what was going on with TCP connections and HTTP requests.
https://github.com/vishnugt/TCPFinMonitor. Live - https://keepalive.gt.ms/
This tool tracks TCP FIN packet timing to see how upstream connections are closing and how keep-alives behave. It helped me spot when connections were closing too early or timing out, which was causing those 503 errors.
https://github.com/vishnugt/hyperbin
A fast, minimal httpbin clone written in Rust. It’s way faster(20x throughput) than the usual httpbin and useful for testing HTTP clients and debugging requests without extra noise.
These aren’t polished, just some stuff I needed to iron out the issue.
I'm working on a website that lists veterinary practices owned by private equity or large corporations to help people make more informed decisions about where they take their pets. It started as a small passion project after our dog (who was sideswiped by a car) died at the hands of a vet practice recently acquired by private equity. We were billed over $13k for 2 days of care where his diagnosis and the opportunity to treat it was missed, there was zero continuity of care, no medical leadership and predatory billing practices.
The site has become quite a hit and gets thousands of unique visitors each day. https://www.privateequityvet.org/vet-list
I’ve just published the first public release of a new open source project Shovel.js, replacing tools like Express, Fastify, Next.js, Vite. It’s a full-stack/meta server framework which implements the full Service Worker specification but in Node, Bun, Cloudflare. It leans into using web standards to do things like accessing the filesystem, reading cookies, create client-side bundles rather than inventing new APIs. You can read about the process of making Shovel with AI in the introductory blog post.
Been bored a bit, so working on a Coop exploration app, already on AppStore - https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/ato-explore-together/id6757285....
Basically tracking where my friends and I have collectively been by dividing the global map into H3 hexagons. The using photo and workout metadata to get the locations, giving points and doing comparisons between everyone. It’s actually quite fun to see random people around the world sign up and see in the global map where everyone has been. Grounds me a bit haha.
https://donethat.ai/profile/christoph
An AI based time tracker: reconstructs your day from whatever it sees you doing. Screenshot based but never stores them.
The same tech stack is pretty easily adaptable to openclaw tracking. If anybody would like to try, DM
Also looking into AI based security tools for monitoring security of DoneThat. Thinking of using zeropath would love to hear if people tried them / have other suggestions
I am in the early stages on building a passion project called Metric Me - A dashboard for your body.
Over two decades ago I was diagnosed with high blood pressure (for which am I have been on meds for about 15 years). I also have low platelets (red blood cells, basically means that I bruise easily and that small cuts don't heal fast). At any rate, I do blood tests on a regular basis to keep things in check. I have been keeping track of test results, weight and blood pressure result for nearly 20 years, but the data lives in a text file on my desktop. I wanted to build something more substantial for this for quite some time now, so, this is it.
I'm going to do the hyper-literal take of what are you working on literally today, since I'm always working on the same old project Marginalia Search and I have been for going on five years now.
* Integrating website liveness data into the crawler to make more informed decisions about whether to keep or wipe data from a website if it can't be reached while crawling
* Working out why the liveness data gathering process isn't stopping as scheduled.
* Deploying a voluntary max-charge request header for the commercial API
* Making website URL elements searchable. They should be already, but are not for some reason.
* Maybe looking into an intermittent stacktrace I get on one of the index partitions.
No blockers.
https://finbodhi.com — It's a personal finance app. It helps you track, understand, benchmark and plan your finances - with double-entry accounting. *You own* your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit (we do have your email for subscription tracking and analytics). Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custom sheet/calculator to operate on your accounts (calculate taxes etc) and much more.
Most recently, we added support for benchmarking (create custom dashboards tracking nav and value chart of subsets of your portfolio) and us stocks, etfs etc.
I wrote about benchmarking here: https://finbodhi.com/docs/blog/benchmark-scenarios
NOTE: you can try demo without signup, but it doesn't work in Firefox Incognito mode.
I released an open source library to remove metadata from images: https://github.com/fasouto/picscrub
Was more complex than I thought. Still missing support for some RAW formats and had to fix some bugs
I also created a website to showcase how it works -> https://picscrub.com/
Learning the autonomous coding, there are so many different skills, tools and ways and only some of them seem to work.
That means I have to: - build something so I can evaluate the results. - track each of these projects separately otherwise they turn into dust after quite some time. Gladly claudesidian seems to be working well with the unstructured stream of inputs. Feel like hooking it up with some task tracker cli and calendar and notifications could make life a bit better too. - plan next projects to keep evaluating other skills and tools
It’s been discussed so many times the amount of new or personalized software that appears and will appear and it seems so true.
Whatever I built I am actively using myself - a text rewriter that cleans some of the AI speak and has MCP and cli (at https://www.refineo.app). Math teaching and solving extension at https://math.photos and a self hosted stock opportunity discovery tool that runs locally. This is just to automate what I did before manually and scale it up a bit.
> Any new ideas
There’s no product yet to cover the needs of all of us launching the software into the internet void. Any ad platform out there is a hot and very outdated mess and I just can’t. There is going to be a better way with all the capabilities we have and someone is going to really nail it.
I am currently not really working on anything major, due to time constraints.
However had, on my semi-immediate todo list in the future are:
- improvements to the scripts I use to compile software from source; I want to be able to build a complete LFS/BLFS without any interaction (I know there is AFLS but I don't like the format or restrictions; I literally want to be able to do everything here via actionable scripts at every moment in time, including using git sources rather than old releases)
- continue on the unified widgets project (e. g. use oldschool GUIs but also for the web "GUIs"). Describe once, run anywhere, in any programming language. This is obviously way too much for a single person, so I mostly want to get the foundation right, prototype primarily in ruby, then add python and java to it. The "end format" should be for normal people, e. g. they should be able to describe everything in one format, and then have that be the basis for every GUI.
- continue working with regard to bioinformatics, also with a focus on normal people (non-tech savvy people). Most bioinformatics software was written by math-heavy tech-centric people, which makes sense. It's not trivial to work with that (we have AI to work around this to some extent, but I feel that many people who use AI don't understand the underlying components; I kind of want something like a Linux from Scratch for all bioinformatics-centric software. Like not just use it but full and useful explanations that are not too technical, but also not too overly long.)
Hopefully gem.coop becomes a viable alternative to rubygems.org - I hate the corporate identity rubygems.org adopted (and you can see the fall-out in other areas, e. g. Heroku dying right now, which kind of means ruby will die too, if all use cases are eroded despite the pro-corporate focus RubyCentral embraced). Unfortunately things seem to become worse in general - I was hoping LadyBird would be a real competitor. The moment you make any statement that they perceive as "criticism" is the moment their code of conduct kicks in and locks you out. And that's not even after a first release; imagine how they will operate once people come in with complaints about LadyBird having problems.
The world wide web used to be a LOT more open in the past.
A metacritic like website but for any product.
It analyzes thousands of professional critic reviews to find the best of the best.
I started building this because I adore how metacritic analyzes professional movie/game/tv show reviews and calculates a meta score for each title. In my experience it’s the best way to discover new things to watch or play, and I’ve often wished something like this would exist for when I want to buy a product.
This year, I decided to start building it myself and Criticaster is the result.
For a given product category we collect all professional reviews of a given product, analyze each to assign them a score and then calculate an average critic score.
The goal is to become the most trustworthy source to make product decisions.
Very curious what y’all think!
I'm juggling two projects:
Offline first, no tracking PWA for intermittent fasting and mindful eating. It helped me lose another 3 kg in January. Spiked a native iOS version, but I really like the simplicity of just the PWA. Not sure what's next!
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Having done a lot of back and forth with LLMs and at the end throwing away learnings from a conversation felt so wasteful - reposit allows you to /share a summary of the valuable learning from your LLM chat for others to discover.
At the beginning of researching a problem, your agent can search reposit just like Context7 for docs. This way, even if you opt out of sharing your data with your LLM provider (as it's all or nothing), you can choose to publicise a solution to your problem with very little effort.
I'm working on extracting valuable learnings from open-source community projects as a starting point now (with attribution), as it probably needs a larger database to be valuable for users to install and use.
You can also self-host it and share privately within the company.
Working on Memory Store: persistent, shared memory for all your AI agents.
The problem: if you use multiple AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, etc.), none of them know what the others know. You end up maintaining .md files, pasting context between chats, and re-explaining your project every time you start a new conversation. Power users spend more time briefing their agents than doing actual work.
Memory Store is an MCP server that ingests context from your workplace tools (Slack, email, calendar) and makes it available to any MCP-compatible agent. Make a decision in one tool, the others know. Project status changes, every agent is up to date.
We ran 35 in-depth user interviews and surveyed 90 people before writing a line of product code — 95% had already built workarounds for this problem (custom GPTs, claude.md templates, copy-paste workflows). The pain is real and people are already investing effort to solve it badly.
Early users are telling us things like one founder who tracked investor conversations through Memory Store and estimated talking to 4-5x more people because his agents could draft contextual replies without manual briefing. It helped close his round.
Live in beta now. Would love feedback from anyone who's felt this pain! :)
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
Skulto - offline-first package manager for Claude/Codex agent skills
https://github.com/asteroid-belt/skulto
Started building this after getting nervous about installing random SKILL.md files from GitHub. Scans for prompt injection in markdown/references and suspicious patterns in scripts/.
- 200+ curated skills included
- 33 supported agents
- Symlinks for one install anywhere and automatic updates
- CLI, TUI, or MCP interface: try asking Claude to find and add Awesome repos.
- Semantic search across skill content
Working on: local skill authoring, mise-style directory activation
Go + Bubble Tea. Happy to hear what's missing.
I'm building Ditto — it clones websites with 100% visual accuracy and outputs a proper React app with named components and preserved structure.
The problem: you find a design you love, want to use it as a starting point, and your options are either manually recreating it or using a tool that spits out a tangled mess of divs and inline styles. CatchDitto gives you an actual codebase — clean component hierarchy, sensible naming, structure you can extend without wanting to rewrite everything first.
I'm still iterating, would love to hear what others think.
https://github.com/ScivizLabVienna/HandsomeTello
An opensource iot drone for less than thirty dollars.
I’ve been building out https://hnarcade.com for the past weeks. Got a lot of good feedback from the ShowHN thread and others reaching out individually.
Since the ShowHN thread, I received more than 40 individual game submissions!
To give more exposure to some of the games launched during the week I also launched a newsletter. Feel free to check it out if you want to learn more about games shown over the week :)
Creating an Android app of my favourite word game. Existing games are full of ads. Started coding, thanks again, thanks to AI.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.superfun.w...
Hosted OpenClaw, one click and you get a full agent with configurable skills, channels and the whole thing, all running in its own sandbox.
I love OpenClaw but setting it up is a pain: VPS, Docker, API keys in plaintext, security patches... So I’ve spent the last couple weeks building a hosted version that handles all of that. Each user gets their own isolated environment on Cloudflare Workers.
Still doing some testing with friends before opening signups but planning to launch properly this week.
Would love feedback on the landing page in the meantime!
I'm making a suite of simple Windows tray apps that do just one thing. They often have existing equivalents but I think my version is better and/or simpler ;-) All work starting with Win7.
The first three are:
- miniWake: keeps the computer awake
Alternatives: Powertools; USB mouse jigglers
Features: installs without admin rights; triggers invisible mouse events; turns off at LOCK, turns back on at LOCKOFF (saves battery); manual turn off or on via double-click on the icon
- miniRec: records system audio + microphone to mp3/wav
Alternatives: various utilities like Voicemeter, AudioRouter, or some DAWs
Features: does not require any special driver; installs without admin rights; light on resources; "invisible" to third parties (video meetings); auto turn off after 5 minutes of silence (configurable)
- miniCron: system scheduler as a service
Alternatives: NSSM - the Non-Sucking Service Manager; Splinterware
Features: launches any program at any given time (cron like but without cron syntax); kills the current task when the service is stopped; reads and logs stdin/stderr; very light on ressources and very simple
Two others are in the works.
Working on https://eonia.art/, simple coloring page generator and picture animations.
I am using gemini-flash-image and veo-fast and it's impressive what you can do with them.
I’ve been working on https://og.plus, a service that creates unique Open Graph images per page on a website.
It does this by taking a screenshot of the page, but before it does that, you can modify what’s displayed in the screenshot with CSS, tailwind classes, meta tags, or HTML templates.
If you connect your website to it, the only thing you need to deploy to your web app are a few meta tags. The OG+ servers do the heavy lifting of processing the meta tags to setup the page, take a screenshot of it, and serve it up to the consumer.
The other cool thing it does is generate a different Open Graph images per social network so they all get an image for the exact size they works best in their previews. The CSS or HTML templates are aware of this too so you can display different content to specific social networks.
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.