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’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 am getting the AI Agents to build an expense tracker Telegram. I would like to have one myself and among my family members since we are heavy Telegram users. I am also using this as a way to learn more about the AI Agents (what they are good at, their limitations, etc) with (hopefully) proper guardrails, guidelines, checks, etc.
https://github.com/yelinaung/expense-bot/
https://gitlab.com/yelinaung/expense-bot/
As you may see from the git history and "contributors", it's mostly Claude and AMP making the changes. I am not entirely sold on these agents and not particularly excited by these. But I also feel that I can't afford to sit out this transition so here I am...
ragextract.com
A document RAG API based on multimodal embeddings that's intended for data extraction. If your document workflow involves search and you're looking for ways to cut down on VLM (OCR) costs, Ragextract provides a simpler alternative (less bells & whistles) which makes sense for startups, SMEs and freelancers.
As someone who works on AI document workflows, I use Ragextract myself to reliably execute for various clients in finance, insurance and proptech. I'm currently working on marketing/messaging for the service and could do with more feedback and use-cases.
Have a new or existing project which could use something like Ragextract? Email me and if there's a fit happy to provide a demo or free subscription.
Learn more here: https://subworkflow.ai/blog/ragextract/introducing-ragextrac...
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.
Working on i18n for Val CMS, a lightweight CMS where content is stored as code.
GitHub: https://github.com/valbuild/val/blob/main/packages/next/READ...
Working on reproducible test runs to catch quality issues from LLM providers.
My main goal is not just a "the model made code, yay!" setup, but verifiable outputs that can show degradation as percentages.
i.e. have the model make something like a connect 4 engine, and then run it through a lot of tests to see how "valid" it's solution is. Then score that solution as NN/100% accurate. Then do many runs of the same test at a fixed interval.
I have ~10 tests like this so far, working on more.
Solo dev, built https://poddley.com a guest-tracking transcript podcast service with rss, timestamps, person-filtering and transcript search.
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 have been learning Ruby on Rails and recently deployed domain-tracker to reinforce Rails principles that were fuzzy to me.
This was built following the GoRails SaaS tutorial but I have added uptime monitoring and ssl expiration tracking as well.
Two free dmarc tools: * dmarc domain scanner https://dmarcdefender.io/tools/domain-check * dmarc xml analyzer: https://dmarcdefender.io/tools/xml-analyzer
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 :)
https://www.github.com/deepclause/deepclause-sdk
"Compile" Markdown specs for SDD or Subagents into executable logic, e.g. CodeAct+DSPy+Prolog. Not sure how and if I will continue, but it's been lots of fun.
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.
https://github.com/askmanu/acorn
A straightforward and simple AI agent framework. It puts a lot of emphasis on the loop and the steps in that loop. You can change in real time the model, the temperature, the tools, the history. You're also able to spin-off work on a branch and then add the result of that work on the main branch. Still early but developing very fast.
Working on Design Flo - Generate enterprise grade software using natural language. We use 10 years of battle-tested patterns, not just LLMs. Deterministic logic where reliability, performance, and correctness matter most.
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.
Also working on App Shot Editor [1], a free iOS/Google App store screenshot generator. Basically my kids were getting into mobile app development, and I wanted an easy way for them to create the screenshots needed for the app store listing.
A goal tracking app that bridges the gap between a to-do list and a calendar. Todo lists don't track time, while calendar time blocks are too rigid.
I need something that gives me visibility into my pace on recurring goals while still allowing for flexibility, i.e. undone goals roll over to the next period. So Im building an internal app for myself.
UPSC Civil Services exam is one of the most coveted exams in India (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Services_Examination). I created the platform which has indexed mock test copies of people who are now officers for the Indian Govt.
Now I am building additional features that make the prep slighly easier. The platform is already live and is being used by several thousand aspirants.
Let me know if you have any feedback! Thank you
I'm building a password tray app. It's tiny cross-platform app (spotlight like search) for people who juggle multiple password managers and browser profiles.
It gives you a global quick search to find and copy credentials from different sources, regardless of browser or profile.
Finding work after a corporate restructure. Also migrating my workloads from VMs and strewn-about containers onto a Talos K8s node, so I can break the cycle of bespoke builds at home and get back to enjoying projects.
Speaking of projects, I’m roughing out a method of pulling cost data for common services (compute, storage, databases, etc) across the three major cloud providers and making recommendations as to where to put things for optimal cost; a key component of a “universal cloud” idea I’ve been kicking around since 2020 or so, where the base cloud services are abstracted away into commodities rather than bespoke products or locked-in vendors. The goal is to basically have something like Terraform that will transpose its code to the destination cloud chosen by the cost analyzer at execution, and eventually auto-migrate load as prices or needs change (e.g., a client churning early and shifting that reserved instance to another customer for a higher margin).
Write once, and trust the pricing model to deploy it where it makes the most fiscal sense. No more learning Azure/GCP/AWS for bog-standard workloads anymore.
I'm enjoying building a website with solitaire and puzzle games.
I am currently rewriting the engine for the Nth time and plan to add 400 games to the platform in the coming months, as well as social features such as daily challenges, awards and leaderboards.
My ambition is to make this project the largest collection of free modern solitaire games available for all kinds of devices.
Building https://shippable.build for vibe coding in a proper stack and opinionated stack so it is less of a pain going to prod.
This month is dropping network cable to the home offices and then adding recessed lighting in the living room, pantry, and coat closet.
Next month prep starts for finding dev work after an extended hiatus.
I am working on versanovatech.com. Its a learning layer for AI agents that lets them remember, share and learn from their experiences. I have built novasheets.com using the tech of versanovatech.com. It extract structured information from financial excel spreadsheets and is totally free to use.
Dimensionally accurate AI 3D modelling. My grandpa has a 3D printer but struggles to use any complex tools. So I am working on this chat interface to allow him to do some simple models.
So far he has triggered more than 150 generations. It’s getting better every model cycle and gives me something I enjoy working on.
I just bought a few microcontrollers and electronics bits to mess with, I want to write an operating system for it to learn risc-v assembler
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 https://dataraven.io/ – a low-cost, cloud-native data movement platform focused on object storage.
RClone is doing the heavy lifting (amazing project). I'm wrapping it with the operational features clients have asked me for over the years:
- Team workspaces with role-based access control
- Notifications – alerts on transfer failure or resource changes via Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.
- Centralized log storage
- Vault integrations – connect 1Password, Doppler, or Infisical for zero-knowledge credential handling
- 10 Gbps connected infrastructure (Pro tier) for large transfersI'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.
Professionally, I'm currently working on a touchscreen interface for a medical device warming cabinet. But in my spare time I'm learning to use the micro-mill I recently purchased, by creating a cutting tool for an electric hand drill that will make flat holes in wood that are cut to exact depth and centered correctly. This is for preparing worn out pivot holes in 19th century wooden works clocks to insert bushes.
I built a mobile app for golfers who don't like using their phones while they play. Take a picture of your scorecard after the round and it reads/saves the scores and stats (and allows you to post to the USGA if you keep your handicap).
I'm a self-taught coder who first built this 7(!) years ago but couldn't figure out the OCR part. Started again 9 months ago on Replit (starting with Agent 2 which was okay, then eventually starting to absolutely crank with Agent 3) and it works really well now.
Would love feedback from any golfers! golfrise.com
I'm working on PC Part Picker for hi-fi stereo gear. https://buildhifi.com
Some technical highlights:
- Graph-based signal flow: Products become nodes, connections are edges inferred from port compatibility (digital, analog, phono, speaker-level domains)
- Port profile system: Standardized port definitions (direction, domain, connector, channel mode) enable automatic connection inference
- Rule engine: Pluggable rules check completeness, power matching, phono stage requirements, DAC needs, and more
It's getting close. I'll do a show HN on it sometime soon.
Working on a PHP debofuscator (ioncube) at https://decodephp.io/
I'm building a safer Agent system for SMBs.
The biggest problem is internal knowledge and external knowledge systems are completely different. One reason internal knowledge is different it is very specific business context and/or it's value prop for the business that allows charging clients for access.
To bridge this gap, the best approach is to train agents to your use case. Agents need to be students -> interns -> supervised -> independent before they can be useeful for your business.
https://github.com/rush86999/atom . it's still in alpha.
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!
A substack for 80/20 life advice and behaviour change.
Full project: https://euzoia.org
Tried to be super low-tech: Notion, super.so, Spotify creators, riverside.
Now thinking of building an email-based agent for behaviour change accountability. Would love any pointers to good UX for email-based AI assistants.
I'm working in getting my fullstack web framework Andurel to v1 (currently in beta).
The goal is to approach the developer experience you get from Rails, but in Go, while keep as many of the idioms from Go.
A dashboard to spin up web servers, proxies, remote server monitoring, remote terminal, and docker containers in milliseconds.
https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio
Screenshots: https://prettydiff.github.io/aphorio/screenshots/index.html
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
Applications for Linux that I always wanted but could never quite find the one that works how I think it should.
traymd: A system tray notes application that supports basic live input of markdown. https://github.com/rabfulton/TrayMD
reelvault: A local film browser and launcher. https://github.com/rabfulton/ReelVault
preditor: A simple image viewer that shows each image in the center of the screen in a window sized for that image with some basic editing functions built in. https://github.com/rabfulton/preditor
For the past 2ish months, I’ve been working on Lattice, my internal engine for my multi-tenant blogging system. Take a look at the code [1] and the live site [2]
[1]: https://github.com/AutumnsGrove/GroveEngine [2]: https://grove.place
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.
I am working on a e-commerce and pos solution. More like shopify/saleor/woocommerce etc. with ready to start for small businesses selling physical and online and in-store products and services.
The platform itself is built on elysiajs/bun and tanstack and is completely hosted in EU and the payment processor is a EU based entity and we have an ISV partnership.
StoryStarling - Turn your story idea into a printed children's book
Working on a platform where you describe a story concept and it becomes a real, illustrated picture book - professionally printed and shipped to your door.
The key difference from "personalized" book companies: this isn't template stories with a name swapped in. You bring an idea - maybe a book about a kid with a cochlear implant going to their first day of school, or a bilingual German-Turkish story about visiting grandma's village - and it generates a complete original narrative with consistent illustrations throughout.
You can upload reference photos so characters actually look like your child. Supports 30+ languages including bilingual editions on the same page.
Currently refining the showcase features and adding RTL language support.
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'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.
Since we recently moved out of the city and into the mountains of Switzerland, I had a niche problem... agreeing with my buddies which is the best ski field to meet at when we all live in different towns. So I made a little web app to help:
This was a fun little project I did over the Christmas holidays but only finished off recently. Basically I precalculated the public transport time between the most populated towns in Switzerland to every ski field (about 350 of them!) and then built a little web app around it using Django.
You can choose to prioritise shortest (lowest time overall) versus fairest (smallest variance in group members).
Totally free to use. Next steps are to integrate it with live snow conditions/open lifts...
Claude did help a lot with the FE part. The biggest part was actually finding the best public transport stop for each ski field - that was a very manual process trawling through skimap.org images and Anreise info on ski resort websites.
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.