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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Started working on a site to document anti patterns in online discourse. Not quite logical fallacies but more so unproductive expressions that aren’t conducive to pleasant, productive, and focused discussion. The site is a bit rough right now and a work in progress.
I want the internet to be a better place for discourse and I think a reference or guide on anti patterns in replies could help make a dent in the right direction.
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
Month 2 of building the SQL client I've always wished I had.
One feature I'm especially proud of is the visual query builder. Drag & drop to build SQL queries.
There's also an entire SQL tutorial section for anyone who wants to learn or refresh SQL knowledge.
I am researching go-string-concat-benchmark [1]:
A performance comparison of four common Go string building methods.
I recently updated my go-stats-calculator to include many more stats [2]:
CLI tool for computing statistics (mean, median, variance, std-dev, skewness, etc.) from files or standard input.
I also created claude-image-renamer [3]:
AI-powered image renaming script that generates descriptive filenames for screenshots.
[1] https://github.com/jftuga/go-string-concat-benchmark
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.
https://github.com/ScivizLabVienna/HandsomeTello
An opensource iot drone for less than thirty dollars.
A free interactive SQL tutorial that will get to the level of being a data analyst. It's Alice in Wonderland themed.
I used to be a coding bootcamp instructor, TA and guest lecturer. I've noticed more and more people need to learn SQL for various different reasons. I'm mostly concerned about lesson scaffolding since most SQL courses don't do it that well. I'm hyped about AI but they're not great with lesson scaffolding.
I'm 33% to 50% done. I've already noticed the way I scaffold the lessons is unconventional. For example, for the first 50%, I don't want students to know what tables are. It's too much all at once, everything should be small bites before the big concepts get introduced.
If anyone is interested in testing the beta version, let me know. It will be up within the next 2 weeks probably. My email is in my profile.
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'm currently working on a RethinkDNS-like (Android) and DNSCrypt-Proxy-like app built with Tauri + Svelte. It will include DNS blocklists, a custom WireGuard proxy, and potentially cross-platform device support. I'm using Mullvad's GotaTun implementation. I wanted to learn more about these networking concepts. If I finish it, I'll open-source it.
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.
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.
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.
After 15+ years in web development — now diving into game development with Three.js / React Three Fiber (R3F). Keeping AI usage minimal where possible, but it’s been invaluable for complex geometry and math-heavy problems.
Game idea: DroneCraft is a third-person drone exploration game where players scout the world for parts, craft powerful upgrades, and trade strategically to evolve their build.
Whats coming: Core mechanics are up and running. First playable version planned within a month, alongside open-sourcing the full codebase.
I'm working on Memex: https://github.com/joenewbry/memex
It's inspired by a moment a few years ago when I realized I had no history of what I had worked on in the past.
It let's you quickly get answers to questions like:
- What did I work on last week? - What was that one hacker new post about compiler optimization that I forgot to bookmark last week?
And it has MCP support so it plays well with Claude.
I've used it recently to target specific job applications by adjusting my resume based on what the job application is looking for and what I've worked on in the past... Claude one shots this (because it has context from Memex). And it feels amazing!
Also, the name Memex comes from Vannevar Bush's 1945 article "As We May Think". He originally thought of as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The individual was supposed to use the memex as an automatic personal filing system, making the memex "an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory".
And he created a word - memex - which is a portmanteau of "memory" and "index".
The wikipeida entry here has more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex
It's been a slow start for me. But now, between the cli interface and the MCP connection with Claude I find that I'm starting to use it instead of:
- Bookmarks - Lists / Bug Tracking
And even more exciting it's unlocking capabilities that I didn't have before:
- Can ask Claude to review the last week of work and remind me of things that I might still need to do - Can prevent randomization when someone asks me how to configure a server that I set up a month ago. Now I just ask claude and it checks in Memex. And I can send over a nice .md file
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/
I'm building CatchIntent (https://CatchIntent.com). The goal is to help turning social conversations into qualified warm leads.
Started with it because I was struggling with finding relevant conversations about my first app where people are exactly asking for what I'm selling, only that I was missing those conversations and people. Build a POC, tested for myself and started getting good leads, so I converted it into my second app.
Small lenticular holograms of math equations: https://gods.art/store.html
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.
I’m building an app that facilitates discovery and eases payments for roadside stands that sell produce, honey, maple syrup, eggs, firewood, crafts, etc. The concept is that any roadside vendor can sign up for free (forever, no add-ons or upsells) and they have an online home for their home business. The vendor can list up to 3 stands and show off the products they sell in each stand. Users can discover stands near them by list, search, or map, view the vendor and stand details, ratings, payment methods accepted, etc. When arriving at a stand the user can scan a QR code which opens a web cart, allowing them to add products they are going to purchase and then “check out” using one of the vendor’s stated payment methods like Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, Apple Cash, Zelle, or good old hard currency. We make these payments easier by standardizing the check out experience but we do not facilitate payments at all - these stands have always been and will continue to be self-serve on the honor system. Once you’ve paid, you get a receipt and take your goods. The vendor gets an alert that a sale intent was started and by which method so they know where to look for their revenue. In the future we may help with some basic reporting and very light inventory management if vendors ask for it. We allow users to alert the vendor if a stand is out of stock, which is also reflected in search so other users are informed as well. Users can then ask to receive re-stock alerts as the vendor restocks. Then of course users can favorite stands and products, share them, rate them, and create shareable collections of stands they curate (The Honey Trail or Summer Sweet Corn All-Stars, etc.). Eventually we will be adapted for events like farmer’s markets, craft fairs, and christmas markets. I built this because I am a maple syrup producer (tapping starts in a few short weeks from now) and I’m starting to get into mass sales of my syrup. I felt like people who produce and sell these products put a lot of hard work into the process and deserve a legit discovery tool as well as a basic stand management system that does not make them change their process or get in their way. An app like this costs basically nothing to run and I will ensure it is free to use as long as I am in charge. I’m testing this week and likely soft-launching in the next couple weeks - the goal is to be online around March 1. It was just going to be web-only (Supabase with a Svelte front end) but after Claude put me in timeout last week I tried Antigravity and now have 80% of an iOS app and will scaffold my Android app in the next month - so native apps will follow a web release pretty quickly.
I'm still working on basi[0], a Playwright alternative syntax/tool. I am curious about using LightPanda as an optional headless browser for it and wrote about it here[1]
[0]: https://github.com/zikani03/basi [1]: https://code.zikani.me/using-the-zig-built-lightpanda-browse...
The past few weeks I've been building Blackbird
https://github.com/jbonatakis/blackbird
At a high level it's my take on how the execution aspect of spec-driven development should be handled. Where as most tools that are popular right now break a spec down into a task list and instruct your agent to work through it in a single session, I am treating agents as stateless. By this I mean a separate (headless) session is started with selected context for each task. This avoids context exhaustion, compaction (and the resulting confusion that can occur), and means that Blackbird can work through effectively an arbitrarily large task list.
Right now it's BYO-spec, but then it:
* breaks the spec down into a dependent-aware plan (DAG) composed of parent and child tasks
* executes tasks one at a time based on their status (ready to execute if all dependencies are marked as completed)
* allows you to (optionally) pause execution after each task to review, approve and continue, approve and quit, or reject the changes altogether
* (soon) treats parent tasks as an automated reviewer for all child tasks and optionally auto-resume those sessions to address the feedback
* and more
It's entirely bootstrapped, and so far I'm quite pleased with it. I also wrote a post[1] today about some of the concepts I had in mind as I was defining the architecture.
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
Solo dev, built https://poddley.com a guest-tracking transcript podcast service with rss, timestamps, person-filtering and transcript search.
Struggled to find the best priced meat from UK butchers keeping up-to-date in my spreadsheet so built a comparison site with multi platform scraper (and a taxonomy matcher to allow “apples” to “meaty apples” comparisons).
UK only for now, and very much a “solves my problem” side project, but easily scalable to other countries of the need is there!
I've been working on a starter kit for indie SaaS builders. Extracted from a few of my SaaS products. Been programming for 30 years and using coding agents for the past year, so it's optimized for that https://stacknaut.com
Been working on TenantSaas, a .NET library to make developing multi-tenant apps safer. Wanted something that prevents background jobs or admin scripts from accidentally running across tenants by refusing to run when tenant context isn’t clear. Comes with contract tests teams can run in CI. Still early, so be gentle.
A Postman-like MQTT platform with variables and custom MQTT topic buttons.
https://github.com/alsoftbv/topic-lab
It's a Tauri-based app so it has small binaries and supports MacOS, Linux, and Windows.
No screenshots yet, couldn't find the time for marketing work. I'm building features as I am using them. I wanted my colleagues to give it a go first before sharing to the public, but I believe it's already valuable as-is.
Building https://shippable.build for vibe coding in a proper stack and opinionated stack so it is less of a pain going to prod.
I built a time tracking app and control panel for ourselves at our company out of frustration (it was very basic, for compliance with spanish law) and eventually we just fixed so much stuff and added so many features that we just released it as a product https://workstamp.eu
We need to reduce the entry barrier (it's meant for companies so it needs explicit registration) so anyone can use it as a proper SaaS but so far we already have a couple clients :D
I left my job as a PM a couple of years ago to start acquiring small e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon. I'm currently running those, and mid-acquisition on one.
Because they're relatively low-effort (Amazon is terrible for sellers in many ways but man do they provide an incredible amount of infrastructure), that leaves me plenty of time to play with AI, and it just so happens that the business serves as a giant, practical eval as new models come out.
I've been vibe coding apps for internal use and using Nano Banana for listing images and whitebox photos, and more recently I've started to lean on Claude Code heavily as an assistant. It's got API creds for my Amazon account, so I use it for everything from figuring out when I need to reorder to filling out spreadsheets for companies that safety test my product.
And of course I am writing a Substack that I must shamelessly self promote that goes into the practical use cases of AI in my business: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/
Working on Postkit - auth, permissions, config, metering, and job queues as pure SQL functions inside Postgres.
I've been using Claude Code to spin up apps quickly, and I kept needing the same infrastructure every time - user auth, permissions, usage tracking, job queues. So I pulled it all into one SQL package that lives in Postgres. Now when I start a new app I just tell Claude to use Postkit and all that stuff is already there, no external services to set up. I can focus on the actual product and iterate fast.
It was also a good excuse to actually use stuff I'd studied for system design interviews - Zanzibar-style ReBAC for permissions, a double-entry ledger for usage metering, transactional job queues with SKIP LOCKED. ~15k lines of SQL across five modules, with a Python SDK. The SQL works from any language though.
A developer platform for AI image generation that includes observability, with fine-tuned vision models as a judge to monitor production traffic. (Still working on the last part.)
We also have a model arena and showdown page that ranks models by task, so you can find the best model for e.g. making infographics: https://lumenfall.ai/leaderboard
We just launched the MVP. Tech stack is Rails for the dashboard and Cloudflare Workers (Typescript / Hono) for the gateway.
Almost done with launching my chrome extension called Klue which helps you create notes about webpages and talk with them. Just to clean up a few things, set up a feedback flow for family and friends and set up a landing page. What do you guys use to create these beautiful landing pages?
https://github.com/ntk148v/clicklens
It's a modern, powerful, and user-friendly web interface for managing and monitoring ClickHouse databases. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for developers, analysts, and administrators to interact with their ClickHouse clusters efficiently.
- Effective and Native RBAC: Use ClickHouse grants to control the data access and UI permissions. - Discover - Flexible, Kibana-like data exploration for any table granted access. - SQL Console, Monitoring and Logging, ... all in just one place.
Building a workout Apple Watch app and a workout editor for the Mac. Just testing it on n=4 or 5 people right now and thinking about how to market it if I launched it.
https://github.com/jmahmood/RED-STAR-WEIGHTLIFTING https://github.com/jmahmood/WEIGHTTRAINING-EDITOR
A healthcare integration engine for companies who don't want to build their own or don't want to use Mirth connect. Brings together some of the nicer features we have had in the SWE world (writing code and using a CLI vs clicking in a UI, version control, IaC, spin up/tear down envs easily, CI/CD, telemetry). It is written in Go.
Building https://lenzy.ai - helping conversational AI products (think Lovable or Cursor) reduce churn and prioritize product improvements by analyzing their user's chats. I started about 4 months ago, made my 2 paying customers happy. Now trying to onboard more and more companies!
Building a tool for finding scientific papers behind real-world OSS projects: https://papergrep.dev/
This is a follow up to an idea I had years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022649, which is now semi-automated (with lots of manual curation as the last step).
The biggest challenges:
- how to organize all this info in a nice way
- where to find more time to read all the gems I've found so far :)
UPD: formatting
All kinds of things! I work with AI every day to do various kinds of work. Coding. Research. Brainstorming. I write up notes nearly every day and then I post a summary of each week on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/cw/aiconfessions
One of the projects that features in these notes is the attempt to build a programming language using AI. https://github.com/xvandervort/graphoid
Since I left my last job, I do a lot of writing. I also have a couple substacks. One is a humorous weekly look at science and tech (https://technoscreed.substack.com/ ) and the other is a monthly exploration of history (https://historyroad.substack.com/)
I'm working to figure out new auxetic geometries for 3D lattices. The arrowhead is cool and simple, and gyroids are very effective, but I'm trying to discover if there's something simple, printable, and maximally effective. Tough problem. There's no general theory for auxetic lattices, so it's a matter of reasoning from the desired mechanism to find patterns that fit, almost like alchemical trial-and-error.
I finished website[1] with solitaire games as my first project which I did from start to end, from coding to people online playing my games.
Currently building chess puzzles based game called ChessBingo[2]. It's almost finished, but there are still things to polish.
[1] - https://onlinefreesolitaire.com
[2] - https://chessbingo.com
Building Pasture (https://www.usepasture.com)
Pasture takes each signup, enriches it (title, company size, funding, tech stack, and more), and scores it 0-100 against your ICP. Alerts go to Slack with full context. You can also track which channels bring quality vs. junk over time, which has been the most useful part so far.
Making rent as an open source developer.
Shamelessly attracting new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my crappy HTML skills.
Hey! I'm building SprintPulse - https://sprintpulse.io - a real-time retrospective tool designed with small teams in mind that transforms team feedback into concrete action items. With AI-powered summaries, merge suggestions, and sentiment tracking, every voice is heard and nothing gets lost.
A PDF generation API, Chrome-based. Most of my time lately goes into print production - browsers render everything in RGB but print needs CMYK with ICC color profiles, and getting that conversion right inside the PDF turned out to be a much deeper problem than expected. Got PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-4 working now.
Simplified agent task orchestrator named Kiln:
Uses your local Claude Code as the agent and GitHub as its UI, things you already have. Open source, MIT License.
You move cards across kanban columns (Backlog -> Research -> Plan -> Implement) and Kiln runs Claude locally, opens PRs, and keeps everything tracked in GitHub.
I am building Hobbyboard as a self hosted visual archive that uses vision models to curate inspiration media for hobbyists and makers.
Website: https://hobbyboard.aravindh.net
GitHub: https://github.com/aravindhsampath/hobbyboard
I want to do a show HN later this week.. but here might be a softer launchpad :-)
I will be replacing the Raspberry Pi 4 I use as a home server with a more powerful HP desktop. I am getting tired of DDOSing myself whenever I open the wrong menu on Nextcloud.