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
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
Solo dev, built https://poddley.com a guest-tracking transcript podcast service with rss, timestamps, person-filtering and transcript search.
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.
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 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
Remixify[1]. What I mean to do is target DJs and people who love to own their playlist curating process. We aim to help people find remixes to their favourite Spotify playlists. Alt versions, club mixes, remixed versions, whatever. Come build your new experience.
Building https://shippable.build for vibe coding in a proper stack and opinionated stack so it is less of a pain going to prod.
Working on new code review tooling specifically for reviewing your own branches/commits when you use an "AI Agent" to assist with writing code. It seems all of the tools people are building in this space attempt to automate away the review, but I want better tools for reviewing (and tracking tech debt) in the code I just generated locally. Will publish here soon
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 :-)
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.
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.
Learning cribbage, my family has been learning cribbage and we are leaning hard on cribbage scoring cheat sheets, but haven't found a great one online. So I put together https://cribscore.linsomniac.com/
This weekend I've been going through a bunch of stuff with A2A, building little samples and just getting my head around it. Threw together this repo[1] with a bunch of the stuff I'm doing, if anybody else is interested.
Also, watching a bunch of videos and reading docs on OpenClaw. I had thought I'd do an install of it sometime this weekend, but I don't know if I'll get to that at this point or not.
And lastly, messing with Spring AI[2]. I wanted to get a local build of that going so I can dig into the bowels of it and hack on it a bit. So I got that repo cloned and ran a quick build, and now I plan to start exploring the codebase.
Ultra token efficient query language for LLM generation. Acts as an intermediate representation that programatically translates to SQL.
https://memelang.net/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17967 https://github.com/memelang-net/memesql10/blob/main/memelang...
I've spent my weekend building asterbot: https://github.com/asterai-io/asterbot
Asterbot is a modular AI agent where every capability (such as tools, memory, LLM provider etc.) is a swappable WASM component.
Components are written in any language (Rust, Go, Python, JS), sandboxed via WASI, and pulled from the open asterai registry. Think microkernel architecture for AI agents.
Finally integrating Stripe! Been working on open source mobile app and ad analysis for awhile but didn't have a good flow for people to pay me. After getting 3 emails in the past month about it, and with plenty of pressure from my wife, it's definitely time.
It's a (now more than 20 years old) TV tracking website and community.
I've been using Claude 4.5 Opus (now 4.6) more and more these days modernizing and redesigning sections that haven't been touched for a decade or two. I don't trust LLMs much, but by breaking the work into small, self-contained tasks and testing constantly - I'm making surprisingly fast progress.
Implementing a hobby HDL for designing circuits in Wireworld and other Cellular Automata. The eventual goal is to create a larger Wireworld computer than the original (https://www.quinapalus.com/wi-index.html). If this project actually ends up working, I may attempt to optimise some large Conway's Game of Life designs. Currently I'm at the stage of rewriting the language's solver.
WIP language spec: https://gist.github.com/Heathcorp/13fcd206fdc38ca6ce001f32ef...
Writing the compiler/solver in Rust with no AI assistance because this is a learning project.
A social bookmarking site: https://fyp3.com/
Kinda like HN meets Pocket.
It includes a Chrome extension to easily tag, save & share pages.
Currently the front page is all the pages I find interesting (AI/Startup related).
Would love any feedback or feature requests!
Improving seccomp and landlock intergration into https://ryelang.org, improving tooling for making single executable files from rye projects, experimenting with reactive, declarative TUI library.
I am building tool for easily managing integrations for Cursor/CC users. You can integrate, test, visualize, monitor and maintain all your integrations from a single tool. We provide MCP so that your coding agent can communicate and ensure your integrations are working fine. We do continuous monitoring by sitting on top of your integration and monitoring infrastructure and if any issues are found, we do RCA so that your precious developer and analysts time is not wasted in routine maintenance. Do checkout vibeinfra.live
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.
I've been thinking about this a lot after shutting down my previous startup. One problem I've identified is that tools like Claude Co-worker or Claw Bots will never truly deliver reliable agentic outcomes for people due to the fact that scaling a human-like agent is paradoxically harder than scaling a script.
- I see a lot error propagation with CUAs
- A GUI is very flakey and it produces a lot action latency
- There're hidden states behind each screen that CUAs simply can't capture
- Token consumption is absurd (but I guess this will alleviate as LLMs get cheaper)
What do you guys think? Any good ideas what'd be a good counter to this?
I keep working on my command line game 'Rebels in the sky' (https://rebels.frittura.org)
The game is about spacepirates playing basketball, it's kinda a basketball manager game. It's played in your terminal and works with no internet.
You can try it via ssh at `ssh frittura.org -p 3788`
My VPS was purged due to a platform hack. I did not keep a backup, and I am trying to figure out what to do. There is no plug and play solution for backup. From what I understand, I have to set up rsync and dump files via cron to a Raspberry Pi. But there is no snapshot-like feature.
I am using KVM from Cloudcone (their virtualization software was hacked about a week ago) and I am using RPI4.
Then I need to set up my old website again, which is a pain in the butt. I hard-coded cron and a git-based auto-deployment feature (I think).
Im working on a number of projects at once that are all under the umbrellas of: personal library science, booktech, and qualitative improvements to personal life [1]. Notable mentions:
- Life’s Articles, a personal Wikipedia
- Counting Worms, a very fast calorie tracker
- BookTalk, a audio based reading companion for capturing annotations
- Kindle Blocker, a Chrome Extension that earns you minutes on websites by reading with the Kindle app
I've been working on an offline cross-platform application currently called Dev Cleaner.
> Dev Cleaner is a desktop application for scanning and cleaning development cache files and build artifacts. It helps developers reclaim disk space by identifying and safely removing caches like node_modules, .cargo/registry, .npm, and other build artifacts.
It's closed source, as I am planning to sell a license. But if you email me, I am happy to provide a build.
Today I'm writing a Postgres native function to derive UUIDs from an integer primary key using AES intrinsics. This lets me expose public UUID keys while still using an efficient 64-bit sequential primary key.
Not sure if I'll use it compared to just using conventional uuidv7 but it's nice to have options.
1. The collaboration and notation app for rock bands that I’d wished existed already: https://bandwith.rocks/about
2. A “runtime scheduler for humans” that I wished existed, too (think morning routines, travel checklists, and pomodoros in the same abstraction—but also a lot of support for ad-hoc rearrangement and addition of the task queue).
Working on a few
- Kardy - send group cards - https://www.kardy.app
- Jello - Create & customize popular games - https://www.jello.app
I'm working on a new compontent for viewing PDFs in original format and structure but show text highlighting while a specific piece of the PDF is being played in the TTS engine. This for my app (https://with.audio). Which already supports PDF parsing and TTS of PDF files. WithAudio currently converts the input PDF to Markdown and performs TTS and synchronized text highlighting on the Markdown content. I want to do this on the original rendered PDF content itself.
Initial results are promosing Extracting the text and figuring out which lines belong to the same paragraph and then try to map those to the original positions in the PDF...
Kerns (https://kerns.ai) — a research environment for deeply understanding topics across multiple sources. Upload papers, articles, or books into a workspace that persists across sessions. Read with AI summaries that let you zoom in and out of any document. Generate knowledge maps to visualize how ideas connect. Run deep research agents that produce comprehensive, cited reports. Free to use, would love feedback from anyone doing heavy reading/research.
Letterboxd for music - https://raygum.com
Trying to be much more though. Creates an abstraction over all the music streaming services so you can share playlists with anyone, regardless of what subscription they have.
Competency matrix for better people decisions https://matricsy.com
I was annoyed by how many managers lead teams, make decisions, what 1:1 looks like..
https://taiko.taikohub.com - Working on the TAIKO-01, a split concave ergonomic keyboard.
I'm an physician who previously had wrist tendinosis and carpal tunnel and made the keyboard for myself. I'm trying to get the keyboard registered as a medical device for treatment of hand/wrist repetitive strain injury. Currently getting design for manufacturing finalized, and waiting on injection mold prototypes. Hoping to launch on Kickstarter in the next few months.
Also concurrently waiting on ethics approval for a clinical study, which will happen after launch. We had quite promising results from user testing, so I'm cautiously optimistic about the study.
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 built an Legaltech for Singapore with RAG architecture and triple llm backup logic
GitHub:- https://github.com/adityaprasad-sudo/Explore-Singapore Live demo :- https://adityaprasad-sudo.github.io/Explore-Singapore/
Building my dev workspace into an operating system. Not metaphorically — structurally.
10 MCP servers as device drivers (exchange APIs, browser automation, Apple docs, issue tracking).
200+ skills as prose runbooks that compose system calls. Agent-mail for IPC between parallel
agents. A drift detector called "wobble" that scores skill stability using bias/variance analysis.Working on a PHP debofuscator (ioncube) at https://decodephp.io/
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
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.
Last week I released Gata Router - https://github.com/gata-router
Gata is an open source automated L1 ticket triage tool for Zendesk. It costs pennies per ticket for it to route tickets to the correct team.
During development I was regularly seeing over 90% accuracy. The average for humans is 60-80%.
The whole thing runs in your AWS account.
There's more information in the release announcement - https://www.proactiveops.io/archive/meet-gata-the-automated-...
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
A Windows 95-themed interactive guide on agentic AI coding, with a hidden SkiFree game, original chiptune soundtrack, achievement badges, and a Red Pill / Blue Pill choice that can BSOD your browser. Seven chapters with a codebase readiness scorer, ROI calculator, and copyable artifacts for engineering leads.
Built entirely with Claude Code, which is fitting since the guide teaches the same workflow. It's a labor of love that happens to be made with the tool it's about.
An attempt to build intuition with interactive articles and experimentation, inspired by explorabl.es
https://orrisbreathing.com Building a box breathing app for iOS. Started it to manage stress and as an excuse to get back into native development. SwiftUI with color-coded breathing phases, customizable timing, and session tracking. In TestFlight now with beta testers. Used Claude Code for most of the initial build — nearly one-shotted the whole thing, which was a bit surreal.
I am working on building a youtube supplement, not a replacement, that tries to replace the algorithm with a transparent shuffle.
The idea is that future discovery isn't limited by watch history and users on the platform can curate, showcase and amplify their favorite videos. It is an equal opportunity stage where users contribute to build a time capsule of videos.
If that sounds interesting to you, check it out at http://jadestage.com/ !
https://upscpath.com
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