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'm building a free alternative to SimpleCitizen (YC S16).
It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.
So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled.
I found out simplecitizen offers a DIY plan for $529 (https://www.simplecitizen.com/pricing/)
So, a free (and local-only) version might be a good alternative
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 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://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.
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.
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..
I’ve been working on a developer-facing sandbox for AI agents that focuses on budgeting and cost control, not payments.
In multi-agent setups, we kept running into issues where agents either hoarded resources or exhausted shared budgets unpredictably. So we built a control layer where agents operate using virtual credits, can temporarily rebalance budgets or split shared API costs, but everything stays under explicit human-defined limits with full audit logs and kill switches.
It’s intentionally not real money and not a financial product — more like infrastructure for coordinating agent spend safely. Mostly exploring how much autonomy you can give agents before cost becomes the real bottleneck.
I’m building True Fluency https://truefluency.org a language-learning platform focused on efficient, structured learning. I’m also thinking about future AI features, like a tutor that answers questions, AI conversation partners, personalized exercises, and even AI-generated stories or dialogues for practice.
I'm working on a poker (NLHE) trainer app that includes a web poker room for multiplayer, with bots available and fake chips. Using Event Sourcing with some CQRS in Elixir and Phoenix. The player view is a projection of House Events, suitable for hand history, for feeding to solvers or LLMs for real time advice or post hoc analysis.
The idea is to get tons of reps in, across varied situations, with excellent advice to build good intuitions and decision making abilities. Or to stop making bad or terrible decisions. Or just play poker for free.
I'd like to monetize with at least the hand history format open sourced. Ping me if you would like to get involved with GTM and the revenue side of things.
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
My first research paper about World Model caching !
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.
I'm building a markdown editor with minimal UI and unusual features like real-real-time chat: https://kraa.io/hackernews
More about the product itself: https://kraa.io/about
Trying to get a small Saas off the ground by adapting a script I wrote for friends to help them schedule their teams -> https://skeda.app
and also Backseat Writer, a creative writing text editor that uses AI to impersonate your audience and give you feedback https://backseat-writer.vercel.app/demo which is more of an anchor for my own writing practice than anything else, but I find it fun
I’m working on Zigpoll[https://www.zigpoll.com], a lightweight survey/feedback tool for ecommerce (mostly Shopify).
Built it because most survey tools felt overgrown for what I needed. It focuses on post-purchase and on-site surveys, attribution questions, and getting clean data out.
Lately I’ve been working on:
Simpler targeting + survey logic Exposing survey data to AI tools Improving response rates without nagging users
It’s bootstrapped, profitable, and built by one person (me).
Puzzleship - https://www.puzzleship.com/
It's a daily puzzles website focused on logic puzzles at this moment. I have about 70 subscribers, and it's online since Dec/25.
ClodHost.com ... it's basically lovable but just claude (opus 4.6) on your own root ubuntu server, with a web wrapper to claude code. And no credits, unlimited claude usage. Also free if you sign up now to help me with beta testing! thanks!!
Oh, I also used the tech to set up claudecrowd.clodhost.com .. a vps running claude code where anybody from the internet can submit the next prompt!!
An attempt to build intuition with interactive articles and experimentation, inspired by explorabl.es
I just published the web app for https://listendock.com You can listen to your documents. I also have an iPhone app (that was first).
My most fun feature: when I connect the app to my car, I can use the skip buttons on my steering wheel to rewind or forward 10s in the playback.
RxJS vite plugin that operates in much the same way as react devtools and vite plugin, because I love rxjs but I cannot recommend it without that same calibur of tooling. Turns out you can take a lot of ideas from the react vite plugin and do a bunch of similar things.
Trying to parse, model the HMR process, and storing the data as flat as possible and doing it from relation design first, has been a pleasant process.
Im hoping it works for react devs easily, and then I guess I'll try to learn angular to see if that would not be helpful for them too.
I mostly want to help my old coworkers maintaining my old crazy code with a visual helper.
Bedtime Bulb v2 [0]: a low blue light bulb for use before bed, with added near infrared. Now shipping!
Restful Atmos lamp: a circadian bedtime lamp that automatically shifts from energizing light during the daytime to low-blue light at night. Units are inbound, shipping in March.
[0]: https://restfullighting.com/products/bedtime-bulb-v2
[1]: https://restfullighting.com/products/restful-atmos-preorder
Minimalist Podcast player with gPodder sync focused on iOS ecosystem. (WatchOS/CarPlay/AirPlay). YourPods is a gPodder-compatible, privacy-first, and self-hosted podcast player. Sync your subscriptions and listening progress across all your devices using your own Nextcloud server, manage multiple profiles, and keep your data 100% yours. https://github.com/asecretcompany/yourpods-source
Been working on a weekly newsletter [1] to stay fully informed about agentic coding with one email, once a week. I also keep the focus narrow, only on what engineers and tech leaders would find useful for shipping code and leading teams, which means I filter out all generic AI news, or what CEO said what, or any marketing fluff.
I'm working on Checkend [1], which is a self hosted error monitoring app. I needed something lightweight and easy to deploy.
Working on a PHP debofuscator (ioncube) at https://decodephp.io/
Experimenting with visual/audio combinations to explore aspects of a space dataset I’ve been having lots of fun with. Added in a LLM chat view with Duck DB WASM as well to try out tool use - text to SQL seems to be relatively solved with a light semantic layer; some interesting optimization around what tools to expose and result handling that need some more iteration.
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 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
https://tretto.io - market / competitive intelligence powered by agentic search. Small SaaS built with LLM assisted workflows from day 1 on top of a “classical” tech stack (.NET, Azure, Aspire, CosmosDB).
If you’re in sales, a business executive or simply curious about what’s going on around your own startup give it a go.
I'm building an AI agent that handles my bookkeeping automatically. It works with Beancount, a plain-text format for double-entry accounting and calls on different skills depending on where it is in the process. Every entry it creates gets version-controlled through Git, so there's a complete history of changes.
A CRM for the tattoo industry.
I have started working on a SaaS for Doctors. It is basically a patient management system where Doctor's can get complete picture of their patients like visit history, diagnosis, medications suggested, billing etc. I am using Nest.js for backend and Next.js for frontend (Shadcn UI Library)
Side Note : These posts on HN motivated me to start working on this project. Cheers! to the community.
https://llmparty.pixeletes.com/experiments/universal_ui
I tiny experiment/joke about chatbots :)
Finally trying out Godot on a real project.
I've been pretty bummer out by Rainbow 6 Siege X announcing they will never support Linux due to a lack of kernel-level anti-cheat support. While I can use NVIDIA shield to play from my Windows pc, id rather play something natively with friends (for context, we usually play 3v3's for funsies.
My goal is not to make an exact clone, but to make a smaller map version for 3v3 that is a bit more quick paced.
For context, it's a bomb defusal game where the main goal is intel and gadgets. You need to make the other side waste their gadgets so it comes down to a gun v gun fight.
Adding EXORdisk-I support to my MC6800 simulator so that it can boot EDOS and EDOS-II disks.
EDOS was a direct 6800 port of FDOS. FDOS was the first DOS available for microcontrollers, using iCOM's FD360 8-inch floppy drives.
I'm working on a chrome extension that helps answering "Cover letter / Tell us about the time when... / Why do you want to work at..." questions in job application forms.
You can bookmark a job description (it will be parsed), then paste a question and it generates an answer based on your resume, the job description, and your previously given answers for similar questions in other applications. The generated answer can be refined through a follow-up chat and exported as a PDF. It also works as a simple job application tracker.
Saves me tons of time and effort every day!
A GBNF to json schema translator in such a way that structured responses from LLMs can be serialized back into string confirming to the original grammar.
Initial results have been surprising in that even when using structured output, some of the generated json schema breaks the generation process in a way that syntactically invalid json is returned.
I'm working through major providers to determine which are stable enough to rely on.
The end goal is to generate strings confirming to non-json grammars for common formats like CSV, SQL, Python, sed, regex, etc.
https://github.com/asfaload/asfaload : an opensource multisig sign-off solution allowing to sign and authenticate GitHub release artifacts. It is self hostable, accountless (key pair identity), auditable.
I'm optimizing performance of PBT generation and shrinking in [elm-test](https://github.com/elm-explorations/test/compare/master...ja...) - on its own PBT-heavy test suite I got it down from 1336ms to 891ms by using JS TypedArrays.
I'm also experimenting with coverage-guided PBT input generation in the same library, AFL-style -- right now elm-test only has random input generation.
I'm making Letterboxd for TV, with a pretty data visualizations.
The UI/UX is a pretty interesting problem. Letterboxd has it easy because a movie is its own discrete unit, but TV shows have multiple seasons, each with many episodes, and viewer behavior is varied. Some people watch one episode. Some people watch three at a time. Others binge multiple seasons in a sitting.
I'm running a BETA on Worn, my tape saturation VST. Made in Cmajor with some help of vibe coding.
https://stoneandsignalaudio.com/
Use code 'FREEBETA' to partake, ~25 seats left.
I'm also making music. I got Suno to do a cover of 2 songs I wrote, although eventually I want to introduce human versions. Also want to make electronic music eventually.
I finally put my "securenote.app" domain to good use. It's a note taking service with markdown support where the data is fully encrypted before it even leaves your computer with no way for me to see your notes (as I don't have access to the password that encrypted it).
Still iterating on it, including a potential improvement to the (very simple) design.
Learn languages with spaced-repetition flashcards from content such as ebooks, websites and videos.
Completely rewriting fullremote.it (a platform for italian tech workers looking for remote jobs) in next.js using claude as "pairing buddy"
I built teach.af as a flipped classroom environment where students will “teach” AI bots to enhance their understanding of functional programming.
Nvim plugin that tries to make code review actually enjoyable (as I think this is what we will spend most of our time on).
https://sfbapt.com/routes.html
Lots of work left to do, but happy to have a working version up. It's an interactive map that currently shows all the routes and stops for SF Muni, BART, Caltrain, samTrans, and VTA. There are many more agencies (official and unofficial) in the bay, so I'll be adding those throughout the next few days as I sort out the data.
Finding the data and cleaning/normalizing it is a real pain, so if anyone knows a good place to find them (and normalize them), please do share
I'm working on Blender-like UI areas Vue plugin. Pure planar graph, UI interactions, API, styles customization
I need it to create Gamedev and 3D artists oriented tool for creating SDF-based shader visualizations (with 3dgs/nerf compilers)
90% is done
Building my dev workspace into an operating system. Not metaphorically — structurally.