alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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I'm building web-based CAD software for woodworkers. Not a plugin, I'm starting from scratch. I'm aiming for it to be intuitive for non-technical users (think SketchUp), while also offering some of the more powerful tools of "proper" CAD tailored for woodworking: simple parametric workflows, cutting layout optimization, built-in tools like chamfers and joints,...
StoryStarling. You describe a story idea and it generates a fully illustrated children's book, then we print and ship it.
Not templates with names swapped in. Every story and illustration is made from scratch. You can go from "dinosaurs soccer" or write out a whole storyline. Pick an art style, optionally upload reference photos of your kid, and it builds a 28 page book in a few minutes.
Bilingual in 38 languages. We handle RTL (Arabic, Hebrew), CJK, and less common languages like Estonian, Maltese, Irish where there's not much available for kids.
Tech side for the curious: LangGraph orchestrates the pipeline, Celery workers do image generation and text rendering in parallel, and LLMs critique the illustrations for consistency mistakes and can trigger regenerations automatically.
Printed in Germany, booklet around 20 EUR, hardcover around 40 EUR.
I’m building a decentralized Drone-as-a-Service (DaaS) orchestration layer that treats aerial robotics as a simple API endpoint.
The system allows users to submit a JSON payload containing geocoordinates and mission requirements (e.g., capture_type: "4K_video" | "IR_photo"), the backend then handles the fleet logistics, selecting the optimal VTOL units from distributed sub-stations based on battery state-of-charge and proximity.
Building a cheaper alternative to Twilio Voice Intelligence. Record phone calls, transcribe, generate AI summaries, enable semantic search over transcripts — $0.30/hour vs Twilio's $1.50/hour.
Stack is 15+ Go microservices on k3s. Cross-lingual semantic search is fun. Spanish query returns English calls with no translation code.
I finally decided to try and make a note taking tool I've been wanting to use. https://chrononotes.com/
As many here, I've found that a single text file is all that I really need, but found that it makes it difficult to keep track of a variety of things. I was also trying to use the file as a simple project tracker, adding some tags like [BUG-N], and updating them by hand. Eventually, it became difficult to track the progress of things, since I had to jump around the file to look for updates.. or use grep.
I condensed the idea to just that - a very simple tool which manages "trackers", and has a simple filtering built in to "trace" the updates. I've been using it, since I've added the BE, and dogfooding it a bunch. Would love for fellow note takers to take a look. It's not perfect, but I'm keeping it around for myself :)
I love making games, and I've been building a no-code game engine by extracting reusable components every time I ship a new game. It started as me scratching my own itch, and now it's turning into a real platform.
Each game adds more building blocks to the editor: multiplayer, event systems, NPC behaviors, pathfinding, etc. I build a system once, and then anyone using the editor can use it in a click.
Since my last month, I shipped the asset marketplace and the LLM builder. Artists can now upload tilesets and characters, and unlike itch.io, assets drop directly into the editor. You can preview how they'll actually look in-game before using them [1].
An other problem I kept running into: even with a no-code editor, users don't know where to start. So now I'm extending it with a coding agent. Describe the game you want, and it assembles it — pulling assets from the marketplace, wiring up the event system, and using all the building blocks I've spent the past year extracting. Multiplayer, mobile controls, pathfinding, NPC behaviors — the agent doesn't build any of it, just reaches for what's already there.
Once the LLM assembles it, users will have a game ready to work on, and will still be able jump into the editor and tweak everything [2]. Here's an example of what it can already make [3] (after a lot of prompting), and the goal is to reach games like this one I built with the manual editor[4].
Hoping to release the AI mode in a week or two. The manual editor is live at https://craftmygame.com in the meantime.
[1] https://craftmygame.com/asset/mossy-cavern-JdYWai1
[2] https://youtu.be/6I0-eTmoHwQ
Still working on https://kavla.dev
I have worked with data for a while. I feel like our tools could be much better when it comes to "flow". I want an experience where you don't need to alt+tab to slack/images/another query. What if we put it all on a canvas? That's what Kavla is all about!
Since last month I've done a lot of improvements to the editor to make the "flow" better.
I've also read up on HMAC, Nonces and fun encryption stuff to create read only boards.
Here's one where I look at stack overflow survey for databases: https://app.kavla.dev/v/mqhg54o319doya4.67dbfee1ccd6caf638d3...
Snowflake users apparently make the most money!
I used Rust to build a terminal based IDE for parallel coding cli workflow. It works with Claude Code, Codex and Gemini!
My favorite features are: - custom layout and drag and drop to change window - auto resume to last working session on app starting - notifications - copy and paste images directly to Claude Code/Codex/Gemini CLI - file tree with right click to insert file path to the session directly
OH and it works on both Windows and MacOS! Fully open source too!
I am working on two small apps for my dungeons & dragons group. We're playing inperson and I really like to give them printed out cards for magic items they receive and also for spells, because they are quite new to the game.
So I build these two app to create items and spell cards and print them out.
For language geeks: https://kpt.datamediate.com
KPT is a language app specifically targeted at explainable verb conjugation for highly inflected/agglutinative languages. Currently works for Finnish, Ukrainian, Welsh, Turkish and Tamil.
These are really hard languages to learn for most speakers of European languages, particularly English - we're not used to complex verb conjugations, they're hard to memorise and the rules often feel quite arbitrary. Every other conjugation practice app just tells you right/wrong with no explanation, which doesn't really help you learn when there are literally hundreds of rules to get right.
The interesting part was using an LLM to create a complete machine-executable set of conjugation rules, which are optimized for human explainability, and an engine to diagnose which rule is at fault when you get it wrong. There's several hundred rules needed for each language in order to cover all exceptions.
NB as a bonus it also works fully offline because my best practice hours are when I'm travelling and have poor connectivity.
When I have time between freelance work I make games and tools for myself.
Put One In for Johnny Minn (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3802120/Put_One_In_for_Jo...) - A small soccer game all about scoring nice goals. While I don’t expect it to do well, I’m very happy with how it came out, and it’s the first game I’ve made that I’ll release on Steam! Comes out on Thursday (March 12th).
HeartRoutine (https://www.heartroutine.com/) - I built this a few months ago to help me stay on top of my heart health. I enter my numbers on the (offline) app, and then configure my goals (like “lower Apo B through diet and exercise”), and then the server emails me every morning asking me what I ate yesterday, how I exercised, etc. The goal is to stay on track, and to be able to bring a cardiologist a very detailed report.
https://symgraph.ai/ - AI-Powered Reverse Engineering Inside Your Disassembler
Open-source plugins for Ghidra, Binary Ninja, and IDA Pro that bring LLM reasoning, autonomous agents, and semantic knowledge graphs directly into your analysis workflow.
Coming soon: A supporting online service. The VirusTotal for reverse engineering. A cloud-native symbol store and knowledge graph service designed for the reverse engineering community.
- Submit files for automated reverse engineering and analysis
- Query shared symbols, types, and semantic knowledge
- Accelerate analysis with community-contributed intelligence
- Versioned, deduplicated symbols with multi-contributor collaboration
I have built npm for LLM models, which lets you install & run 10,000+ open sourced large language models within seconds. The idea is to make models installable like packages in your code:
llmpm install llama3
llmpm run llama3
You can also package large language models together with your code so projects can reproduce the same setup easily.
GetSize (https://www.getsize.shoes). We’re collecting the official sizing data of the world's shoes in one place.
Today, if you search for "what size should I get in Nike Air Max 90" you'll find size charts. We have it, and for 200+ brands across 70+ retailers. When users tell us which shoes they own and what size fits them we’re slowly building crowdsourced fit recommendations which are personal and more accurate compared to size charts.
We're two coders who've built an almost fully autonomous platform. AI agents build, debug and deploy crawlers on their own. We went from 4 crawlers to 280+ in about a month, and the whole thing runs on a home server. When new shoes are discovered, the platform publishes new pages with relevant info automatically. Agents get access to platform metrics and SEO data via custom MCPs to identify the right opportunities on their own. Currently at about 3000 MAU and about 100 size recommendations/day.
Example: https://www.getsize.shoes/en/shoes/nike-air-jordan-1-low-se-...
Nonograms! I built Nonodle[1], a daily nonogram puzzle game and I’m adding an option to access these puzzles from Nonoverse[2], my iOS nonogram app.
There is an API, and it’s a straightforward task, but one thing led to another and I’m also improving the app UI. The update will take some time but I hope it will only be better.
[1]: https://lab174.com/nonodle/
[2]: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748...
I've been celebrating five years of working on OnlineOrNot (https://onlineornot.com/) by adding more features for teams that build software:
- 2FA, PassKey, and password-based login for folks that hate magic links
- Moved my entire API from GraphQL to REST so I can fully dogfood the API I offer
- Added an audit log as standard on all plans
- Built a terraform provider (https://github.com/OnlineOrNot/terraform-provider-onlineorno...), and a way to download existing config into terraform files
- Started iterating on a CLI (https://github.com/OnlineOrNot/onlineornot)
A no-code platform for building SaaS apps with AI (serverless): https://saasufy.com/
I'm never clear if this Ask HN is for posting about what you're messing with or for promoting organized projects that chase github stars or are commercial.
But anyway, I've started to learn Go. By doing a vertical scrolling shooter with embiten. Kinda like fitting a square peg into a round hole. No, it's not public and will probably never be.
Studying how do do a memory pool for actors, since it doesn't look like garbage collection and hundreds of short lived bullet objects will mix well.
Alfred/Spotlight like quick access search[1] for Bitwarden.
Built and adding few add on features on the way: copy card numbers and view notes.
With Rust, bwc-cli - it decrypts vault into zeroize and provides near instant search with hotkey.
I absolutely love pre-1800 homes and am exploring a few ideas on how to help preserve and promote them. The main thing I'm working on to that effect is https://homelore.org
It's like a carfax but for your home, although the intention is more to create an interesting historical narrative that inspires people to care about the history of their home rather than as a tool for inspecting home issues before buying.
My target customer is realtors who want to inspire buyers to take on historic homes that may need a lot of work. Also home owners themselves of course.
A soccer web game where you are the coach and your only possible interaction is shouting (ie typing) messages to your players from the sidelines. An LLM interpret your messages and pass instructions into the game engine.
It is a pretty fun project
I built a simple joke tool to analyze all the rejection emails (over 1600) that I got during the recent job searches and create simple bar graphs from it. Wrote a blog about it https://github.com/khante/l here https://rohankhante.substack.com/p/thank-you-for-your-applic....
PS - The results are entirely obvious.
An accessible color palette editor for creating branded palettes built from the ground up that pass WCAG/APCA contrast rules (which is much quicker and less of a headache compared to doing manual contrast checks and fixes later):
https://www.inclusivecolors.com/
The current web tool lets you export to CSS, Tailwind and Figma, and uses HSLuv for the color picker. HSL color pickers that most design tools like Figma use have the very counterintuitive property that the hue and saturation sliders will change the lightness of a color (which then impacts its WCAG contrast), which HSLuv fixes to make it much easier to find accessible color combinations.
I'm working on a Figma plugin version so you can preview colors directly on a Figma design as you make changes. It's tricky shrinking the UI to work inside a small plugin window!
Cakedesk: Fast & simple invoicing app for small businesses (Windows & Mac).
Been working on this for about 4 years. It has some cool features, like letting you create your own PDF templates with HTML/CSS. Most users love that it's so simple and just a one-time purchase.
Currently thinking about how to implement an Obsidian-style cloud sync feature since that gets requested a lot.
I've been working on two small projects recently.
1. Live Kaiwa — real-time Japanese conversation support
I live in a rural farming neighborhood in Japan. Day-to-day Japanese is fine for me, but neighborhood meetings were a completely different level. Fast speech, local dialect, references to people and events from decades ago. I'd leave feeling like I understood maybe 5% of what happened.
So I built a tool for myself to help follow those conversations.
Live Kaiwa transcribes Japanese speech in real time and gives English translations, summaries, and suggested responses while the conversation is happening.
Some technical details:
* Browser microphone streams audio via WebRTC to a server with Kotoba Whisper * Multi-pass transcription: quick first pass, then higher-accuracy re-transcription that replaces earlier text * Each batch of transcript is sent to an LLM that generates translations, summary bullets, and response suggestions * Everything is streamed back to the UI live * Session data stays entirely in the browser — nothing stored server-side
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2. Cooperation Cube — a board game that rotates the playing field
Years ago I built a physical board game where players place sticks into a wooden cube to complete patterns on the faces.
The twist: the cube rotates 90° every round, so patterns you're building suddenly become part of someone else's board. It creates a mix of strategy, memory, and semi-cooperative play.
I recently built a digital version.
Game mechanics:
* 4 players drafting cards and placing colored sticks on cube faces * The cube rotates every 4 actions * Players must remember what exists on other faces * Cooperation cards allow two players to coordinate for shared bonuses * Game ends when someone runs out of short sticks
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Both projects mostly started as things I wanted to exist for myself. Curious what people think.
I'm learning bug bounty hunting again. learn to contribute to NUCLEI open source contribution.
I got laid off a while ago and I’m privileged enough to take time to reconsider what I want to do. I’ve been learning how to sketch which supports my bigger passion- printmaking. I’ve primarily been doing linocut which is carving negative space into linoleum, inking it up, and printing it on paper. I’ve got a membership at a local atelier and have branched out into drypoint, kitchen lithography, and what I guess is called LEGOpress. I’m sparking a lot of joy working with my hands every day. I have been finding adequate challenge in honing my craft as I try to figure out how to draw/carve the images I see in my mind.
https://monohub.dev — a new EU-based (hosted and developed) GitHub alternative. Currently, it has a file browser and a PR review tool. Started off as a personal tool, but grew enough to consider offering as a service.
I posted about it recently on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47199062):
It is at a fairly early stage of development, so it's quite rough around the edges. It is developed and hosted in EU.
I have started developing it as a slim wrapper around Git to serve my own code, but it grew to such extent that I decided to give it a try and offer it as a service. It doesn't have much at the moment, but it already has basic pull requests. Accessibility is high priority.
It will be a paid service, (free for contributors) but since it's an early start, an "early adopter discount" is applied – 6 months for free. No card details required.
I would be happy if you give it a try and let me know what do you think, and perhaps share what you lack in existing solutions that you would like to see implemented here.
I'm learning bug bounty hunting again. And thinking to start opensource contribution
https://github.com/AzimovParviz/openblaster/tree/qt6
I wrote a CLI utility last year to control my SoundBlasterx G6 DAC (can only control LED colour and EQ bands) without needing to use Creative's windows only program (I am mostly a Mac + occasional Linux) user.
Recently downloaded Qwen3-coder-next 80b model and been vibing with it to introduce Qt6 and write a dead simple (aka ugly) crossplatform GUI to it so that other people can use it on their Macs and Linux machines. Letting a LLM wreak havoc on your project feels bad, I constantly have to reign it in and rollback the repo once it starts looping due to writing something that doesn't compile, making it going back and forth between doing and undoing changes.
I'm working on arranging talks and poster presentations at various conferences/seminars to spread knowledge of my latest academic paper, "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points". In the paper, among other things, I argue that (we should define species in such a way that) for any organism in any species, either the species is made up almost entirely of descendants of that organism, or else the species is made up almost entirely of non-descendants of that organism. This is a funny property because most people who hear about it fall into one of two camps, those who say it is obviously true, and those who say it is obviously false!
The paper in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05274 (published in the Journal of Mathematical Biology)
Building a new kind of news site, featuring updates from primary sources.
We're constantly pulling info from official sources, and using AI to group and summarize into stories, and continue to share reporting from trusted, vetted journalists.
The result is news with the speed and breadth of getting updates straight from the source, and the perspective and context that reporting provides.
Still ramping up, but I'd love to hear feedback:
I'm working on Firefly, a programming language for full stack webapps:
One month ago, I purchased this small eink reader (Xteink 4) and I've been loving reading on that device. It made me read much more in the past month (already more than 50% through Fall or Dodge in Hell).
The stock firmware is horrible but the community has this firmware called CrossPoint. I wanted to be able to upload, manage files etc. from my iPhone on the go and also send over web articles. So I build this app CrossPoint Sync https://crosspointsync.com to do just that.
I've already published it on App Store and pending publishing on Android. The community is niche and has also been using the app, so its been fun building for my use and in turn also getting good feedback from community.
If you are using the Xteink and CrossPoint firmware, then give the app a try.
iOS App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/crosspoint-sync/id6758985427
Android Beta: https://crosspointsync.com/android/join-beta
I wrote this Telegram bot that translates any video with AI-generated subtitles in about 2 minutes. You paste a YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram link, pick your language, and get back the video with burned-in subtitles.
It started because my wife watches Chinese dramas and new episodes never have subtitles for our language. Turns out thousands of people have the same problem — Arabic speakers watching anime, Russian speakers following Turkish series, Persian speakers catching up on K-dramas.
Supports 40+ languages, works with any video link or direct file upload. There's also a Mini App inside Telegram for a more visual experience.
Building ConvoLens [1] - app to explore the content of video interviews from YouTube channels I like (such as Dwarkesh Patel's): research by keyword, RAG, visualization of discussed topics with a 2D projection, semantic graph, and the possibility to generate a new video or audio from a playlist of video segments.
Supports only YouTube as the data source, and Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite for processing, but it can easily be tweaked. Runs locally with Docker compose.
https://bettertaste.cc/ Building an iOS app that helps travelers find handpicked places with real local character: cafés, restaurants, hidden galleries across European cities. No sponsored listings, no aggregator noise.
I was exploring a spec development system (similar to the likes of openspec) but with specifications that are more succinct. One of my frustration with openspec is the number of files that are generated from the proposal, to the design and implementation.
Side project - plan mode and code review annotations for coding agents (ui that integrates via hooks): https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator
Main gig: Trusted agents. We just shipped hardware based signing to web bot auth protocol.
I’m working on a 2D top-down Zelda-style adventure MMO game. I’m imagining it as a persistent world with Minecraft-like building and procedurally generated quests. I’d like to focus on co-op adventuring and social rather than pvp. Kind of a D&D experience I suppose, though that’s not really a direct inspiration for me.
I have no illusions that this is actually something in capable of building to an actual release-able state but it’s fun to tinker with.
A webapp combining note taking with messaging. Recently added a new feature that allows for creating communities in a lightweight discord-like UI:
A visual explorer for the trees of San Francisco.
https://greenmtnboy.github.io/sf_tree_reporting/#/
For all the places it's bad at, AI has been fantastic for making targeted data experiences a lot more accessible to build (see MotherDuck and dives, etc), as long as you can keep the actual data access grounded. Years of tableau/looker have atrophied my creativity a bit, trying to get back to having more fun.
https://getvalara.com - PDF appraisal document in, grounded appraisal review out in 5-10 minutes to aid in risk management for lending institutions and individual appraisal reviewers.
We use landing.ai to parse the PDF, as well as useworkflow.dev to durably perform other work such as rendering PDF pages for citations, and coordinating a few lightweight agents and deterministic checks that flag for inconsistencies, rule violations, bias, verify appraiser credentials, etc. etc. Everything is grounded in the input document so it makes it pretty fast and easy. We’re going to market soon and have an approval sign up gate currently. Plenty of new features and more rigorous checks planned to bring us to and exceed parity with competition and human reviewers.
There’s plenty of margin for cost and latency versus manual human review, which takes an hour or more and costs $100 or more.
I am working on a P2P VPN app that lets you use a friend abroad as your VPN provider with no special setup: https://spora.to
It's mainly for censorship evasion (should be much harder to block than the regular centralized VPNs), but also for expats to access geo-blocked domestic services.
It's at the MVP stage and honestly it evoked much less interest in people than I hoped it would, but I'm still going on despite my better judgement.
Working on update of linux-insides (https://github.com/0xAX/linux-insides) adapting it for modern kernels versions
I've been building a collaborative docs tool called Docules. The short version: it's a team documentation tool that doesn't have any embedded AI features. I use Claude Code daily, but putting LLMs into every workflow and charging for it is kinda insane. Every docs tool is adding AI auto-complete, AI summaries, "generate a page" buttons. Docules has an API and an MCP server instead, so you connect whatever AI tools you actually want to use. The core product focuses on being a fast, solid docs tool. Real-time collab, fast — no embedded databases or heavy view abstractions, hierarchical docs, drag-and-drop, semantic search, comments, version history, public sharing, SSO, RBAC, audit logs, webhooks, etc. The stack is React, Hono, PostgreSQL, WebSockets. The MCP server is a separate package that exposes search, document CRUD, and comments — so Claude/ChatGPT can work with your docs without us reimplementing a worse version of what they already do. Happy to talk architecture or the MCP integration.
Designing a conversational UX for Bookmarker.
I was stuck on this conversation problem. First version had a dead-end search box: six starter prompts, one referencing a tool that didn't exist. No follow-ups. No guided flows. Users got an answer and had to invent the next question from scratch.
Now the assistant explores your library with you. Tag discovery, color browsing, weekly digests, smart collections that auto-curate as you save.
Semantic search runs hybrid, keyword matching plus pgvector cosine similarity on 768-dim embeddings. Streaming responses.
Almost there. https://bookmarker.cc/
https://notepad95.com/ I still use regular notepad.exe and text files to take meeting notes. But I thought it'd be fun to have a seperate browser tab for it.
https://github.com/nickbarth/closedbots/ I was also trying to do a simplified openclaw type gui using codex. The idea being its just desktop automation, but running through codex by sending codex screenshots and asking it to complete the steps in your automation via clicks and keypresses via robotgo.
I'm working on a personal recipe site called Struggle Meals, in the genre of https://traumbooks.itch.io/the-sad-bastard-cookbook and https://old.reddit.com/r/shittyfoodporn/, for food I ate when I felt too poor / depressed / tired / chronically unwell. Some of them are just normal adulting recipes. Some are meal prep. Some are too struggly for a legitimate recipe site.
I have some barebones content at https://struggle-meals.wonger.dev/ and will be working on the design over the next few weeks. Some decisions I'm thinking about:
- balancing between personal convenience and brevity vs being potentially useful for other people. E.g. should I tag everything that's vegan/vegetarian/GF/dairyfree/halal/etc? Should I take pictures of everything? (I'd rather not)
- how simple can I make a recipe without ruining it? E.g. can I omit every measurement? should I separate nice-to-have ingredients from critical ingredients? how do I make that look uncomplicated? (Sometimes the worst thing is having too many options)
- if/how to price things? Depends on region, season, discounts, etc
3D AI Modeling software intended for 3D printers.
https://grandpacad.com
Originally I made it for my grandpa, but I got a lot of interest so I made it into a full commercial product.
Just yesterday I published a set of 3 mini tutorials if you want to see how it works - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKt1F5TvOjAHE07oBDlPXcrHc...