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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Native macOS sandbox terminal:
- UI for sandbox-exec to protect filesystem - Network sandbox per domain - Secrets filter via gitleaks - Vertical tabs option
It's highly customizable. You generate native macOS app wrappers for each terminal app, each with its own rules and customizations.
I built Collider, A wrap-based package and dependency manager for Meson.
I needed a way to use and push my own artifacts in Meson projects. WrapDB is fine for upstream deps, but I wanted to publish my packages and depend on them with proper versioning and a lockfile, without hand-editing wrap files.
Collider builds on Meson’s wrap system: you declare deps in collider.json, run collider lock for reproducible installs, and push your projects as wraps to a local or HTTP repo. It’s compatible with WrapDB, so existing workflows still work: you just get a clear way to use and push your own stuff. Apache-2.0.
I wanted to make it exceedingly easy to learn vocabulary in Catalan and Spanish.
To me good is - Pre-determined lists of words - Audio examples - Sentence examples - Native app with offline support
most importantly: - No business model that requires a subscription
I'm trying to see it more as writing a text-book, than starting a business
NotifyButton - A simple script on the frontend of your site, a complete SaaS platform on the backend for DSA compliance.
If you operate in the EU and want to avoid heavy fines, this is for you. Once integrated, it allows users to report legal content issues directly to you, which you can then manage via a dedicated dashboard following official EU procedures. Without such a system, users are much more likely to file complaints through official state or EU channels, which can trigger investigations.
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-...
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.
I just started building an operating system that will be written entirely in one text file. This text file includes in order: a readme, a RISC-V assembly boot code, then the rest. You run it by compiling the initial boot code with a RISC-V assembler, then you concatenate the binary with the whole text file itself. Then when you run it, the boot code will compile the rest of the text file (the operating system), including higher level language compilers that the rest of the system will be written in.
This is the kind of project that creates something from as little as possible, where the only things you need to get started are a very basic RISC-V assembler and a computer or emulator to run it on.
I don't have anything interesting to show yet because I just started yesterday, but one day I will show you.
"Does a launch make any impact if there's no audience?"
We've found most early-stage startups ignore social media until after a launch. Things like “$0 spent on ads” sound cool, but they don’t help if no one knows your product exists.
I'm building Appents to provide a done-for-you social media solution for startups.
Would love feedback: https://appents.com/
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.
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.
I’m working on WC Price Hostory, a plugin that handles price tracking and Omnibus Directive compliance for WooCommerce.
It’s been available as a free tool for years, growing to over 45k active installs. I just rolled out the Pro extension to offer more advanced features, and the early traction has exceeded my expectations. If you're running e-commerce in Europe, this is a must-have for staying compliant with EU law.
Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:
https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.
https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.
https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".
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've been slowly hacking on game ideas on and off for the better part of a decade and I've finally switched tracks and trying to seriously build something full time
I've given myself 6 months
It's a bit scary basically 180ing like this but I figure if I don't try it now I never will
I've already started prototyping various ideas, and to be honest just sitting down and spending time doing this has been really quite lovely
One thing I'm finding fun is slowly unearthing what I actually find interesting
I started with messing around in minecraft and tinkering with rimworld-like game ideas, but I'm slowly moving away from them as I've been tinkering more and more
Don't get me wrong, I do want to revisit them at some point in the future, but I do find myself circling more around narrative, simulations and zachlikes
It's a bit of an odd mix and in some ways they look like paradox style games, but I'm well aware that taking one of those behemoths on is going to be a bit silly, so I'm trying to slim down until I get to a kernel that I actually find enjoyable tinkering with
A toy if you will
Currently I'm trying to work out if there's anything interesting in custom unit design, basically unpicking how games like rollercoaster tycoon's coaster design maps to stats like excitement ratings and seeing how that might mix with old school point buy systems
It feels like it might be small enough to be a good toy and I'm having fun tinkering with it, but I have no idea whether other people will xD
It might honestly be too niche for anyone and I've successfully optimised for an audience of one :shrug:
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
Been recently playing around with using LLMs and the promise of malleable software.
Published a demo/experiment under MalleableTodo [1] - and so far seen some pretty strange use cases...
Essentially, just allows each user to use an LLM to rewrite their own UI to add features/customisation.
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)
I made my own AI personal assistant:
https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot
It's like OpenClaw but actually secure, without access to secrets, with scoped plugin permissions, isolation, etc. I love it, it's been extremely helpful, and pairs really well with a little hardware voice note device I made:
I just launched bookcall.io publicly last week. Think calendly that treats your scheduling page more like a sales funnel. Very important if one call can make you a bunch of money. Page builder, brand assets, videos, documents etc. attachable. Forms, video calls, everything included.
Also launching a supabase security scanner. If someone wants a free scan hit me up. Includes POCs and verification before and after remidiation. Goodbye false positives.
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 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)
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/
Not sure if people interested, but since I use sqlite in a lot of my own projects, I am working on a lightweight monitoring and safety layer for production SQLite.
The idea is pretty simple: SQLite is amazing, but once it’s running in production you basically have zero observability. If something weird happens (unexpected writes, schema changes, background jobs touching tables, etc.) you only find out after the fact. It tries to solve that without touching application code. It's a Rust agent that runs next to your sqlite file, and connects to the server where everything is logged in. My current challenge right now is encryption and trust, mostly.
Curious if others here are running SQLite in production and if you would be interested in something like this.
3D AI Modeling software intended for 3D printers.
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...
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 am working on Kastanj. It aims to make cooking as foolproof as it can get. Anyone should be able to cook any recipe and get it right on the first try. Clear step by step images and instructions for everything etc.
It also features a recipe manager with family/friends sync. This makes it possible to upload your grandmother’s cookbook and share them with your whole family.
https://talimio.com/ Generate fully personalized courses from a prompt. Fully interactive.
New features shipped last month:
- Adaptive practice: LLM generates and grades questions in real-time, then uses Item Response Theory (IRT) to estimate your ability and schedule the optimal next question. Replaces flashcards; especially for math and topics where each question needs to be fresh even when covering the same concept. - Interactive math graphs (JSXGraph) that are gradable - Single-image Docker deployment for easy self-hosting
Open source: https://github.com/SamDc73/Talimio
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.
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 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.
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.
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’m working on VineWall (https://vinewallapp.com), a network tunnel that helps you fight doomscrolling by making your internet slower when it detects you spent too much time scrolling.
At this moment I’m working on improving the logic that decides when/how much to throttle the network.
Working on...
- Tablex (https://www.tablex.pro) - seat arrangement app for weddings, seminars, conferences.
- Kardy (https://www.kardy.app) - group card app I've always wanted to build.
- Jello (https://www.jello.app) - Create games with your own photos and sound effects!
I'm working on site that let's you check when a manned space station was last directly over your house.
It's a reference to https://xkcd.com/2883/, which I've always liked and was suprised there was no tool to check when you last had astronauts over for dinner.
Looking up the location of the ISS at a specific time is easy. Looking up the closest passes of the ISS to a specific location for the last 30 years on-demand is more complicated.
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.
Proving the infamous FTP guy from the original Dropbox HN thread right: you can now access your Dropbox over FTPS, SFTP, S3, or MCP. And not just Dropbox, it works with every storage backend out there: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
A music livecoding app[0], it's open-source[1] and it's been in the works for years in various iterations, but I've finally settled on the format and delivery. I'm now trying to make it as newbie friendly as possible by doing tutorials[2] and videos[3] and having ready-made instruments[4] to begin with. Thinking also to expand it as a general purpose creative editor in a standalone electron app and bundle in other livecoding languages as well, for graphics also.
[1]: https://github.com/loopmaster-xyz/loopmaster
[2]: https://loopmaster.xyz/tutorials
https://gitlab.com/usecaliper/caliper-python-sdk
An LLM observability SDK that let's you store pre and post request metadata with every call in as lightweight an SDK as possible.
Stores to S3 in batched JSON files, so can easily plug into existing tooling like DuckDB for analysis.
It's designed to answer questions like; "how do different user tiers of my services rate this two different models and three different systems prompts?". You can capture all the information required to answer this in the SDK and do some queries over the data to get the answers.
I've been building https://lan.events. It's been built entirely with an LLM as I've been learning more concepts behind agentic engineering for reliable development with an LLM. The primary reason I built it is because LANs are disappearing and they were a formative part of my childhood. They were a way to connect with people that I knew from all over the world. I still have some lasting friendships from the big and small LANs I went to as a kid. LANs are free for 50 and under so please sign up and if you have feedback, send it through the support system!
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.
I’ve been iterating on nights and weekends on a hackers news like website that sources all content from engineering blogs (both personal and company blogs). I have about 600 of the total 3k rss feeds I’ve collected over time loaded up, just tweaking things as I go before dropping the whole list in there: https://engineered.at
While the main app is closed sourced, the rails engine that handles all the rss feeds is open sourced here: https://github.com/dchuk/source_monitor
I have another version of source monitor getting by published soon with some nice enhancements
I'm porting Jetpack Compose to Rust. The Rust would be the future default ai language. Having the familiar well designed by Google UI API will help Android developers to be in a loop. https://github.com/samoylenkodmitry/Cranpose
Mostly Jolteon (https://github.com/lautarodragan/jolteon), a TUI music player written in Rust (for almost 2 years now!)
Also used the new Navigation API (and some Shadow DOM) to build a cheap, custom client-side rendering (sort of) into my site (https://taro.codes), and some other minor refactors and cleanup (finally migrated away from Sass to just native CSS, improved encapsulation of some things with Shadow roots, etc).
I've been wanting to write a simple AI agent with JS and Ollama just for fun and learning, but haven't started, yet...
I'm rewriting a shipping app, that is just over two years old.
This is a "full rewrite," because I need to migrate away from my previous server, which was developed as a high-security, general-purpose application server, and is way overkill for this app.
Migration is likely to take a couple more years, but this is a big first step.
I've rewritten the server, to present a much smaller API. Unfortunately, I'm not yet ready to change the server SQL schema yet, so "behind the curtain" is still pretty hairy. Once the new API and client app are stable, I'll look at the SQL schema. The whole deal is to not interfere with the many users of the app.
I should note that I never would have tried this, without the help of an LLM. It has been invaluable. The development speed is pretty crazy.
Still a lot of work ahead, but the server is done, and I'm a good part of the way through the client communication SDK.
I'm building out https://measuretocut.com, which started as a tool for myself to help with planning board cuts (and now sheet cuts). It calculates how much material you need for your project and gives you a plan for the materials and shows all the cuts you need to make and where to make them.
First release was in December for 1D cuts. Last month I released sheet cutting for 2D cut calculation. It's been working well for my own projects and it started getting consistent daily users since my last update in February. You can save projects now on the site for you to come back to later.
Any feedback is welcome. I'm always looking for what features to add next.
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.
Have been building a project https://github.com/openrundev/openrun/ which aims to make it easy for teams to easily deploy internal tools/webapps. While creating new apps has gotten easier, securely deploying them across teams remains a challenge. OpenRun runs as a proxy which adds SAML/OAuth based auth with RBAC. OpenRun deploys containerized apps to a single machine with Docker or onto Kubernetes.
Currently adding support for exposing Postgres schemas for each app to use. The goal is that with a shared Postgres instance, each app should be able to either get a dedicated schema or get limited/full access to another app's schema, with row level security rules being supported.
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:
https://www.forth.news