alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
Building Bloomberry to help sales teams find companies that use any technology or SaaS product.
Example: Slack: https://bloomberry.com/data/slack/
Built GhostDance — overlay any TikTok dance as a ghost on your camera to practice in real time.
Been learning dance moves from TikTok but hated the pause/rewind loop on my phone. So I built a web app that overlays the original dancer as a translucent ghost directly on your camera feed.
Upload any video → ghost appears → you follow → record yourself → export. No install, works on mobile browser.
Feedback will be much appreciated!
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.
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 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
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!
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/
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.
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.
jsonmaps.dev its a way to create maps and create storytelling maps that you can embed in your react application, I was quite tired of how AI wasn't able to generate reliable maps in my applications.Every map library has its own imperative API and the AI output was always broken, hallucinated, or unmaintainable with so many different formats that you can put on the map.
The story map part came out of wanting to build Mapbox-style scrollytelling easily. You define chapters with a camera view and content, and it handles the scroll-driven camera interpolation.
Stack: MapLibre under the hood, React, published as an npm package.
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.
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'm building Fillvisa: Turboxtax for Immigration [1]
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(YC S16) offers a DIY plan for $529 [2]
So, a free (and local-only) version might be a good alternative
[1] https://fillvisa.com/demo [2] https://www.simplecitizen.com/pricing/
PayByFace is a nominee in the Romania Startup Awards 2026, we have about 1 day and 18 hours left to get as many votes as possible! Help us win this award if you believe in our project :) Vote here: https://strawpoll.com/05ZdzP64Qn6
We have been homeschooling our kids. Homeschooling in India is not that widespread. So when a national newspaper covered our experiment, I got lot of questions around what we were doing. For a while I wrote blog posts answering them.
Now I've written quite a few posts (and given talks), I thought of writing a book. Just wrote two chapters. The draft lives here: https://www.jjude.com/books/hs/
Google AI overview dissector
AIOs are a black hole - we dont know when they appear and whats in it. so i creates a tool thats starts with GSC data and enriches it via AIO data
works good and the major finding by now
the best AIOs you can get are ..... none.
doesn't matter if you are in it or not - as soon as they show up the CTR to tour web-property goes down massively ~60% to 70%
the CTR on the AIOs are ~0%
I am building a voice interview/survey webapp that helps product teams conduct product research faster. You can try it at https://intervio.app
Any feedback is welcome :)
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
This week I'm on project #20 of my 25 projects in 25 weeks challenge! One was on the front page of Hacker News this weekend. It was humbling.
Building Universal mobile devtool — control iOS Simulators, Android Emulators, and real devices from a single dashboard and CLI
GitHub: https://github.com/pranshuchittora/simvyn
Do give it a try, Thanks!
Building a boring POS (1) using various AI tools just to check what can I do with these tools. I have used claude, gemini and now using antigravity. I have not done a single edit manually.
I got it all done in probably an hour or two. But done in 10-15 min blocks over many days.
Mostly art projects:
- VR version of Surface Browser (3d internet browser): https://boxc.net/surfacebrowser.html
- Crowd Strike: faster self-driving: an exhibition where the visitors help autonomous drones target a different visitor each minute with lasers
and also Wingman: a dating app secretary (privacy focus, runs locally on your computer for any dating app that has a web site. It tells you if favourites have messaged you): https://boxc.net/wingman_app.png I'll open source this one if interest.
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.
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'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'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)
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
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.
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.
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'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!
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.
Group chat photobooks. Automatic layouts, no editor/app, unlimited free previews. Build a hardcover (up to 1000 image) and ship it in minutes.
Wanted a physical souvenir for everyone in my long running signal chat but didn’t want to spend hours curating in editors.
JetSet AI (https://bit.ly/4besn7l) — flight search in plain English instead of the usual date-picker maze.
Type "cheapest flight from London to Tokyo, flexible on dates in April" and it returns live results with real pricing. I compared a few against Google Flights and they matched. Not mocked data.
The part I found interesting: it runs on a dedicated VM so it keeps context across the conversation. If you say "actually make that business class" or "what about flying into Osaka instead" it knows what you were looking at. Most chat-based search tools lose that between messages.
I didn't build it from scratch — it's a pre-built app in the SuperNinja App Store that I deployed and have been extending. The deploy itself took about 60 seconds. The extending part is what I've been spending time on: describing changes in plain text and watching them go live without touching a repo.
Still figuring out what the right UX is for flexible-date search. Curious if anyone has opinions on that.
An opensource AI analytics tool with option for teams to track everything on a dashboard. Happy to get feedback or contributions: https://getpromptly.xyz
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.
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.
Started on making my own AI model benchmarks and leaderboard[0], after I tested MiniMax M2.5, which was supposedly good based on standard benchmarks, but peformed really poorly in practice and burned through hundreds of thousands of reasoning tokens for each request...
[0]: https://aibenchy.com
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
Codeboards https://codeboards.io - Codeboards connects to GitHub, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, and HuggingFace to generate a professional developer profile that updates itself. Your commits, contributions, and reputation — finally in one place.
Building Cursor IDE, but for knowledge workers. Domain will go live soon on https://document.bot
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
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.
A lightweight framework on top of Temporal for building reliable, stateful AI agents on top of temporal.
Think OpenClaw, but durable, with long-term state, and enterprise-ready. We've been using it internally to build agents for a while now and have decided to open-source it.
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...
https://github.com/Chrilleweb/dotenv-diff
Environment variable checker - pretty niche.
What would make you use this? does this miss anything useful?
I'm working on JRECC, a Java remotely executing caching compiler.
It's designed to integrate with Maven projects, to bring in the benefits of tools like Gradle and Bazel, where local and remote builds and tests share the same cache, and builds and tests are distributed over many machines. Cache hits greatly speed up large project builds, while also making it more reliable, since you're not potentially getting flaky test failures in your otherwise identical builds.
AST-based code modifications from LLMs: https://codeplusequalsai.com/
I'm interested in the idea that LLMs writing raw code and doing line-or-diff replacements will not be the future, but that having the LLMs modify the structure of the code may end up being the best.
Also, I think that building LLM-powered webapps should earn the dev per token call; so I've built a margin into token costs where the end user is charged 2x the provider's token costs, and then I get 20% of the remaining and the dev gets 80%.
I'm building a small tool called FormBeep[1] that sends a notification to your phone when someone submits a form on your website.
It started as a client problem, then something which I also experienced so decided to built it. It's just one small script and work seamlessly across platforms.
[1]https://formbeep.com