Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

Also working on a Korean guide, so far it introduces Hangul (한글), the Korean alphabet: https://tolearnkorean.com/

Also making an app / web app for memorizing Korean words, takes inspiration from Anki and Duolingo. Words go through 4 stages: 1) matching up pairs 2) Multiple choice answer 3) Writing word through blocks 4) Free-form writing.

It's testable here: https://game.tolearnkorean.com/

Feedback is very welcome.

I'm scratching my own itch: building a yet another audio signal generator for smartphone. I need some extra functionality that is not available elsewhere, and impose some limitations "just because": it must be bare minimal PWA.

But actual app does not matter, the main take away for me is: it is easy and fast to write bloatware (esp. with AI), but not that easy to distill to what is really needed. And what looked like a weekend project, a couple of hours max (with help of AI), now lingers for 2+ weeks on-and-off on evenings (of manual effort).

I recently built Cranki [0], a free little PWA that generates crosswords using your Anki flashcard lists. It's aimed at language learners (who find flashcards boring and crossword fun!). To be honest I built it just for me and then decided it might be useful for others.

It's all local, no server, no database, etc. Mobile and desktop friendly.

I did build it with the help of AI, but no AI inside the actual thing.

[0] https://cranki.app

Knowii, a community for knowledge workers who want to excel and thrive. We explore the frontier of knowledge management, personal organization, zen productivity, clarity, personal development, project management... And AI

https://dsebastien.net/community

I made this one-page little tool to help me split bills when going out with friends:

https://trianguloy.github.io/githubPages/SplitBill/splitBill...

The UI is horrible, but I really liked doing the coding. I'm also aware of other similar sites, but this one contains the features I need.

“Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2026) (Non AI)”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679021

18 points | 1 day ago | 37 comments

A family. Hope to have a little one in the next year! Wish me luck!

I am building a web application for learning math. I want it to be something between Khan Academy and Math Academy. Here is a demo of fourth grade https://demo.numerikos.com/ Currently the best part about it is one of my kids is using it. I have some more lessons ready, waiting to be released and I am currently working on Trigonometry.

I wrote a book about software engineering mental models that barely mentions AI on purpose. Only in the Appendix section I explain the rationale for not talking about AI, pasting it here:

---

Thoughts on AI

I consciously decided not to talk about AI throughout this book. Not because I don't believe in the benefits of using AI... I do.

I believe AI will keep bringing a lot of value to society.

I believe AI will keep changing our profession in many profound ways.

But whatever happens, I believe the principles here are still going to be incredibly valuable, even if the software engineer profession ceases to exist with its current name.

We might be working at a totally different level of abstraction, but the values, principles, mental models, patterns of communication and behavior described in this book will still make a huge difference. I believe they are atemporal.

Having said that, here are my recommendations regarding AI:

- Think of AI as another tool you have to create value, just like your IDE, the code you write or the emails you send.

- Keep yourself long enough in the problem space before throwing an AI api to solve a problem that might not exist

- Unless you are working at the frontier of AI development, ignore the noise. AI is now the shiny object everyone wants to be up to date with. JavaScript frameworks were used as a joke between value-driven software engineers because there would be a new one every 6 months and a lot of people would move to it without the real need. AI changes and improves every day or week. Being on top of it is probably a full time job. Instead of following all the news on a daily basis, level up your AI game in batches every 3 or 6 months. It will be more than enough.

- The most interesting use of AI for me has been in finding out my unknowns-unknowns. One question I frequently ask is "What are the building blocks of this problem/system/piece of knowledge?"

Recently started working on my app for self-tracking again, a customizable combination of habit tracker, health journal and diary.

It should be as powerful as a spreadsheet for self-tracking, but the daily usability should be more on par with a habit tracker app.

The website and waiting list for anyone interested: https://dailyselftrack.com/

I have been working on two opensource tools:

https://dhuan.github.io/mock/latest/examples.html

^Command line utility that lets you build APIs with just one command.

https://github.com/dhuan/dop

^JSON/YAML manipulation with AWK style approach.

I'm still working on my PDF search engine as an offline desktop application. It's at https://www.docgoblin.com/ if you're interrested.

No AI at all just plain old Java, JavaFX, Lucene and enough code to bring them together. I would love to get feedback if you try it!

I've been working on a super-straightforward volunteering platform -- https://handsup.barryvan.com.au/ . Mainly because I got frustrated with my kids' school and sailing club activities being (mis)managed across WhatsApp, Google Forms, pieces of paper, and the like.

I’m building ATProto Alternatives (https://atprotoalternatives.com).

I started looking into AT Protocol recently and find it very interesting, so I started collecting a list of decentralized products built on top of AT that are alternatives to mainstream (popular) products.

I’m building a home woodworking workshop—hands-on, slow and completely non-AI. It’s therapeutic and a nice escape from all the AI hype.

I'm currently working on a small tool that helps me setup new personal computers in a purely descriptive way.

A little bit like ansible, but then totally not like ansible.

It generates SSH-Keys. It clones repositories, installs uv and rust. It removes Snap from my Ubuntu machines and installs firefox from the mozilla repositories.

MusicLibrarian, a macOS app that deep-cleans Apple Music libraries. iCloud sync duplicated my playlists up to 540x (77,542 ghost entries). Built it in Swift, uses ITunesLibrary framework + AppleScript. https://thevaultdj.com

A shopify app to sync witg Google Sheets. https://shopsheets.co

I am building something similar to Windows Task Manager but it also works on Linux, launches/monitors web servers, and provides a visual dashboard for docker containers.

https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio

This project makes no use of AI.

1. Reviving an old project that lets users sync their google docs as blog posts.

2. Writing a rich text editor library powered by pretext for cheap pagination

3. A layout engine that understands html/CSS subset for lightning fast pdf generation

Although AI is the main reason why I'm able to work on all these projects concurrently.

I have been building cross platform QT desktop apps with PureScript and NodeGUI. PureScript is truly underrated as a language and as a gateway to the entire JS ecosystem!

I'm building a no bs esign product, with api access by default. At a previous company, automating this stuff cost us an arm and a leg and we got locked into a bad contract. I've always been on the engineering side of things and never had the opportunity to learn how to find customers and sell. It's been a fun and rewarding experience for me. https://www.sign-n-post.com/

https://findsubstack.com

I'm building this mostly to scratch my own itch.

A newsfeed for Substack posts from the past 24h. Its helping me discover writers other than just what the algorithm gives me.

New programming language.

Took some good ideas of Pascal and making it more modern. Minimal runtime, manual memory management, single (small) executable, no dependencies. Compiler itself is written in Swift and I am using QBE as a backend ATM.

I'm building the CAD app I have always wanted. Free, Parametric, STEP export for 3d printing. The input is just a javascript editor. It uses OpenCascade under the hood. Lots of fun.

I've been building the games I've always wanted to play. It used to take months to make something like Medieval Building Simulator.

Now you tell some idea of what you want and AI gives you a better thing than what you originally imagined. Then you go into a rabbit hole... simulate productivity, sales, customer, cash flow, materials for the building, make it curvy, make it pop up in 3D, populate it with NPCs, give your NPCs wages and background, write a dialogue with the ghosts of Christmas. It ends up being a game in itself.

It's good fun. It costs me $20 and I can do it and deploy it from my phone.

reverse engineered Elektron Octatarack binary data files and now writing libraries to interact with/modify them.

https://gitlab.com/ot-tools/ot-tools

i’m currently avoiding committing/releasing a bunch of changes i did last week because people are actually using the library already (the curse of writing something useful lol)

https://SupplementDEX.com - helping people find out if their supplements work

I am building a 3-way diff editor: https://codeinput.com/products/merge-conflicts/online-diff

I have gathered lots of public datasets and wrote a service that analyzes a car brand.

i made my own personal website [0] that loads in less than 512kb; with a mini bio, a blog (with RSS support), images, links to friends' websites, stuff i made/maintain, and some fluff[y boys] like a walking Ralsei [from Deltarune] that follows the cursor, a music player, and some secrets/easter eggs ;)

then there's another project i have, which is a download-and-run version of Minecraft, where you just download one binary (most likely an AppImage) and can run the full game. it will be for personal use so i shouldn't worry about copyright.

i'm also making my "own" minimal tiling window manager for Linux [1] (which is a fork of [2]) with my custom keybinds and [planned] controller (joystick) navigation support.

and lastly, i made yet another fetch software: jotafetch (*jota*lea's implementation of neo*fetch*). it should be available to read and download a on my website [3] (i haven't packaged it for mainstream distros yet, and i probably won't).

[0] https://jotalea.com.ar/

[1] https://github.com/Jotalea/jwm

[2] https://github.com/173duprot/wm

[3] https://jotalea.com.ar/files/jotafetch

A Chrome extension that helps you efficiently declutter stale tabs.

Builsing my web dev agency aurevow.com (@aurevow.com on x)

Since the moment "AI" became a thing, I've been rolling my eyes and looking the other way since I know it's just a half-assed hype buzzword. With that in mind, pretty much everything I work on is not AI related. As a hobby(and to a degree to be prepared for WW3), building a ton of drones and drone equipment, flying them and finding more and more ways to push their range to the absolute limit.

I don't think it qualifies as AI in the modern day and age but NLP in general. It's truly amazing how easy it is to spot troll farms online and no one is doing anything about it, be it individuals, private sector or even on national level, given that those should be considered a risk for national security.

rawfeed.social, for the people who loves RSSs.

Now that gasoline prices skyrocketed I developed https://pumperly.com in selected countries where data is publicly available

Why would that be refreshing?

This seems a little bit of a duplicate of [1], but I can repeat my answer here as any views help!

My wife and I continue to work on Uruky, a EU-based Kagi alternative [2].

Since last month we finally got our production API Key for EUSP/STAAN (it was certainly the slowest and most complicated search provider to adopt, so far), and that brought us to 5 search providers you can choose from and sort as you prefer.

We already have got over 40 paying customers (excluding family and friends, we’re guessing these paying customers came from some privacy listings and HN comments) and have exited beta last month!

Customers seem to really enjoy the simple UI (search can be used without JS) and search personalization (from choosing the providers to the domain boosting and exclusion). We also have hashbangs (like "!g", "!d", or “!e”) when something doesn’t quite give you what you’d expect, though.

You can see the main differences between Kagi and Uruky in the linked page, but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get a copy of the source code!

One thing we’re struggling with is outreach because we want to do it ethically, and it’s hard to find communities or places to sponsor which are privacy-focused and don’t require €5k+ deals. Ideas are welcome! Because of bots there isn’t a free trial easily available, but if you’re a human and you’d like to try it for a couple of days for free, reach out with your account number and we’ll set that up!

Thanks.

P.S.: Because people have asked before, our tech stack is intentionally very "boring" (as in, it generates and serves the HTML + bits of JS to enhance settings and such), using Deno in the backend (for easier TypeScript), PostgreSQL for the DB, and Docker for easier deploying.

P.P.S.: Because this has been also brought up before, the name has no special meaning but we read it like "Euro-key" in English. Names are hard, and we’re aware it can remind people of Uruk and Uruk-hai. That’s OK.

P.P.P.S.: Another frequent question here is “how does it work?” When you search, we query the first search provider on your list, and if it yields less than X results (only Mojeek really gives us a total count, we have to try + estimate for the others), we try the second, and so on. We then merge the results in a round-robin fashion (first of first, first of second, second of first, second of second, and so on). There’s a bit of more nuanced logic to also properly rank the results with the pin/exclude/raise/lower preferences, because it works differently across providers and not all of them support that, for example.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679021

[2] https://uruky.com

I recently made a 'notification-driven RPC' app for Android to help me help others:

Notifactor (Android App)

A lightweight native Android app that intercepts notifications on the device and triggers actions based on configurable rules.

The app uses Android's NotificationListenerService API. Once granted notification access it receives a callback for every notification posted on the device. It then checks each notification against configured rules and runs the configured action.

Why would you want this?

I don't know why you would want this but I can tell you why I made it: to make it easier to control some functions on Android devices used by people I often help using them in some way. My mother's Android TV (which I use to communicate with her through Linphone), phone and tablet sometimes stop doing the right thing. I live about 1300 km to the north of where she lives so I can't just hop on my bike to fix things. Thus far I relied on a set of Termux scripts on these devices to keep a reverse ssh tunnel open to an endpoint on my server but this has a number of drawbacks: the tunnel is not always there when I need it due to WiFi dropouts and other similar problems and the constant connection uses battery power on the phone and tablet. If only I could cause the tunnel to be created when I need it and brought down when it is not needed... Well, that is possible using Notifactor by sending a notification on a specific channel (ntfy refers to these as topics) whereupon Notifactor runs a Termux script which manages the tunnel (etc.).

Still working on my two decades old forum. Still going strong. https://www.tractorfan.app

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]

[dead]