alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
im building ReceiptBot an APM-style flight recorder to stop Node.js AI agents from going rogue, leaking .env secrets, or burning your API budget.
github.com/redshadow912/ReceiptBot
Building a project to learn Go Concurrency using spaced repetition.
Moving over to the management track and trying to not suck at it.
A new SML runtime with effect based IO (no function colouring).
I built ReceiptBin because I wanted a simple way to track receipts and link them to my budgeting app. There are plenty of apps that already do this, but most of them feel out of place on iOS and lock basic features like OCR and autofill behind paywalls. ReceiptBin uses Apple’s VisionKit and Foundation Models to handle OCR and autofill at no cost. Everything syncs through iCloud, and you can generate reports entirely on-device. There’s also support for widgets and Siri Shortcuts.
If you want to check it out: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/receiptbin/id6761148891
I’m planning to push another update in the next few weeks with bug fixes and some new functionality.
A couple of things: 1. data management for music publishers. This came out of nowhere but has got me back into coding, deploying, test. And I've got real lessons using AI-generated code that I wouldn't have got just reading other ppl's blog posts! We've been mapping all the data formats publishers work with, how to organise them better and build a suite of apps around it.
2. the other projects it the framework. Aside from the product itself, I've ended up with a really nice framework (FE and BE) and playbook for copilot to follow. I've hit multiple problems with AI generated code and had to rework it like I have for junior devs! But now, the framework focuses the work and stops the slop!
I want to build out all the product-dev-helper tools I've wanted in the past. I've already got a lovely schema-UI system, UI components which are data-aware and the basis of some low-ish-code tools. I've also nearly got a "run tests and fix" local LLM which saves tokens.
Really enjoying this.
A rogue mission control software for spacecraft
Building a selfhosted activity tracker inspired by wandrer.earth
I'm getting pretty darn close to doing a "Show HN" about my new macOS paint app, called Mojave Paint. I just posted a feature tour video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61FJ2xzUiIU showing how to make halftoned edges, which happens to cover a lot of of the basics including layers, alpha masks, selections, foreground/background color, gradients, etc.
I would say Photoshop is awesome but expensive (if you can look past how invasive it is for your machine), Affinity is free but "meh", I'm going for the "awesome and cheap" square of the quadrant. Find it at https://skullrocksoftware.com
I'm making web chat using captive wifi portal on esp32.
stk (https://github.com/level09/stk): async Quart + Vue 3 starter i use for everything. auth stack is already wired up (session, 2FA, webauthn, oauth), async sqlalchemy, alembic, no frontend build step. basically the boring part so i can get to the actual product faster.
ziglag (https://github.com/level09/ziglag): self-hosted invoicing for freelancers, built on top of stk. clients, invoices, VAT, PDF, shareable links, MIT. got tired of paying a monthly fee to send a pdf.
idea is to keep chipping away. every subscription that annoys me is fair game. small tools, self-hosted, no accounts, no seats, no upsell. if it's useful for me someone else probably wants it too, so might as well open source it. open to ideas on what to kill next.
experimental chat site https://talktotalk.me/
Working on a lot of projects, both at work and personal, but if I'm honest I want to create something now. Pottery, woodworking, agriculture, whatever. I'm tired of writing code, really. It's boring to do, it's boring to tell others what you do, and frankly I am contributing little to none to society other than saving money for others.
From another submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738827), there was a screenshot of Google Docs/Drive showing a popup saying "You cannot do copy/cut/paste with the mouse" whenever you try to right-click and copy.
Some months ago, I saw that very popup, and finally started working on something I've been wanted to do for a long-time, a spreadsheet application. It's cross-platform (looks and work identical across Windows, macOS and Linux), lightweight, and does what a spreadsheet application should be able to do, in the way you expect it, forever. As an extra benefit, I can finally open some spreadsheets that grown out of control (+100MB and growing) without having to go and make a cup of coffee while the spreadsheet loads.
I don't really have any concrete to share, I guess it'll be a Show HN eventually, but I thought it was funny it was brought up in a similar way in that article as was the motivation for me to build yet another spreadsheet application.
Wow this is an unreal way to get some karma hahah
Voklit.com / Voklit.app
An international calling app, for the poor people
I've just published Timelocked (https://github.com/Caltanjun/timelocked), a local app that encrypts any file or message but delays decryption.
One of the main goal is to help with cryptocurrency-related home invasions. The XKCD "$5 wrench attacks" became a reality in France where I live. So it's another way to delay the access of personal funds, but it doesn't need to rely on third parties or multisig. You can just timelock a BIP39 passphrase for a duration of your choice.
It can also help with self-managed inheritance, or digital addictions.
a soft-state filesystem cache and cluster control system that doesn't require any external orchestration or micro service infrastructure
i'm creating (another) learning platform so people with no background in tech can learn sql and python for data analysis
I am working on a (yet another) local app for managing multiple claude/codex/gemini sessions in a game like environment: https://getviberia.com/
I got tired of paying lots of $$$ to form tools, in order to create useful forms and checklists for me, and with my specific requirements:
- immutability
- self-hostability and/or EU SaaS option
- nested data (e.g. nesting a list of sailing legs into a sailing trip form)
- formulas (today(), date, string, numeric,...) and conditionals (visible/required/enabled if)
So I created two nice pieces out of that, which would have been impossible in the past due to time constraints and got massively unlocked through claude code:
- a frontend/javascript only forms library that supports all the rendering, form schema input, data output, validation and formula/conditional logic
- a multi-tenant SaaS product, that is a single golang binary and stores in sqlite, easily self-hostable but I can also operate it as a European SaaS (and in other regions) where needed
So I was trying:
- pocketbase
- really running something bigger with much more data off of sqlite (primarily used it for smaller stuff in the past)
- real focus on self-host-ability, keeping dependencies minimal and extremely simple (which also helps claude)
- trying other tools for security scanning, verification, testing, security analysis, WAF,... than I use at work, pretty much playing around with tech as much as I can to see new and different stuff :-)
Hello I'm making a game.
I've been busy adding postgres and sqlite support to apostrophecms:
Six months ago, that would have been unrealistic, because we're heavily committed to the mongodb API and we make it part of our own API.
Starting in December though, Opus 4.6 made it perfectly realistic to pursue this with Claude Code as a series of personal weekend projects.
Now, despite not having any official resources on this until the last week or so, it should land in May.
This doesn't work for everything. It absolutely helps that the problem I'm solving is an "adapter pattern" problem: "make X talk like Y." And that we have a massive test suite, at multiple levels. That combination makes "here's the problem, go solve it, grind until the tests pass, don't bother me for a few hours" a realistic AI agent request.
But it's a little mind-blowing all the same. The hype around AI is so out of control, it can be easy to miss genuine "holy crap" moments.
Along the way I've written a fair bit about how to run Claude Code autonomously on your household server in a reasonably secure manner:
https://apostrophecms.com/blog/how-to-be-more-productive-wit...)
Also general Claude Code tips and thoughts on workflows that help and workflows that ultimately just speed your burnout:
https://apostrophecms.com/blog/claude-code-part-2-making-the...
I know, everybody's writing this stuff, but the desire to share is natural.
(Disclaimer: I'm part of the demographic AI was trained on. If I tried not to sound like a bot, I'd have to sound like... well, somebody else)
I built a cmux-like sidebar for a fork of wezterm, called wezmux https://github.com/vcabeli/wezmux
If you know, you know. I wanted to like cmux but I had tons of problem with fonts or scrolling behaviors and I don't need a web browser in my terminal, so I went back to wezterm and added the nice sidebar for my claude code / codex notifications and output previews.
Been building an E2EE chat client on the weekends that sits right between Discord (but dis-enshittified) and Matrix (but with good UX around encryption). Still got some rough edges - we are in the second nine of the march of nines in terms of quality.
Recently started a web design and IT consulting company called Opacity Tech with a simple goal, reasonable prices, and handwritten code. No AI agents writing bloated code, no template based site builders. Just real humans, writing real, optimized, fast code, using experience and knowledge, like the old days. Art used to be what we created with our hands, not what robots hallucinate for us. This from scratch attitude means we can charge less because we dont have to rent platforms or pay subscriptions for services or licenses. Real servers in house too, no cloud overlords.
https://auxx.ai Yet another "AI CRM" Started over a year ago working on it part time. Its coming together. https://auxx.ai
brew install apfel
turns out starting a popular open source project comes with ongoing work attached
HTTPState
https://github.com/httpstate/httpstate
A minimal, reactive, real-time state layer over HTTP. Pick a UUID, read/write ≤128 bytes, and instantly sync data across apps, devices, or services. Each state is addressed by a UUID [1]. You read/write it via a simple GET/POST API, or use one of the client libraries (8 languages and counting) for real-time updates. It is open source with a permissive license.
Some design premises:
* It should be as easy as possible to use. One line of code (ok, two if you count the import line).
* Hard limit: max. 128 bytes state size. This forces small, fast updates. HTTPState is not meant to be a storage layer but a fast, real-time communication layer for things like events, sensors, UI/UX updates.
* Data is open, to re-usability and collective applications. You can see some featured data streams on the site, if you like one, you can use it on your app in like 1 minute.
Use cases (but not limited to, lol):
* Add pub/sub-style communication to your apps, quickly and easily.
* Stream sensor data to a web/mobile UI (or any of the client's implementations).
* Persist state across multiple runs of your app through time.
* Sync state across multiple app instances.
Some undocumented integrations (will land soon):
* You can update a state via an SMS message.
* You can update a state via an email.
* You can update a state by setting an HTML form's action to httpstate.com/UUID, so that it works on "noscript" environments.
* CAS-style optimistic concurrency control (w/ atomic operations) via headers on the request.
* There is an iOS client that allows you to easily build widgets with the states you choose.
Roadmap:
* Add "API Keys" so you're the only one who can read/write to the UUID you pick.
* C/C++ and MicroPython clients for embedded devices.
* A postgreSQL extension to bind states to tables.
How can you help?
* Just reach out if you want to adopt one of the clients and/or want to write a new one in a language/platform you'd like to see.
* If you know how to code Android apps, I'd like to have the same widgets feature I have on iOS but on Android.
* Publish some data and send me an email so I can add it to the featured list! (This will be automated eventually, I just haven't figured out in such way that is not abused).
* Comments and suggestions always welcome!
1: You can write it without the dashes, but it has to be a UUID v4. You can also add '/[8 hex digits]' at the end, this is helpful to keep many related states together.
i am building yet another ai powered language-learning app. user uploads random texts, and the ai gives grammar and vocab hints, so the user can try to translate it on their own. Basically google lens, but without the final translation.
ironically the difficult part wasnt the OCR or the textanalyses, but finding the exact position of the text in the input image.
I'm building an immediate mode GUI Win32 app on top of Windows.UI.Composition visuals, maybe building up a library with it along the way. Just a hobby project / experiment. I hate this problem [0] so I went down a rabbit hole trying to solve it.
givedirection.com
Direction - I’m trying to teach people how to do all the other stuff that you need to know, other than writing code, about delivering real products and not just a bunch of junk and slop that can’t be maintained
ShowHN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47721469
I’m also trying to make it really super simple so it’s week to week pricing, and have a discord community that grows out of it.
It’s literally just four two hour courses on Monday of each week and a demo day.
you walk through what you’re gonna do, how you’re gonna do it, how you’re gonna use your AI assistants to help you, where it can help you, and where it can’t help you, how to talk to it about teaching you instead of just doing it for you, and at the end of it you have something tangible to show for it.
There’s no subscription this is just straight up teaching product and project development that comes with a community and the community grows as much as it chooses to.
You can read the vision and roadmap on the site as well
Finally starting a blog.
I'm working on the wolrd model action (WMA) model, which is used to replace Visual Language Action (VLA) model to bridge the physical world with LLM.
Now I've done my basic researching part, but I'm lack of the courage to dive into this topic. After all, it's a really hard work to it.
So I'm just, you know, scrolling the HN and trying to sharpen my brain and get back to the work.
Building a pro transparency writing tool that cryptographically proves a human actually typed what they claim to have written (research papers, news articles, assignments etc) . It captures behavioral signals during composition, makes it very hard to automate or fake the writing process, and lets readers verify authorship authenticity. Think "proof of human work" for the AI generated slop era.
patching bash's interface because... why not?
https://ianchanning.com/safer-ralph/
Ralph loop in a docker container, bullshit removed.
Anti-slop, using AI to try to make it as simple as possible.
A privacy friendly cloud storage manager like Windirstat for Google Drive & MS Onedrive
No file contents are accessed, only metadata, fully client-side API calls (browser to google API).
Starting a blog
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an app for insomnia, racing thoughts at night etc.
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We ar e
Following up the comment i made last month, I'm a solo dev building a handful of apps across different niches.
- Plask ( https://plask.dev ) — Google Analytics (GA4) connected analytics dashboard for people who ship multiple products. I got tired of manually checking separate GA4 properties for all my apps and SaaS projects, and setting up individual MCP integrations for each felt like overkill when I just wanted a quick overview. So I built a single dashboard that connects all your GA4 properties, runs statistical anomaly detection, sends alerts when something breaks, and generates AI weekly digests. Free tier for 2 properties, Pro at $9/mo.
- Kvile ( https://kvile.app ) — A lightweight desktop HTTP client built with Rust + Tauri. Native .http file support (JetBrains/VS Code/Kulala compatible), Monaco editor, JS pre/post scripts, SQLite-backed history. Sub-second startup. MIT licensed, no cloud, your requests stay on your machine. Think Postman without the bloat and login walls.
- APIDrift ( https://apidrift.dev ) — Monitors changelogs for APIs, SDKs, and libraries you depend on so you don't get blindsided by upstream breaking changes. Scrapes docs, diffs changes, classifies severity with AI, and sends digest emails. Track your dependencies, get alerted when something breaks. Free tier covers 3 sources with weekly digests. Built with Next.js, Supabase, and Gemini Flash.
- Mockingjay ( https://apps.apple.com/app/id6758616261 ) — iOS app that records video and streams AES-256-GCM encrypted chunks to your Google Drive in real-time. By the time someone takes your phone, the footage is already safe in the cloud. Built for journalists, activists, and anyone who needs tamper-proof evidence. Features a duress PIN that wipes local keys while preserving cloud backups, and a fake sleep mode that makes the phone look powered off during recording.
- Stao ( https://stao.app ) — A simple sit/stand reminder for standing desk users. Runs in the system tray, tracks your streaks, zero setup. Available on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.
- MyVisualRoutine ( https://myvisualroutine.com ) — This one is personal. I have three kids, two with severe disabilities. Visual schedules (laminated cards, velcro boards) are a lifeline for non-verbal children, but they're a nightmare to manage and they don't leave the house. So I built an app that lets you create a full visual routine in about 20 seconds and take it anywhere. Choice boards, First/Then boards, day plans, 50+ preloaded activities, works fully offline. Free tier is genuinely usable. Available on iOS and Android.
- Linetris ( https://apps.apple.com/app/id6759858457 ), a daily puzzle game where you fill an 8x8 grid with Tetris-like pieces to clear lines. Think Wordle meets Tetris. Daily challenges, leaderboards, and competititve play against friends.
And much more, you can find more on my blog https://tskulbru.dev , im even doing an agentic workflow course for those who havent gotten started doing that yet. Although I guess most people here have :)
ComputerPoker.ai is a website where users can play simulated poker tournaments against GTO Bots to learn GTO poker strategy in a fun and low-risk environment.
My motivation for creating CompterPoker.ai was feeling a bit overwhelmed by some of the professional poker tools out there for learning GTO play. For some tools, learning how to simply operate the tool itself felt like a second job. With ComputerPoker.ai players can play against bots themselves simulating GTO play to learn what it "feels like" to play GTO vs. GTO opponents without having to turn any knobs or dials (feedback is real-time as you play).
The Beta tester code for HN Users is: HackerNews2026. All feedback is welcome! Please send suggestions for improvement or bugs to [email protected] or alternatively leave a comment below. Any questions I will do my best to answer.
As for the product offering the website is designed to teach players how to play optimal poker strategy (GTO) in simulated Texas Hold 'Em poker tournaments. Our value proposition is that if you can consistently beat the bots then you will fare well in live poker tournaments (of course adjusting for your opponents' play).
In addition to GTO pre-flop quizzes and pre-flop charts, users have the ability to simulate poker tournaments from start-to-finish and get feedback on their decisions _in real-time_ in a fun and low-risk environment.
For those interested the tech stack is Django deployed on AWS via Terraform and SaltStack, the database uses a Postgres RDS backend, and the frontend uses HTMX with WebSockets via Django Channels and Redis (Nginx serving as reverse proxy with CloudFlare DNS and SSL). During the project I used Claude Code to aid with various boilerplate aspects of the code base including building out the repos for Terraform and SaltSack and of course speeding up Django development.
Users are graded pre-flop based on the covered pre-flop scenarios (two-ways only for now). Post-flop users are graded on a residual MLP PyTorch model. We have built an in-house solver in Rust using the discontented CFR++ algorithm. The PyTorch model approximates GTO play post-flop (again only two-ways currently) based on training data with raises, EV, and realistic ranges for OOP and IP players. Because the post-flop decisions are based on a model that will always be a work in progress I refer to these decisions as GTOA (or "GTO Approximate").
Version 8 of the PyTorch model is the first one that I am happy with and actually find it quite difficult to play against. If you manage to beat the bots please do let me know how many tries it took! For those curious the PyTorch params for the most recent run are below (I trained on a gaming PC via Linux WSL2 using an AMD GPU).
The website is live in Beta mode as I gather feedback on how things are structured and work out any bugs/kinks. If you have any suggestions for improvements I’d love to hear them. Subscriptions are live so if anyone wanted to test the Stripe payment processing flow I certainly wouldn’t mind! ;-)
p.s. This is a side gig for me. I am currently looking for full-time work either fully remote or on-site based in London, UK (this LLC that runs ComputerPoker.ai operates out of USA but I am based full-time in the UK and authorized to work in both UK and USA). If you or someone you know is looking for a SRE with strong software engineering skills please let me know!
I always see these threads and think I'm not working on anything, but I just realised it's a lie, I'm exploring a couple of things right now, both heavily AI supported:
Simracing trainer.
I love simracing, I'm moderately competitive and want to improve, and I like to be efficient with my practice. So having access to and using a lot of telemetry, I noticed that the "turn a few laps, load telemetry, compare against reference lap, try again" is not as efficient as it could be.
Also a lot of my telemetry analysis is very rote and "rules based": Look at the biggest laptime delta jump against reference, try to determine the cause among a few usual suspects".
So I have started experimenting with a system that reads the iRacing telemetry in real time, and compares against the reference telemetry live, finding the biggest delta jumps, and trying to find the root cause of the time loss using an increasingly sophisticated GOFAI rule and pattern matching system. Then this report is fed to a cheap LLM call to be condensed into clear advice, and the result goes to the free Microsoft TTS API. So I get instant feedback of where I'm slow and maybe even why.
So far I fear it's mostly making me faster from all the test laps involved more than the advice itself, but when it clicks it does feel magical and really help.
But sometimes I feel like I'm just speedrunning the collapse of 70s AI, as it feels a bit too brittle and situational.
I also have added additional tools for tracking improvement across sessions, finding statistically problematic corners (where am I plain bad?, where am I inconsistent?) or even training my muscle memory by tracing fast driver brake traces using my pedal.
Yay compiler: The other ongoing thing is a clean room reimplementation of Jon Blow's Jai. I've been curious about the language for years, but it's a closed beta and for some reason I've never felt about asking Jon to get into it. I'm not really a game dev so I wouldn't even know what to put in the request.
So now I have 100k+ lines of Rust that can compile a very significant subset of the publicly available Jai source code. I just used various LLMs to condense the public information about the language and come up with a dev plan and started chipping at it. Once I had something in a kind of working state I started with the Way to Jai big tutorial and make sure every example there compiles and works as intended, fixing errors or missing features one by one.
I mostly use Claude Code or Codex, but sometimes what I do is having them guide me into the new feature and doing the edits myself while they explain, so I get to know how things really work under the hood.
It's a silly pointless project, but for some reason I find very satisfying watching it compile the examples.
nocodo: Sheets Driven Development
I think in this era of coding agents, more people feel empowered to build their own workflow automation. But for vast majority of non-technical folks, Claude Code or even Replit are not easy to use solutions. So I am taking inspiration from spreadsheets and using that as the primary UX to build a coding agent.
Solo project since 4+ years: https://kastanj.ch/en?mid=hn47741527
The goal is to make every recipe foolproof on the first try, similar to when you walk into a restaurant and just pick what you want to eat without thinking about the details. The goal is to have the same experience, just pick what you want to eat, with recipes that tells you exactly what to do with no magic involved.
Technically it is probably very different from other recipe apps. The database is a huge graph that captures the relations between ingredients and processes. Imagine 'raw potato'->'peeled potato'->'boiled potato'->'mashed potato'. It is all the same ingredients but different processing. The lines between the nodes define the process and the nodes are physical things. Recipes are defined as subsets of the graph. The graph can also wrap around into itself, which is apparently needed to properly define some European dishes in this system. The graph also has multiple layers to capture different relationships that are not process related.
Why was it designed it in this way? Because food/cooking is complex to define. This design is the only way I have found that can capture enough of these complex relationships that the computer can also 'understand' what is going on.
My favourite thing about this is that each recipe is strictly defined in the graph. If the recipe skips a step, or something is undefined, the computer knows that the recipe is incomplete. It won't ask you to do 10 things at the same time and then have something magically appear out of nowhere. It is like compile time checking but for recipes.
It also enables some other superpowers, for example: • Exclude meat part of the graph = vegetarian. Same thing works with allergies. • Include meat part of graph = only show me recipes that contain meat. • Recursive search: search for 'potato' and the computer will know that french fries are made from potato. It can therefore tell you that you could make the hamburger meal, but you will need to complete the french fries recipe first, which should take 60 minutes. • Adjustable recipe difficulty (experimental): It knows which steps can be done in parallell, and which can't based on how the nodes connect. A beginner can get a slower paced recipe with breathing room between steps, while someone more experienced can do a faster pace and do more things in parallell.
If I knew what it would take to build this, I would never have gotten started. I completely underestimated the complexity of the problem I was trying to solve. But here we are, and now it is basically done and working.
The website captures the key points from a non-technical point of view, and you can enter your email and get notified when it will launch in your country.
minimal now pages via chat - https://minnow.social
the Indie Internet Index - https://iii.social
https://volt.fm