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
I'm working on my Open Source speaking clock (mostly for myself):
https://github.com/jcubic/speaking-clock
It uses local AI models for the voice.
https://larm.dev, an uptime monitoring service with a focus on reliability and reduction in false positives. I’ve been building it for myself really but I figure it’s worth sharing it with people in case someone else finds it useful too.
It’s also a lot of fun to work on. Phoenix LiveView dashboard, go probes running on 4 continents, connected to the backend using websocket tunnels. Clickhouse for reporting. Even did a CLI and an MCP for fun.
You can take the probes for a spin with the free response time checking tool and see how fast your site is https://larm.dev/tools/response-time
My daughter introduced me to Pokémon TCG. We found a local group and have been playing for about a year and a half. At this point we have so many bulk cards that it takes way too long to search through them. Other than a few specific pulls we keep in a binder, we honestly have no idea what we own.
I’ve been building a phone app + website (https://MyBulkCards.com) to scan cards and organize where everything is. It’s pretty basic right now, but I can store cards in boxes like “Box 1 AAA, Box 1 BBB, …” and find cards easy peasy. There’s also a friends feature so I can see what others have locally. We borrow cards from each other quite a bit.
It’s been a fun project to build. I trained one model to find a card in the camera frame and another to identify it. Still iterating a lot. One epoch on my Mac M4 takes about 2 hours, and I’m still seeing improvements past epoch 10. Even now, it can find and identify a card more often than not, even without the OCR bits. Both models are under 20MB, run directly in the camera frame, and are fast enough to identify a card as I slide it into view.
I started with Android since that’s what I have, and I’ve shared the app store testing link with my local group for testing. The app is built in React Native, and I’m hoping to get an iPhone version out soon since there are a bunch of iPhone peeps. A couple of the players also got me into MTG, so now I’ve got a pile of Turtles cards too. I’ll be training an MTG model next. I don’t think it’ll be too bad since I can reuse most of the same approach.
I'm working on https://react.tv
It lets you create TV channels from digital media such as YouTube, The Internet Archive, TikTok, Twitch, and Dailymotion. It does that by letting you schedule videos against a custom calendar system.
Since filling out even a month of content can be a lot of work, I built some things to make the process easier.
* Advanced scheduler to know when and how long content can be played at any given datetime
* Real time team collaboration
* Channel libraries to organize media
* "Blocks" - Create a dynamic schedule which generate hours of content that mimics real television scheduling. It even carries over your playback history between generations so that playlists continue from where they left off.
* A catalog to find media from official sources on YouTube
* Embeddable as an OBS browser source to restream your owned content
* Repeat content infinitely or temporarily to create 24/7 channels.
If all goes well I am hoping to re-release sometime this month.
To prevent a big wall of text, duplicate of [1] (similar, but non-AI focused), I'll just say my wife and I are still working on Uruky, a EU-based and simpler Kagi alternative [2], and that's going really well so far!
On that first link you can find a lot of answers to frequently asked questions.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700880
[2]: https://uruky.com
I've been updating my game Blackshift (https://store.steampowered.com/app/741110/Blackshift/).
It released in 2020 but I've never stopped adding things and tweaking it. Recently I added mirrors that spin when you shoot them, called "flip-flops" because they work a bit like flip-flops from computing.
I'm also tinkering with some new game ideas, because I'd like to make something popular that can sustain me financially, and the gaming market, as difficult as it is, does still seem to value human soul and creativity.
I'm quite excited at the prospect of EmDash from cloudflare unseating Wordpress - especially for creating real estate websites.
I adapted my open source ruby on rails real estate website builder to work with EmDash and can already see a lot of potential.
It's not ready for production use yet but I'm really enjoying working on it:
https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/emdash_property_web_bu...
I'm building a workspace for thinking with AI. Think what Cursor did for coding, but for rigorous thinking.
I believe the direction toward persistent, proactive, remembers-everything AI is the wrong one for thinking. AI should be used as a selectively invoked sparring partner.
Making rent as an open source developer.
Shamelessly trying to attract new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my crap HTML skills.
Crossed 100K MRR as a solo founder for Zigpoll[1] - honestly I never thought I would get this far with the product so now it's all about trying to market and keep growth strong. Doubling YoY gets harder each year so you always have to find new growth channels (or ways to improve existing channels). This is an interesting task especially given the current environment.
I used to think "if you build it they will come" but, as it turns out, it's much more nuanced than that and requires a lot of iterating and stumbling along the way. I hope to break into another vertical this year!
A cyberpunk 2077 inspired Tower Defence game https://github.com/XEonAX/TowerPunk-CyberDefence
I had already developed a tower defence game without AI long time back.
Wanted to try my hand at guided vibe engineering and see how faster was it.
Building mobile app to cure my socials scrolling addiction - instead of videos you scroll live flights. https://planefeed.app/
An open course on building high performance LLM inference engine! Hope to finish by the end of April
I’m making Bezier, a mac-native vector design app as an alternative to Figma and Sketch.
Unlike those apps it has full support for design tokens and (so far) flexbox layouts. It can also export directly to HTML, rather than a fake preview mode. I’m also working on full code-backed components, so you can go between code and design very easily.
As a designer, I’ve been frustrated for years by the gap between design and code, and despite all the new AI features, Figma still hasn’t got any further in years - design tokens need a 3rd party plugin and responsive designs are a pain in the bum. So I decided to build something that has the ease of Figma while being much closer to live code.
I’ve got to the point where I’m designing the app in itself, tokens are working, html export is working and nearly ready for first betas.
B2B SaaS to host 3D scans of DataCenters and industrial plants.
Basically a google streetview tour of your Datacenter or large industrial plant.
You can do some nice things like draw 3D linework to trace the paths of pipes, conduits, eg : https://youtu.be/t8nRhWUl-vA add notes with markdown and html links at useful places in the 3D space.
We have add-ons for generating an 'xray' view floorplan to make it nicer to navigate a large space.
I think we are the first to have a web uploader that can preview and import .e57 panoramas, directly in the web page [ and skip the points if you dont need them ]
Currently in use by a telco in the Americas.
I made a thing to watch YouTube like it's 2000s cable tv.
I'm working to make it better right now.
I've been building an AgentRegistry. Right now it is mainly based on A2A Agents that run in Docker containers. There's an auto-register module that watches the Docker system event log (I'll add support for K8S eventually) and if it sees a container spin up with the right labels, it fetches the AgentCard from the Agent, then registers an Upstream and Route with APISIX, then updates the 'url' field in the AgentCard, and stores the AgentCard in the Registry.
The Registry in turn has two interfaces: one REST, and one A2A itself. If you hit /.well-known/agent-card.json on the Registry server, you get the AgentListerAgent, which supports searching for Agents by various criteria. Or you can search using the REST interface. In either case, you get an AgentCard that points to the correct APISIX endpoint to talk to the desired Agent.
Besides adding K8S support, other plans include adding support for other proxy providers (including Istio for the K8S case), supporting Agents that are not based on A2A and, allowing Agents to register themselves using the Registry API, and... uh, well, that's the main stuff I have in mind right now. Aaah, wait, I might do something along the lines of integrating an MCP Registry as well, not sure yet. Heck maybe I'll get bored and make it an all-out API registry for all sorts of endpoints... could integrate a UDDI server and bake in WSDL support for good measure! (Don't count on that last bit happening anytime soon).
Anyway, no repo to share right this second, but I do intend to make it open source. I'm just committing the cardinal sin right now of wanting to "make it presentable before releasing the code".
Just today I helped co-host the SF Permacomputing Club.
It was a lot of fun and I love all the good energy people bring to the conversation about long lasting and community driven tech.
Working on implementing the web both auth standard and a take on federated and out-of-band agent bot validation.
I evolved an rsync based backup script I've been using for almost a decade into https://github.com/nickjj/bmsu. I use this for backing up my life's work to an external drive but also syncing files to my laptop and phone too. It supports easy restoring as well.
No traffic ever leaves your local network and since it uses rsync under the hood the devices being sync'd to don't need to run anything other than SSH.
It's a single file shell script that has no dependencies except rsync. It's literally 1,000+ lines of defensive checks and validations to make sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot with rsync, and at the end the last line of code directly calls rsync. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel by replacing rsync (it's an amazing tool).
Still (in fits and starts) working toward a Bitemporal SQLite based (SaaS, for now) software architecture, because of an obsession with this notion of "Sovereign Software". Any SaaS I build should never lock in customer data, for example.
Current state of work: The implementation of the core data model is wrong. I need to throw it away and redo it from scratch.
Whiplash status: WTF, Time. y u move so fast?
This thread made me---forced me---to accept that it's been well over a year of the agony and ecstasy of solo software construction. Or maybe 2026 is moving way too freaking fast. Or it's good to be obsessive I guess.
A small project but something that I'm happy about: Postgresql backed persistent queues crate for Rust.
I couldn't find any crate that would be ergonomic enough to use and provide features I deem essential, i.e. retryability, scheduling, poison job detection, barriers, backoff strategies etc.
it's an area I'm familiar with so after spending 2 days trying to integrate external libs I decided to roll my own and I'm quite happy how it turned out in 2 days of development.
I plan to open-source it in the near future but right now using it in my another project and it's running quite well.
MinusPod is a self-hosted server that removes ads before you ever hit play. It transcribes episodes with Whisper, uses an LLM to detect and cut ad segments, and gets smarter over time by building cross-episode ad patterns and learning from your corrections. Bring your own LLM -- Claude, Ollama, OpenRouter, or any OpenAI-compatible provider.
I built my own fun t-shirt brand called devopsicorn, no AI used here, I worked with a graphics designer from Spain: https://devopsicorn.com
Fun project playing around with print in demand and Etsy. Now wondering why Etsy became so popular while being tricky and inflexible to use for the seller :-)
A native application (Windows, Linux, MacOS) for music transcription.
It comes with time stretch and pitch shift as most of these softwares do, but it allows you to save loop regions and take notes. It's designed to be a practice session tool.
I'm doing it from first principles, and having fun writing GPU code, platform shims, and squeeze every ms I can to make it fast and smooth.
I will be looking for testers soon. If anybody is interested, hit me up.
I’ve just released v2.0 of Kintoun (https://kintoun.app), an iOS client for Cloudflare that I’ve been building for quite a while now.
Synchronous P2P file sharing tool with post-quantum encryption and virtual mount point (https://keibisoft.com/tools/keibidrop.html)
Both peers mount a virtual FUSE folder. Files shared by one side appear in the other's folder in real time. You can open, copy, and browse your peer's files as if they were local. Files go directly between devices over encrypted gRPC. (by default it tries over LAN, then direct IPV6, then uses a data relay).
The hardest part has been making git repos work through the FUSE mount between peers.
(Been developing the tool for 12 months now, very close to a full release)
Hello folks, I'm a former Figma employee and while working there I've been amazed how well visualization and whiteboards actions work for humans. I've been working on a new tool to organize my family that is centered on the idea of a whiteboard with tiles of different kinds. It's still a little rough but maybe some of you would enjoy it. It supports daily journals, calendars, text, files. You can use it to organize yourself or create beautiful galleries for your memories. I've tried to create something simple that even kids can understand and use. For example, you can click and hold a little star at a corner of the Journal tile to record an achievement and my kids love it. I'm not trying to sell anything, the tool is currently completely free and has versions for Web, MacOS and iOS. Please checkout https://umka.day/ and share your feedback, I really appreciate this.
https://deadtrees.earth fully open crow sourced drone repository for vegetation monitoring
I'm trying to get back to verifying some of my old fun ideas. I want to finally build my 3D QR cube (https://deriese.net/qrcubes.html?s=hn) by sending a design to a laser shop, and I also want to find someone with a few termocouples to verify my results to the coffee cup cooling problem (https://deriese.net/coffee.html?s=hn). If anyone wants to help, feel free to send me a message.
I keep on refining https://hnarcade.com
I’ve got a decent amount of people on the newsletter so trying to figure out how to best deliver indie games via that channel and in the end get more people playing these awesome games people develop :)
Worked on some features at open reader, a local-first PDF TTS reader that highlights the words spoken and uses the excellent local kokoro tts engine.
Got fed up with web tech, it's so slow and clunky, so made my own version in python and qt. I changed the design to be based on a doclayout llm, so you can skip or include things like tables and references easily.
It now works so beautifully fast, it's code is readable and simple, no apis or multiple services. Just a qt app, some local llms that can run on a decent cpu and word-leven highlighting and playback selection.
https://github.com/thepycoder/projectwhy-tts
I can listen to papers now!
Working on tooling to help make working with agents in parallel easier, with minimal tools/no deps - https://github.com/andrewhathaway/ag.sh I don’t want to manually manage worktrees, tmux sessions, branches but want to remain in the terminal.
Also recently built a home energy cost/consumption display for the TRMNL - https://andrewhathaway.net/blog/ambient-cost-display-for-oct...
Published 3 articles so far, but working on AI architecture and management. While most people are focused on prompt engineering and making stuff with AI; I'm more interested in how it actually works, how to size workloads, how to maximize performance, the security and safety aspects. Here is my most recent article where I played with benchmarking tools to get a baseline and understand how configurations impact token generation
https://ewams.net/?date=2026/03/29&view=Qwen35_Performance_w...
A browser extension & windows app that automatically redacts the text you paste to prevent your private data from leaking to the third parties. Its an AI model that runs 100% locally on your own device so that your clipboard contents do not leave your device. http://redactor.negativestarinnovators.com
Coding agents have changed how I build. Constantly switching between the terminal and an IDE started to feel inefficient, so I wanted a better terminal-first setup where I could manage multiple agent sessions and make quick edits without the overhead of a full IDE. So I built Helm for myself: https://github.com/samirkhoja/helm
I am building ExamineIP - Free network security toolkit
Collection of 15 diagnostic tools (VPN leak test, DNS checker, port scanner, etc.) built after a WiFi security incident. All client-side, no data collection.
Feedback welcome!
Back in the day, my friends and I loved to rip a few games of Curve Fever 2. The original is gone and the game that took its place has objectionable aesthetic and gameplay tweaks.I've been working on making my dream "curve-like" game that captures the elegance of the original's gameplay while also allowing optional stuff like portals, rocket launchers, custom maps and modes like capture-the-flag. I'm kind of going for that sense of hilarity and semi-competitiveness of e.g. Halo 3 custom maps and modes.
My friends and I have been having a great time playing the initial version, and it's been fun working on some of the more interesting technical aspects like server + browser performance, mapping 2-d game space onto a 3-D visual space, etc. as well as some just-because-I-want to things like a dynamic music system.
Hi HN,
I’m working on OurCodeLab, a Singapore-based startup. After 11+ years in DevSecOps, I noticed a lot of local SMEs are either overpaying for simple sites or using insecure, bloated templates.
I’m trying to solve this by building high-quality, lightweight landing pages at the most affordable rate possible. Right now, I’m running a promotion: we’ll build your landing page (up to 2 pages) for free if we handle your domain hosting.
I craft each site individually to ensure they meet modern web and cyber standards—no copy-paste layouts. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the model or any feedback on the tech stack.
If you're an SME or know one that needs a hand, reach out at [email protected] for a non-obligatory chat.
VCamper: use LLMs to spot security fixes before CVE publication
Once a patch for a security vulnerability is public, the patch itself can reveal the vulnerability before the CVE is published. VCamper uses a staged LLM pipeline to analyze a Git commit range and flag likely vulnerability patches, even when they look like routine changes.
It’s still a proof of concept, but on known cases like curl CVE-2025-0725 it got close to the published root cause from the patch alone.
This matters because LLMs could make it much harder to keep security fixes quiet: once the patch is public, the bug may be recoverable almost immediately. Quietly shipping a fix and hoping it stays under the radar may stop being a reliable strategy.
Been working on something that I use daily, and decided I wanted to see what kind of other ideas I could get out of it, it's very basic article to speech using piper models at the moment.
The part I cared about was being able to send links via one click in my browser or two taps on my phone as I want to read every HN article who's title I find interesting, but don't have the time to read right at that moment.
It then at the moment publishes it to an RSS feed so I subscribe to it in Podcast Addict, but I've also just been using the web app as my reading list and tracker.
Been playing around with different settings on the piper models and different techniques for getting the most out of my four dollar instance:
https://experiments.n0tls.com/
Up next is to work on making the voice better (I'm impressed with the out of the box stuff already), and then making it better at finding the real content on a page and only recording that. It's a problem space I don't know much about, but find fascinating, been fun so far.
Just recently launched my suite of media inspection and encoding tools based on FFmpeg.
Still iterating through refinement and features. It's built on Rust + Tauri with a React frontend, in case anyone is curious.
I've created various open-source and commercial tools in the multimedia space over the last 10+ years and wanted to put it all together into something more premium.
I built an AI that turns YouTube videos into interactive tutoring sessions
Paste a link → AI breaks it into sections → teaches you on a whiteboard with voice → quiz + flashcards at the end.
It's free to try while in beta: https://www.pandio.online
I have some blog posts coming out soon. I’m also trying an experiment where I make YouTube videos[0] on each of them. My first video was a huge lift, since it was my first time doing everything.
Random observations from my first one: - presenting my idea visually helped crystallize my thinking in a way that writing doesn’t. And writing was already very good at crystallizing my thinking. - even making a bad video was a lot of work - making a video presentable is a deep subject. Subtle changes were throwing off my setup. Now I understand why so many influencers are fitness and lifestyle; the demand side is obvious, but when you’re already camera-ready you have a huge advantage on the supply side - described something I built felt natural. I do that for a living. The intro was like 45 seconds and took me like 45 minutes to film because it was acting and I don’t know how to do that - learning about video editing features had an immediate payoff because video is so long
[0] I’m posting the videos at https://m.youtube.com/@bitlog-dev . I said if the first one got to 100 I’d commit to making at least 10, and I just crossed that threshold
I am working on [1] a modernized open (AGPL) stack for interactive tutoring systems. SRS++, with hooks for defining your own pedagogical protocols over knowledge dependency graphs, Elo rating systems, etc, and with an eye toward gracefully differentiable curriculum that can hill-climb in terms of its efficacy.
With this stack, I'm scaffolding several (fingers crossed) commercial learning SaaS products. The first [2] is LettersPractice - a minimalist early literacy app that's family-first, in so far as it presumes an adult supervisor who co-learns strong confidence as a phonetic coach both at and away from the app. Putting considered rails on the parent-child reading experience.
The second set of apps is in music, with some experimental dev right now against piano (via midi devices), flute [3], aural skills, and sightsinging.
[1] https://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder , https://patched.network/skuilder
LLM has made scripts incredibly cheap, and their lifecycles as short as one-off. Batch rename? "Please implement a Python script." Remove background from images? "Please implement a Python script." Or various operations that could be described in a few sentences but used to take a lot of time—"help me implement a script..." With development time nearly zero, creating a new file, running a script, then deleting the script becomes the most time-consuming part, which feels very clunky. So I wrote RunOnce—targeted at this kind of one-off script scenario. It registers in Windows 11's right-click menu; click "Run Code Here" and a minimal editor appears. Paste your code (or generate it inside), run—automatic language detection, file cleanup, etc., much smoother :) Written in WinUI3, follows Windows 11 Mica guidelines, distributed on the Microsoft Store: https://github.com/Water-Run/RunOnce
a 90's Art Style (think Street Fighter 2) - Surf Forecast App.
I wanted a surf forecast app that i can look at glance, which "time-slot" of the week is good enough to go surf.
And I wanted it to look like nothing else out there, at least surf forecast wise
Building a map and text-based mobile game where you walk around and graffiti tag things (like Pokemon Go, except you are not looking at a map on your screen). The interface is text room names + descriptions, like an old school MUD, that update as you walk in different directions. They rooms are based partly on what is there in real life, although known points of interest are changed to fit a 'cyberpunk' theme.
The app is built in React Native (almost entirely with AI although I'm fairly particular about some of the features and methods it uses) with a Go backend. Map data comes from PMTiles.
Git worktrees are awesome but they broke my workflow in a couple ways:
Resuming work. I used to `j <reponame>` then `gco <branchname>`. Now if I do that I get an error about the branch being checked out already in another worktree. I realized the branch names are pretty unique across repos so I made ` jbr <branchname>` that works from anywhere.
Jumping within repo. The other kink was when I wanted to focus on a particular package I’d do `j <subdir>` and it would usually be unique enough to jump to the one in my current checkout. But now I have dozens of concurrent checkouts and have to pick, even though I’m already in the repo. So `jd <subdir>` does like autojump or zoxide but only within the current checkout.
To power those shell functions I made a “where” extension for Git.
https://github.com/turadg/git-where
It’s working out nicely!
I’m working on (and inside) https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw. It started as “my own OpenClaw” and quickly became an entire workspace to develop and test stuff in. It currently runs my homelab, my Obsidian vault, my blog static generator, a lot of my ARM low level stuff, and after some M365 hackery, my personal mail and calendar as well, all properly sandboxed. The home page at https://taoofmac.com has a list of things I’ve been doing with it over the past few weeks.