alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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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.
I’m working on Flowtelic. A workflow driven note-taking system that aims to get you thinking deeper, but also help you work on the most important thing next if you’re stuck. While not essential, it’ll be enhanced with a local first AI approach.
I'm building a framework for making small-to-medium sized factory management systems.
I built a MacOS-native app [1] to control Positive Grid Spark amps [2], without needing a phone.
Official app is mobile-only and clunky, and the workflow is awkward if you're sitting at a desk. Hardest part has been maintaining compatibility across amp models. Small protocol changes or optimizations I make for one amp can break another. That means I have to do a lot of manual testing before every release. So I'm trying to think of an emulation layer or test harness I can build to make my life easier. Happy to hear suggestions there.
About ~50 people are using it so far, and main feedback has been that it's much faster and more reliable than the official app.
[1] https://tonepilot.app [2] https://www.positivegrid.com/products/spark-2
I built an open dataset mapping the structural connections between Israel's tech/startup ecosystem and its military-intelligence apparatus.
The Israeli tech industry isn't a neutral commercial sector, it's a deliberate pipeline from intelligence units to billion-dollar companies. Wiz ($32B Google acquisition) was founded by four Unit 8200 veterans. SoftBank's Israel ops are run by a former Mossad director. CyberStarts, a $1.5B VC fund, openly recruits Unit 8200 graduates.
I am building the perma-lib on the topic of ethics and sustainable practices: Ꭰ-Library
Pronounce A-Library "The Unicode character for the Cherokee letter 'A' (Ꭰ) is U+13A0"
Launching a kick-starter for it in the coming weeks. Hoping to make a difference for the next few generations for a better world and education.
and
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!
Well, Electric Minds Reborn is now online: https://electricminds.org
I will be continuing work on the new software that powers it, the Amsterdam Web Communities System. https://github.com/amysoxcolo/amsterdam
(I tried to "launch" it with a Show HN post, but it sank without a trace. I may try again, after I get back from vacation...)
DailySelfTrack app: https://dailyselftrack.com/
DailySelfTrack is 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.
For example my use-case would be:
- Journaling in a way that fits into what I need. (Gratitude, bullet point jounal)
- Analysing my health and understand how things might relate to each other. (State of multiple health issues)
- Support for moving closer towards achieving my goals. (Daily focus sessions, no-phone mornings, learning Korean)
My wife has wanted a security system for a while. The turnkey cloud solutions freak me out. I've done some home automation with home aisstant before, and omg that was configuration slog. But with Claude..... It becomes fun.
Writing. I publish one long form essay a month with two published thus far. The third one is in editing stages. An enjoyable experience moving from internal notes to outward expression.
Hello! Not sure if this is you, but every year I either miss my kids’ summer camp deadline or scramble to grab whatever’s left . I figured there has to be a better way — so I’m building something that helps parents like us get reminders (and maybe even auto-book if this is possible) before camps fill up.
If you’ve been through this rodeo too, please provide your feedback — your feedback will help make next summer a lot less stressful for other parents
I'm working on ghidra-delinker-extension [1], a relocatable object file exporter for Ghidra. Or in other words, a delinker.
Delinking is the art of stripping program for parts, essentially. The tricky part is recovering and resynthesizing relocation spots through analysis. It is a punishingly hard technique to get right because it requires exacting precision to pull off, as mistakes will corrupt the resulting object files in ways that can be difficult to detect and grueling to debug. Still, I've managed to make it work on multiple architectures and object file formats; a user community built up through word of mouth and it's now actively used in several Windows video game decompilation projects.
Recently I've experimented with Copilot and GPT-5.3 to implement support for multiple major features, like OMF object file format and DWARF debugging symbols generation. The results have been very promising, to the point where I can delegate the brunt of the work to it and stick to architecture design and code review. I've previously learned the hard way that the only way to keep this extension from imploding on itself was with an exhaustive regression test suite and it appears to guardrail the AI very effectively.
Given that I work alone on this in my spare time, I have a finite amount of endurance and context and I was reaching the limits of what I could manage on my own. There's only so much esoterica about ISAs/object file formats/toolchains/platforms that can fit at once in one brain and some features (debugging symbols generation) were simply out of reach. Now, it seems that I can finally avoid burning out on this project, albeit at a fairly high rate of premium requests consumption.
Interestingly enough, I've also experimented with local AI (mostly oss-gpt-20b) and it suffers from complete neural collapse when trying to work on this, probably because it's a genuinely difficult topic even for humans.
I'm working on a p2p file/audio/video sharing site: https://dropspace.app/
https://neverbreak.ai that fixes failing CI and opens a PR with _proof_. Most "AI CI fix" tools read the error log and guess a patch. We actually reproduce the failure, fix it then re-run the test in a fresh environment to confirm it passes before opening the PR. Each PR includes a short GIF of the fix working. If the test doesn't actually pass, no PR gets opened. Works with C, Python, Go, Node.js, Java on GitHub Actions and GitLab CI. Currently working with few beta users.
Check out https://www.steampunkclock.com - a concept inspired by a drawing toy called a spirograph. I originally coded it in c# over 10 years ago, but was able to port to the web via mostly vibe coding, and even go 3D! Brass, copper, rusty steel, gears and more gears! Really Quite Prodigious my dear chap! Drag to rotate, with zoom etc. I used google antigravity mainly for this recent work. Hope you like it. from Charlie Wallace of Carlsbad CA.
I'm working on building Orris (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orris-breathing-exercises/id67...): a breathing app for iOS. Built it because I wanted something simple for winding down before sleep and everything I tried was either bloated with content I didn't want or locked basic features behind a paywall.
It does guided breathing sessions with variable phase durations (4-7-8, box breathing, etc), streak tracking, and HealthKit integration. It's all based on SwiftUI, Swift 6, with no backend. Currently exploring adding ambient soundscapes for sleep sessions.
Solo project, been working on it for a few months on the side. Also been a fun journey back into iOS after almost 10 years away!
A Minecraft competitor.
I'm leaning heavily on simulation, economics, towns with real economies, and interweaving progression systems. It's a custom engine. I finally have the foundation built, it's multiplayer ready, and it currently loads in under 200MB. The idea is to be hyper efficient to simulate multiple towns that grow by themselves and you can trade and interact with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeZ3O6F5FXU
It's a free-time project, but I will happily take investment and make it my full-time project. :) I have a game design-doc that I have built out, and I personally like it a lot. I believe in it's potential.
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.
I am working on a routine tracker app. I have been searching for an app where I could create programs, schedules and routines for various things that I consistently work on in a structured way (ex. workout program, music practice, language study, etc.). I haven't been able to find anything that I could use across my interests so I am building it myself. It's currently in the internal testing phase of the playstore and am working to get it out this month.
https://openscout.app - a local first communication tool, for agent to agent communication and user to agent communication too
Building a video game adaptation of Pass The Pigs (the "dice" game where "dice" are plastic pigs).
Early preview here: https://piggy-toss.netlify.app/
The goal is to play with friends, we love this game.
Phase angle measurements. And it's been a very hard, long and slow slog. Anybody with bright ideas in this department and I'm all ears.
Working on implementing the web both auth standard and a take on federated and out-of-band agent bot validation.
A boring solution for a boring problem - Working with PDFs.
I've been making a browser-based PDF editor that runs on-device via Webassembly / PDFium. Many of the hard parts were done by the open source embedpdf project, and I've been adding my own custom tools on top of it.
It does the usual annotation stuff — highlights, comments, stamps, etc. working on some more advanced stuff now - regex search/redact, measurements and takeoff tools for AEC industry.
Worked in a portfolio site for vibecoded projects: https://vibefolio.link
I’ve started streaming programming on Twitch and YouTube live.
Used to do it for friends only, but been publishing publicly since recently and it’s fun.
“Senior dev, junior attitude”
https://youtube.com/@harlybarluy
Spent 3h today adding a “system” filter to jq only to find out there are like seventeen PRs for this going back ten years. T_T I live but I don’t learn.
Working on testing and monitoring agent-readiness of CLIs with www.cliwatch.com, some interesting challenges in building test suites and analyzing data :)
This morning published a design manifesto for the Co-Wiki — a wiki-based warm storage layer that sits between LLM context windows and vector DBs, designed for human-agent co-authorship. The architecture solves chat hell, RAG chunking failures, and the missing second brain infrastructure in one brutally simple design. I'm a long-time SW architect who moved to epistemology. I’m too busy to go back to building — the design is complete, documented, and open. First to ship owns the category.
https://gist.github.com/paulshomo/69cf99e3185fa7ad0f50fc0e38...
I'm working with Claude Code to create complete programming systems in languages other than English. Not just wrappers around an English syntax;these are based on an English original but are complete scripting languages in their own right, with documentation, tutorial and programmer's playground. Each variant has its own language pack and they share a common compiler and runtime. The best of all is they are extremely AI-friendly. I've started with Italian and I'm looking for collaborators to work on others. I'd like to do Polish and Bulgarian but any are possible. See https://allspeak.ai.
I've been using speech-to-text tools every day now especially for dictating detailed prompts to LLMs and coding agents. I personally use VoiceInk which is open-source.
I tried to look for what other solutions are available and I've collected all the best open-source ones in this awesome-style GitHub repo. Hope you find something that works for you!
Right now Im working on so many thigs, but none of them as interesting as the things that other people here do.
I manage a small store (https://amigurumis.com.mx) for my SO and im dropping Elementor (too expensive) to use only Gutenberg. Turns out that it is pretty good for simple sites.
Im having some sucess developing new websites for people who cant afford it, or who never though about having one, so i created one for an accountant (https://contadoranual.com) using only WordPress.
Trying to improve my fine tuned whisper through more custom dataset. I can still see it not understanding certain things currectly.
My wife and I have been working on a platform for close to year now, called The Influencer AI (https://www.theinfluencer.ai) that helps you generate a consistent AI person, and use them for images and talking video. We've been growing and polishing it based on user feedback since then. You can go from idea of a person in your head, to the finished video of her doing or saying anything you need, all on one platform, with the best ai models for each step leveraged for you.
Working on a rogue-like discord activity game (soon to be multiplayer) that connects to Cloudflare durable object web sockets.
It takes my favorite elements from games like: WoW character min-max design and rotation Diablo 2/POE for item and crafting inspiration Slay the spire dungeon flow/fights.
It is uses pixel art I commissioned a decade ago that I am looking to finish a game with.
Looking for some early feedback! https://crux.lakin.dev/
A TUI written in gnuCOBOL to show and interact with the API of my cs student associations cursed member kiosk system. (Using curl, as I still want to live).
For said same association, templating and assembling a book of songs and other oddities in Typst for the associations 50th anniversary.
Next project is figuring out what to do with my personal website!
I've been building SoberStack (https://soberstack.app). It's the first side project I've taken on in a few years.
It's a free sobriety app for any bad habits I built for myself. Most sobriety apps reset your counter to zero when you slip, but it uses a Github style contribution graph to show you how far you have come. I also use it to track urges, and store a toolbox that is a reminder if why I am quitting something and what I can do instead every time I have an urge.
Game Boy app to explore 4-bit synthesis and "modular" sequencing, smth similar to https://roberthenke.com/technology/inside8032av.html but for Game Boy instead of Commodore PC
I'm building this mostly to scratch my own itch
It's a newsfeed constructed from 130k substack RSS feeds but limited to the past 24h.
Its helping me discover writers other than just what the algorithm gives me.
I've spent several years developing an ad-free website with a few dozen solitaire/puzzle games:
I am currently rewriting+testing the engine and about to add ~400 games to my platform in a few weeks.
dotIPA, an iOS app build size inspector that runs locally on your macOS [$4.99]
Track app size growth over time, inspect contents, spot duplication and size bloat and more.
Mostly playing around with AI agents session logs.
Lately I’ve been having LLMs implement multiple analysis methods on my session transcripts, trying to surface and identify patterns.
It’s been interesting. It took quite a bit of nudging, but Claude applied techniques I didn’t expect, from disciplines I wouldn’t have thought of.
If it works out, I’d like to turn into a sort of daemon that locally runs analysis on the sessions of users, with a privacy-preserving approach (think federated machine learning).
Would be interesting to see what patterns appear at scale, and have those confirmed or rebutted across thousands of transcripts corpuses. No reason Anthropic & OpenAI should be the only ones to benefit from that; those are our interactions after all.
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.
I'm building a browser for designers: https://matry.design/
The most versatile and secure no-code backend platform ever created for building complex web apps. The original goal was to bring junior devs on par with top senior devs in terms of application architecture. I've been trying to create a dev experience that avoids any kind of abstract technical hurdles and makes everything as light, declarative and scalable as possible. Pivoted for AI; which is even better at using it than a junior dev. I started building this project piece by piece 15 years ago.
I (codex) made a plugin for stremio to stream my collection from real-debrid. I tried existing plug-ins first and non was working. Just prompted chatgpt to refine my initial specs, and asked on another session to build that. And later used codex for the last mile. Nothing fancy though and nothing can be particularly useful to others but damn it was too useful to me and my wife.
I’m working on an ATS system that integrates LLMs for helping the recruiter in writing job descriptions, parsing CVs to Markdown, making summaries of CVs and suggest which ones match the best the job offers giving pluses and minus: https://beehive-ats.com/
Arrr. Here's the monthly dose of low self-esteem for all those who struggle to get anything worthwhile done. Currently working on figuring how you get motivated and competent enough as I browse various link from this thread.
I am working on https://github.com/xi/xiio, a minimal async runtime for python. It is mostly feature complete with a fraction of the code of asyncio or trio. It is great fun to get into low level stuff and hopefully it helps me to better understand the finer details of async programming.