alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
I am hacking on an alternative to Builtwith: bloomberry.com. Unlike Builtwith, you can search for companies that use any backend/backoffice product such as Jira/Atlassian, and Github (enterprise/free).
Acoustic diagnosis of electrical problems on the electric grid!
I'm building a tool that allows you to determine the health of an electric transformer from only your phone. It tells you:
- the loading
- the health of the windings and core
- and whether the phases are unbalanced
Acoustic diagnosis of electric issues is FASCINATING, and it feels like there hasn't been a lot of research into this, so I have been slowly chasing down various acoustic patterns I find and try to derive them from first principles of physics.
I'm making an iPhone app for it, and Xcode has been truly awful: non-deterministic, crashing all the time, and error messages that tell me absolutely nothing. I would like to use xtool, but it doesn't have the preview, which I need for debugging.
Working on https://tapitalee.com
- Deploy containerized apps to your own AWS account with minimal config!
- CLI tool with instant console sessions
- Set up SQL/Redis instantly with Heroku-like add-ons.
- For enterprise: Autoscaling, preview apps, audit trail, release approvals.I am building https://aweb.ai (https://github.com/awebai/aweb)
I was tired of copying/pasting between agents, so I gave them identities, and tools to talk to each other and share tasks. I've found it so useful that I've left my job as the CTO of a German startup to focus on this.
The identities are public-key DIDs with DNS as the source of truth, as well as team membership. I also run a public registry at https://awid.ai (also OSS).
I track wait times at the Berlin immigration office. I just added a graph that shows how wait times improve/worsen over time. I generate the SVG without any external dependencies. It was a fun exercise.
https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/immigration-office/wait-ti...
I wish I had more time for such projects, but since AI is now capturing most of the traffic, I am losing a lot of my income and I have to make up for it. It's a huge distraction.
I’ve been working on Broadcast since Sept 2024:
It’s a self-hosted email marketing/newsletter app. The basic idea is: own your subscriber database, run the app on your own server, and send through SES/Postmark/Mailgun/SMTP instead of being locked into another SaaS.
Not trying to be “Mailchimp but cheaper”. It’s more for technical founders, agencies, and consultants who want a boring, controllable email tool they can deploy for themselves or clients.
I’ve kept the changelog public because I wanted the work to be visible: https://sendbroadcast.net/changelog
My buyers are typically people who want to own their data and are in regions that have strict data privacy regulation/laws.
Interesting fact: This was my real last project where v1 was built by hand before AI coding became the norm in the software industry.
I'm currently fighting Garmin's wonderful Connect IQ watch app platform (it's horrendous).
I'm working on <https://untether.watch>. Trying to shift 20-30 micro phone interactions to the wrist per day to ultimately reduce phone use. Dumbphones are too extreme - you need a smartphone for certain day-to-day activities (banking etc.)
The watch is a great form factor - it's got a crap screen (MIP), the ergonomics are awkward (rotate and look down), it has limited capabilities. But that's the point! Do essential quick actions and leave the phone out of site.
Requires Android companion app to do the heavy lifting. Use the (head)phone mic and STT to reply to any android notification and make notes. More features to come.
Garmin's SDK is seriously challenging. APIs are often broken across firmwares, limited developer tools and testing is tough.
Menu bar app that reduces your Claude Code token costs by ~50% so you get 2x more usage out of your plan.
People seem to like it so far :-)
Slapping together an image dithering toolkit to help with album cover stylization. Partly making sure I can replicate it down the line... but also finding an aesthetic, non-commercial motivation I thought I'd forgotten at work.
Some finished covers (https://saltwatercowboy.github.io/albedo/pages/en-10-05-26.h...). Next up pixel sorting.
I've had public dotfiles at https://github.com/nickjj/dotfriedrice for a long time but recently branded them and after having run native Linux for 6 months, I added a desktop environment based on using niri and Arch Linux.
It can get you up and running in a few minutes with an installer that can set up a new system or keep an existing system up to date. There's also a command line version that works on Arch and Debian based distros (including WSL 2) and macOS. I use it on my personal devices and a company issued MBP.
I'm not going to lie, I've been using computers for 25 years and this is the happiest I've ever been with using 1 machine for everything (software development, media creation, gaming, etc.).
I'm building https://clipper.dev
Docker is...quite slow with large images. I've built a registry+pull client+buildkit builder to make it better. It splits apart layers, allowing for files to be shared between related images. In a robotics context, it can make pulls 10x faster. And in a cloud context, the format allows for pulling an image in 15 or 20 seconds instead of 60, without having to do a FUSE w/lazy pulling. Builds are faster, I store 7x less data due to better deduplication, I can run security scans faster due to not having to unpack tarball layers, etc, etc. I want to be the default registry for all ML related work, in the future.
I've been working on my open source integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) auth proxy. It provides an embeddable integration marketplace where users can connect 3rd party apps, and it provides a proxy endpoint to the host application to send authenticated outbound requests. That way token refresh, audit, etc stay with this system and frees the host application/agent/whatever free to just focus on the business logic.
I'm working on an AI-native email client that organizes, prioritizes, and drafts emails for you.
The vision is for everyone to have an executive assistant that manages their email. It's built for people who spend hours in their inbox every week.
It has automatic prioritization, split inboxes, snippets, bundles, automatic follow-up reminders, and an AI agent that can do stuff for you -- without deleting your emails.
If you've read this far, I'd encourage you to give it a try and let me know what you think!
Working on https://kapturekafka.dev, a desktop app for Kafka protocol inspection. Think Wireshark or Fiddler, but native for Kafka.
Useful to debug local Kafka apps against any cluster, intercepts the traffic, decodes the protocol. You see interesting (and weird) things when you look at the protocol. Still early, though already useful for local debugging when you know what you want.
We are working on DBConvert Streams:
A self-hosted database IDE with built-in migration, CDC, and DuckDB-powered federated SQL.
Mostly trying to remove the annoying gap between "I can inspect this database" and "I can safely move/sync this data somewhere else".
Current focus: resumable large loads and cleaner initial-load-to-CDC handoff for Postgres/MySQL.
I built BookDMV (https://bookdmv.app), it watches DMV offices for open appointments and either alerts you or books one automatically.
A model framework for an in house suite of models.
From dataset harvest, to training intricacies on CUDA/ROCm to fun HIP kernels. Full circle to inference testing, building it around consumer hardware(the challenge). Using this as a "how it works" deep dive, allowing me to learn more about the how, more than endless papers will. It's a MoE and I'm slowly running a human loop, research, build, correct, research.
Since getting laid off in Feb, I've been spending my free time polishing up my word game Gram Jam (https://gramjam.app).
I finally finished the (monumental) Svelte 4 -> 5 migration that had been getting dusty for the last year. This unlocked a higher performance ceiling for me to polish my animations and UX. Now I'm revamping my onboarding experience and taking another crack at marketing and promoting it. Last year, I was focusing on setting it up as a PWA and integrating Sentry monitoring and Stripe integration. All important stuff but not what got me excited about the process.
I've been pretty tied up with maintenance and admin work, and haven't gotten a chance to work on the actual game design in a while, so I'm very excited to return to that part of the project soon. I have ideas for new puzzles and modes spilling out of my ears and I feel like with LLMs my prototyping can finally keep up with my brain, now that I have a robust foundation for the game architecture.
I'm working on World Watcher (https://worldwatcher.live). It's an interactive map of livecams around the world.
The idea is to have a better experience for navigating livecam streams that are publicly available on YouTube. There are a few livecam aggregators that include maps, but I never felt that any of them were satisfying, as they always require you to open new pages to watch the streams. On World Watcher, you can jump from place to place seamlessly.
You can also filter the streams by type of place or features, for example beaches or cams with audio. And if you don't know where to go, just try out the Explore button.
I'm currently working on BetterCapture (https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture), which is a lightweight (~4MB size and low memory/cpu footprint) screen recorder for macOS that lives in your menu bar. It supports ProRes 422/4444, HEVC, and H.264 — including alpha channel and HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. System audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.
No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac.
I'm currently planning and designing a plugin system, so others can contribute new functionality without affecting the scope of BetterCapture itself - which should stay as small as possible.
I built on online multiplayer boggle game back in 2008 that somehow drew a lot of users, many of whom still play every day after 17 years. About a year ago I started a rewrite from scratch in more modern technologies but stalled out after getting to about 80% of the way there. A few months ago Claude enabled me to finish the remaining 20% and was able to relaunch mostly successfully! It's been tough though. I'm a dad with three kids and use Claude all day at my day job and my interest in working late isnt always there. But I'm eeking my way to something that hopefully can stay up for another 17 years.
A CLI to replace bookmarks in my browser because I noticed some tracking code lurking in my Firefox bookmarks. This is just personal tool for my own use. https://codeberg.org/Marking-Time/marksan
I’m working on a story time utility.(https://bedtimebookhelper.com/)
You build up a library from your physical books by scanning them in or discover OpenLibrary books to read in app. Then as you mark books in your library as read, it starts building a rotation and recommending books you haven’t read recently. I’ve been using this nightly to track my son’s 1000 books before kindergarten for the last couple of months.
Currently, I’m working to get the app out on Google Play and adding multiple story time attendee support.
3 things
- AI assisted academic progress reports so parents can effortless stay on top of kids middle/high school academics. https://www.gpa.coach
- A family economy app where parents set the rules, kids earn credits for chores and good behavior and kids redeem credits for screen time, money, and other benefits. https://www.kredz.app
- AI first fun mobile media editor your parents could use. https://www.mix.photos/
Building a custom feed for Bluesky which uses collaborative filtering over the likes data: https://foryou.club
How the algorithm works: it finds people who liked the same posts as you, and shows you what else they’ve liked recently.
Launched the feed a little over a year ago and it has become the most liked feed.
We're working on AI user testing, to make it dramatically faster and cheaper for product managers and dev teams to find major usability issues with web sites. Give us a web site and a task users would do (e.g. "Add a pink shirt to the shopping cart"), and we have some AI users try their best to do the task. The output is a report with a prioritized list of problems identified, plus narrated videos that show each AI user trying the site.
If you want to try it out, we offer some free credits at https://fuguux.com
Any feedback you have would be incredibly helpful! We're considering more kinds of reporting, support for QA testing, better integration with CI/CD, and more.
Note: we don't want to replace real user testing, but rather complement it. With AI user testing, you can get quick feedback on potential usability problems in hours for a fraction of the cost, making it so you can iterate much faster. We advocate doing user tests with real people to understand problems that require domain knowledge or nuance.
I'm newly mostly-retired as a VFX software developer & CTO. I'm writing about AI, climate change and more in my blog, https://oberbrunner.com, running Long Now Boston (https://longnowboston.org) to promote long-term thinking, and working through my lifetime backlog of "wouldn't it be great if somebody wrote this" ideas using Claude, at https://github.com/garyo.
You should check out my new open source software build tool, https://pcons.org.
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 working on 2 hardware projects right now!
Fold-up, scissor lift, cross-cantilever 3D printer for open sauce
M.2 FPGA hardware accelerator devboard
All just for fun and open source https://github.com/kaipereira :D
I’m building OneBusAway Cloud, which you can think of as being Heroku for public transit.
It’s a project of the non profit Open Transit Software Foundation that we’re using to fund our other initiatives, like bringing realtime transit information to billions of people around the world.
All of this depends on a bunch of really cool open source projects we’re building, like Maglev, a Golang server that can power realtime transit apps. I wrote up a blog post explaining how to set it up here: https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org/2026/04/setting-up...
We’re always looking for volunteers, especially non-engineers. https://ossvolunteers.com/organizations/open-transit-softwar...
I’ve been building (launched in Feb) a home phone service for families who want to put off the smartphone for as long as possible, but still give young kids the ability to communicate via landline. https://chatterboxphone.com
I am working on a research institute for East Africa, https://maiyoinstitute.org/. I want to tackle the dire lack of environmental data, by using 1. low cost hardware 2. Artificial Intelligence 3. Long term horizon. The problem set is huge, but I am focusing on low cost sensors for Air and Water data collection plus bioacoustics for now.
I built The Daily Baffle over at https://dailybaffle.com with a whole bunch of word and logic puzzles I designed.
There's Truthsorting, a logic puzzle where you have to order logical statements to make them true or false.
Pathword, a puzzle where you lay out letters along a path to spell out 4 words.
Morphology, a clued word ladder written by a different contribution daily.
And a few others!
I've been trying to promote it for a few months but I haven't had a ton of luck, to be honest. The audience hovers around 500 people and growing it beyond that has been pretty challenging.
I've been working on a pure Clojure implementation of WebRTC Data Channels (SCTP over DTLS over UDP). The library provides a minimal, dependency-free (except for Clojure itself) way to establish peer-to-peer data channels on the JVM.
I've always wanted this and have used it to experiment with Gemini's cloud agent Google Jules.
I'm working on a Personal / Family travel organizer. Started as tool to allow me and SO to plan a trip together. There's been steady progress over the last couple years. Focus on privacy and ability to self-host. Of course, there is a managed version if one doesn't mind me having access to their data.
As a data-obsessed golfer trying to get to single digits, I need a tracking app that picks up where Arccos leaves off. So I'm building one: https://shortgamewiz.com (still a bit WIP).
After a few rounds of using it, I already know a few things I didn't before: I suck at right-to-left breaking putts, I baby uphill putts too much, and getting out of bunkers consistently is not good enough if I can't sink the occasional save. So I know what to practice now.
The Ubuntu DDoS got me to thinking: If we had a critical need to respin machines (like our data center caught fire), we would have been in for a real challenge. We run apt-cacher-ng, but it did nothing for us during the DDoS, and worse: Every few weeks or a month ac-ng will go out to lunch and we have to fix it.
So: ac-ng didn't reduce the impact of the DDoS, but it does lead to impact when there is no DDoS. Worst of both worlds.
So I'm working on an apt-cacher that goes to lengths to keep working as much as possible when the upstream is down. It will check the repo metadata and keeps a list of your "hot packages", and will download those before flipping the new metadata to be live, effectively a snapshot. It won't allow you to download a package you've never downloaded before in the case of a DDoS, but packages that you do download regularly (machine re-installs, apt updates), it will ensure are available in the repo.
I'm calling it apt-cacher-ultra. It is pretty early days, it'll probably be another week before it's ready for a beta. I'm running it in my dev cluster right now, successfully.
I've been iterating on the type system of a somewhat-kooky programming language I'm developing: https://github.com/mkantor/please-lang-prototype
Greetings!
I've been working on something in the vein of a indie game for a little over a year now. It has been a passion project, but I'm starting to come around on showing it to people.
I am a big fan of Telltale style narrative games. I think Baldur's Gate 3 was the biggest revelation of this for me. Taking that branching dialogue and freedom of choice, and tacking it on to a fun combat system was just everything.
When text based GTRPGs started popping up, I found it hard to connect with them stylistically. I found that I needed the multimodal stimulus of visuals and audio. This led me to start building something, and it ended up being somewhat of a cross between a Telltale game, a Visual novel, and a TTRPG.
Orpheus (https://orpheus.gg) is a fully on-the-fly generated tabletop simulator, with graphics, audio (TTS), and the freedom you can usually only find at a real TTRPG table. That means you can play a sci-fi, fantasy, or even a modern setting in your campaign. The assets are made for you as needed. It runs in your browser so nothing to install or tinker with.
Getting the harness right so the AI GM can stay coherent and organized has been the biggest challenge. It took a lot of iterations to get it to a point where it could understand the scenes it was building as the player changed them.
I've built it to be played with either a keyboard or a gamepad so you can play from your couch. You can switch between them as you feel like it. There is a 3D tabletop for combat, full character sheets, dice rolling, lore tracking. I want it to be dense.
Mostly, I’m looking for people who want to try it, break it, and tell me what feels magical, confusing, boring, or broken. My biggest roadblock currently is that asset generation is relatively expensive. I'm currently mulling over whether a playtest would allow for a BYOK setup so people could try playing as much as they'd like, or if I should add turn limits.
You can join the playtest waitlist at https://orpheus.gg/ -- and I just setup a discord (https://discord.gg/pychWyzf) that I will use for early playtests. (Just me right now! Come hang out!)
working on https://www.focuslive.app/realtime Its a virtual body doubling tool without camera that helps people focus together anonymously
I made https://poemd.dev/ as an online markdown scratchpad that supports GitHub Flavoured Markdown and stores all data in the URL. This means there are no accounts to work with and everything is basically stored in bookmarks if you choose to.
The persistence model makes documents somewhat sharable, but I do find Open Graph previews to be mixed. In Messenger it renders the whole URL, which is quite long due to encoding, and that kills the conversation view.
Clodhost.com … Claude code with a web interface on your own (hetzner) VPS… and free!
For a long time I wondered how SV startups got such pretty landing pages (here’s a comment I left 2 years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421273). I wanted one for my side projects but couldn’t afford an agency, and the templates online were boring. Creating the page was only half the problem. I also needed somewhere to collect emails for the waitlist.
After AI happened, I built an app (promptfunnels) to scratch my own itch and generate funnels (fancy name for landing pages with a purpose).
Then came the harder part: marketing it. Coming from a tech background, I knew nothing about marketing, so I started reading and came across the $100M Leads book. I realized codifying those principles together with funnels and marketing automation had a real market. My family, friends, and acquaintances became the first customers. A friend joined me as cofounder and we both quit our jobs to do this full time.
As we talked to other startup founders, they kept describing a tangential problem they called GTM. At the core it was the same thing we were solving: marketing for non-marketers. So we pivoted to RevMozi(https://revmozi.com/), which helps non-marketers do both inbound and outbound GTM.
We’re dogfooding the product and coming out of beta next month.
Wish us luck.
Building a website for tracking my learning and scheduling repetitions. Its a dumb frontend reading off of a (public) google sheet with links, dates and wait times as columns plus a couple formulae. Website pulls the sheet as csv, renders as color coded lists and a couple charts. I update the sheet as I go through reps roughly doubling wait times between reps. Links point to articles, leetcode, google docs with questions. This is the simplest version I have for the purpose. I just don't have a way to share this with others without introducing complexity from auth, storage, managing updates from the app, etc.
I've been working on a newish variant of Sudoku called Binku. It combines the traditional Sudoku rules and adds the rules from a game called Binario/Takuzu (with 1-4 as one color and 5-8 as the other color).
A sample puzzle can be found here: https://sudokupad.app/23x300ggzn
It's been well received by the (very kind!) Sudoku/puzzle communities, so I'm working on throwing a nice interface on it that fits the rules a bit better. I've found about five other examples of others doing a variation of this ruleset before in one way or another, and it's been fun trying to see how hard/deep I can get this puzzle to go.
A desktop client for Repomix. Repomix is a CLI which allows you to summarize all the code in a repo in one txt or md file so you can in turn feed it to an AI model for analysis. It absolutely gets the job done it its current state, but it is a personal project so there may be a few rough edges.
https://github.com/KevanMacGee/Repomix-Desktop
It's open source and has no official connection to Repomix. But the developer, yamadashy on Github, knows about it and seemed to like it enough to add it to the Repomix website under the community projects.
I like being able to paste all the code into a browser window and have lengthy discussions with ChatGPT, Gemini and GLM. Doing so in the browser saves tokens over doing it in Cursor or Codex. I like using the Projects feature in ChatGPT in the browser and Notebooks with Gemini because that gives the model context and history on whatever I am working on. It was one part scratching my own itch, one part learning about Python and Customtinker.
It's made specifically for when you just want to get the code and paste it, no muss or fuss. It doesn't have support for flags (yet?) like the CLI because again it is built for speed. Besides, when I want flags, I like using the CLI instead to get granular. Repomix Desktop is for "just give me the code."
I'm a self taught coder so I'm very open to feedback.
A timelapse platform powered by community photos. The idea is to place a mount and QR code at fixed viewpoints around the neighbourhood. People scan, photograph the view, optionally add their name, and submit. Over time, the platform stitches those shots into a living record of how the place changes with seasons.
Just finished the software side using a boring technology and am about to order the materials for the first few locations. Curious to explore photo alignment once real submissions start coming in. Stitching all slightly different angled photos into a smooth animation seems interesting.
Mainly working on https://localhero.ai, automating i18n translations for product teams. Basically runs as a GitHub Action, translating new strings on PRs matching your brand voice and glossary. Got our first fully selfserve customer a few weeks back (found us through the docs). Interesting work lately has been improving how the system learns from manual edits, when someone tweaks a translation in the UI, it feeds back into translation memory and influences future translations in a smart way. Also did stuff like improving our agent skill, so coding agents get glossary/style guide context automatically and they can write source copy that better matches the brand.
Been pushing some new stuff on https://infrabase.ai as well, my AI infrastructure tools directory. Traffic growing steadily from comparison and alternatives pages. Interesting finding is that blog posts rank better but get fewer clicks now because AI Overviews, interactive comparison pages still earn clicks. ChatGPT has also started citing the site more as a source. Adding new content and polishing existing parts of it, added a page focusing on EU based services at https://infrabase.ai/european.
i keep building more to https://service-zen.com instead of finding my first client. but this is what i’m working on
Working on https://gigspool.com
- Building a platform where talented people can list the services and skills they're experienced in. Clients can book paid sessions with them directly through the platform, and once a session is booked, they both meet online to discuss, collaborate, or get advice based on expertise.