alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
Comments
https://github.com/Opfour/warfare - A modern HTML5 remake of Warfare 1.0 (1995) by Carric Moor Games. Turn-based hex strategy with city management, unit recruitment, tactical combat, and AI opponents — all running in the browser with zero dependencies. Playable but still building in additional features
https://github.com/Opfour/coeus-ci - Named after Coeus (SEE-us), the 100 eyed Greek Titan of the inquisitive mind — whose name literally means "querying." CI stands for Competitive Intelligence. A business intelligence OSINT tool that builds company profiles from free public data sources. Give it a domain — get back a scored report covering stability, growth, tech maturity, financial health, security posture, and transparency.
https://github.com/Opfour/op4 - Op4 is a terminal-based encrypted messaging application written in Rust. It provides end-to-end encrypted private messaging with post-quantum cryptography, routed entirely through the Tor network so that neither the content of your messages nor your IP address is exposed to anyone — not even the person you are talking to.
Spartan (Private) - Open-source safety app for women. Community-based emergency response.
AATR - (Private) Catering unified platform: events dashboard, pack lists, and staff management
https://github.com/Opfour/thelinuxreport.com - Linux news and information aggregator.
God I love this stuff!
(edit: I also have about 6 more projects I am working on locally not yet uploaded to GitHub)
- My own whisperflow bike shed
- Converted invoicing to Typst (from LaTeX)
- Automation of blinds
- Automation of lights
- Python library to control lights
- ML tuning library
- ML feature interaction library
- Jupyter notebook slideshow interface
- Davinci Resolve Authomation
- Arduino eink bluetooth HR monitor
- Tons of small scripts
- Email triage
- Meetup alert for meetups that match specific topics
- A daily journal that transforms entries into chibi-style cartoons
- A cashflow forecast our stupid accounting software can't do on its own
- DIY service monitoring for a ragged collection of docker containers, cron tasks, scripts and various others
I wrote a terminal based version of Conductor, heavily based on my own preferred workflows: https://github.com/bakedbean/workspacex
- Otzel, an OT library for elixir that is in some common cases 50x faster than the most widely deployed elixir OT library:
https://github.com/ityonemo/otzel
- Spector, a bare-bones CQRS library for elixir that composes extremely well with Otzel:
https://spector.hexdocs.pm/Spector.html
- nanodrop, an elixir library that interfaces with nanodrop spectrophotometers:
https://nanodrop.hexdocs.pm/Nanodrop.html
- opengenepool, a web-based dna editing tool (technically I started this one 11 years ago):
https://opengenepool.vidalalabs.com/ https://github.com/vidala-labs/opengenepool
- a proprietary camera library that communicates with industrial-grade digital cameras.
- a full on self-hosted lab management system (journal articles, obsidian-like notes, lab notebook, kanban, embedded dna editor, LIMS), obviously this builds on all of the above items
RainBreak - https://rainbreak.franzai.com/
Blocks the computer for x minutes. Agents keep on working. AI doesn't need a break, but I do. And honestly, at least for me AI has made my desktop as addicting my social media feed.
After I tried and failed to find any decent QR code generators online, I made one: https://www.cutearr.com/
Runs entirely in the browser, no tracking, no analytics, no ads.
Tools? Mmmm i tried making a openCV based tool to recognise circular objects on sat. imagery, it didnt work at all (tried for two weeks), changed to a LLM, it seemed to work, or it was just a little bit off, O gave up. If anyone wants to collab in this space, shout out! Ah also a translation tool for pdfs… its also stuck in limbo, forgot why again…
https://probplanner.com/ - I never had the time to dedicate to building a Monte Carlo simulator for project estimates. It was always something I just couldn't justify given my short commute. I used this project to teach myself how to use Claude Code and Codex over last summer.
I've done a lot of little things in Emacs since. Just minor things to improve my workflows or build up Chief of Staff type information flows.
So many! I manage a fund that buys small e-comm brands, and at this point the whole thing runs on a combination of AI and tools created with AI. My favorite is one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/WhatsApp/email supplier convos daily and uses that to build a dashboard tracking the status of my orders.
I write a Substack about the whole thing and have a pretty comprehensive list here: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using...
llm-consortium: prompts multiple models in parallel, loops until confidence_threshold, and iteratively refines a response.
This was inspired by a karpathy tweet [0] and the prototype created using another tool of mine: The LLM Plugin Generator plugin (essentially a curated collection of plugins for simonws llm cli as a few-shot prompt)
The llm-model-gateway companion plugin lets you serve models from the LLM cli as a an openai API. This allows you to use saved consortiums in your various clients as if they where a regular model. Bringing massive parallel reasoning to any workflow.
It occured to me at some time that an collection of parallel LLMs was not really a consortium. A consortium is a group of organizations. A group of groups. To rectify this I added for actual consortiums, where each member of an llm-consortium can itself be a consortium of models. e.g.
llm consortium save cns-glm-n3 -m glm-5.1 -n 3 --arbiter mercury-2
llm consortium save cns-k2-n3 -m kimi-k2.6:3 --arbiter mercury-2
llm consortium save cns-meta-glm-k2 -m cns-k2-n3 -m cns-glm-n3 --arbiter cns-k2-n3
Yes, even the arbiter/judge can be comprised of a consortium of models, bringing parallel reasoning to the task of judging parallel reasoning chains.
Consortiums can also now contain groups of specialists. These custom user-defined expert characters address the prompt from a different perspective. And a Westworld style Attribute matrix can be randomized to inject some more entropy into the process.
[0]https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1870692546969735361
Some other llm plugins I vibe coded:
classifai generates labels with approximate confidence derived from logprobs
llm-alias-options saves inference parameters such as reasoning effort with a model alias. (good for setting the provider in openrouter or creating a consortium of high temperature models)
llm-prompt-json adds a --json flag to return the llm logs object (good for getting conversion_id, or reasoning output in scripts)
llm-jina adds support for all jina AI specialised models and tools like web fetching, embedding and reranking.
HN Chrome Extension for dark mode and a few other styling tweaks I wanted.
Jira Chrome Extension to add some notes and links to dashboard pages that I wanted for ease of use.
Small application which takes a CSV and turns it into a Registered Server List for SSMS in order to keep my list of servers updated for queries across all our databases.
Honestly one of the good use cases for AI. Small low complexity scripts and tools for assistance is a great use case. I'm amazed at the folks that are doing huge monolith rewrites with Agents and such, but I've never had good results for that. Small time saving scripts gets me a much more direct return on investment.
I built a database.
The team behind Gel got acquired by Vercel and I already experienced falling in love with a dead database (RIP RethinkDB) so I decided to fork the concept to a TypeScript port with Svelte as the UI instead of React.
It'll live at disc.sh in a few months. Early dogfooding is promising.
EDIT: Also forgot that I removed React from GraphiQL in favor of Svelte too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48044888
I built a color palette tweaker very specific to my OCD needs:
https://archives.fifthrevision.com/color-generator/index.htm...
I also have a local zsh autocomplete macro that let's me type things like "git rename annotated branch" and ctrl-g and it will get me the actual command. There's also a ctrl-r mode that searches my history using natural language. This is connected to a locally run ollama so my keys don't leak.
Working on a web client and bouncer for Hotline, the old chat software from ~1997. Just want to chat with my peeps who still use Hotline, from the comfort of the browser I have on whatever machine, while some server maintains the persistent connection to the Hotline server for me. Like an IRC bouncer, but for Hotline.
replaced some paid apps with local - google reader rss replacement and send web to kindle.
most ambitious was browser extension to automate booking reservations since captcha and timing were critical.
swamp/evaporative cooler controller that monitors rate of change of relative humidity and sends RF signal to cooler to turn water on for x seconds to keep humidity lower than just leaving set to cool all the time. Does a great job but need to work on edge cases and ultimately replacing remote with my controller.
financial models for retirement planning
pen plotter gcode creator for old 3d printer to make labels.
food monitor to track what i ate with AI analysis based on symptoms recorded as well as interactive follow up questions
inventory app for electronic parts that now is inventory for all kinds of stuff like tools/plumbing etc that uses photo/ai to fill in data.
Some free side-loadable android apps: http://badcheese.com/android
* Auto-Birthday - if you have a contact in your android contacts that has both a mobile number and a birthday in their contact info, you can choose to send them an automatic "Happy Birthday" message on their birthday at a specific time. Can do it with hundreds of contacts. Doesn't use hardly any battery or resources.
* Wrecker - stupid simple "throw a ball at a tower of bricks and try to clear the board" game. High score tables. Made in unity. High battery when in use, No battery use when not playing. Will use internet for high score data.
* GeoNote - Create Geo-fences to generate a notification when you enter a location with your custom text in the notification. My wife is always telling me, "Next time we're here, remind me to only order one piece of toast" or something like that, so I make a note, it pops up the next time we're there and we're both happy. Notes are stored locally. No internet access required. Uses Geo-Fencing which is more battery-friendly than always-on GPS access.
All my apps are free, very privacy-focused and as battery-friendly as possible.
No information leaves your device (other than the high score data in Wrecker).
You have to side-load my apps though. I'm not putting them on the Google Play Store. They're so annoying to deal with! OMG
A graphviz substitute in rust:
https://azriel.im/disposition/
The text editor has an LSP built in to guide you to what can be entered, but see the examples.
I wanted a way to have visual documentation that can show/hide detail, and be pure svg so that it can be pasted into sites without becoming pixelated.
Also supports animations to show interactions between hosts, which always gets messy when drawing a static diagram.
- app logo/favicon generator: https://logo.leftium.com/logo
- classless CSS library: https://leftium.github.io/nimble.css
- HN client: https://hn.leftium.com
- local realtime streaming transcription prototype: https://rift-transcription.vercel.app
---
These projects were started without AI, but heavily augmented with coding agents:
- https://weather-sense.leftium.com
- console.log replacement: https://github.com/Leftium/gg
- Thin layer over Google forms/sheets: https://veneer.leftium.com
A gym app for logging workouts and exercises. Plenty of apps exist but I wanted a specific UI/UX that made logging fast while I’m at the gym.
Too many to enumerate but a couple highlights (and many of these I've turned into apps):
- https://blunders.ai : Chess improvement app
- https://fretwork.ai : Freelancer management app (CRM/Billing/etc)
- https://validity.ai : Provide agents the ability to check the UI code it made (w/out needing to run through your full app)
- Save money on groceries + meal planning. This has probably saved hundreds if not $1k+ for our household at this point (some details here: https://x.com/ryanlanciaux/status/2063604299590939042)
- Orchestration / Starter Kit / Chat : Tool to help me manage multiple agent sessions at once. Some details on this one here https://x.com/ryanlanciaux/status/2063976049537417408
Attie: it shows recently played football/basketball/baseball/etc games but with the scores hidden by default.
That way, you can who played without ruining the result. Then watch highlights in peace!
A MacOS desktop app and a mobile app for instrumenting GPS routes.
Screenshot here: https://x.com/LyleMakes/status/2063784301594853657/photo/1
Having fun building something in software I always pushed for "when I will find the time".
Being proud of the result.
THAT is a real game changer LLMs allowed me, both in my professional and my casual life.
For example this:
https://github.com/yodalf/coincan.git
or this:
I wired up a stream deck to perform long-running tasks. Very much tailored to the kind of HCI that I prefer, so I can be interrupt driven versus checking on status all the time.
Eg: push a button, it shows that it's working for a while, then strongly flashes when it's done (success/failure). When you have it right under the monitor, it's like a macro pad for long-running things.
This reminds me of some of the very early peripherals you'd see on the Alto and other computers. I was surprised something like this didn't seem to exist, but maybe I'm just terrible at searching.
A weight lifting app. I’ve paid for, and used, others over the years, but I always wanted to customize them in some way just for me. So, I just decided to create one the other day (used antigravity CLI) and I’m hosting it on Vercel as a PWA. I’m enjoying it so far and see a lot of potential with making hyper-personal software moving forward.
I've been building a tool aimed at better web annotations for teams and AI collaboration at https://viewall.io/
Having worked with web facing teams there are always vastly different methods any individual uses to capture their feedback. If you or anyone you know on Mac that has 100s of screenshots on their desktop, this is aimed at bridging the gap.
Clipboards are optimized with context for LLM markdown ingestion and for use in work suites like Jira/Confluence.
Still fairly early, but I've been using the tool to help build the app itself which has been an enlightening experience.
I'm building a replacement for TablePlus: a TableAI database client, because the latest releases of TablePlus have gone down in terms of user interface quality. You can find it on the Mac App Store(TableAI - AI database client)
I have a bunch of ffmpeg scripts for specific things like compressing to 10MB for discord.
All kinds of random stuff really, but to filter it down to only the noteworthy ones:
Tuber[0] - this is my favorite, use it multiple times a week. It's just a little CLI wrapper around yt-dlp for my most common use cases - downloading the video, or the audio, or the subs. And then, if you've got the Claude CLI installed, it can also shoot the subs through Claude for a summary. I use it all the time, it's a great little thing!
Scrapio[1] - this is really specific but I was so pleased with how it turned out. You give it a list of "hacks" ("mods" for Super Mario World) and it goes out to SMWCentral, grabs each of the patch files, and patches a clean ROM. I think I only used it twice but it was just a nice way to chew through a list of hacks and get a few ROMs ready, made quick work of something that would have otherwise taken a bunch of annoying schlep work.
Lotus Eater[2] - calling this a tool is a bit undersell, but I'm still really pleased with it. It's a fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus that scrapes Nugs.net for setlist data and lets you do some mildly interesting analysis on things like song frequency and co-occurrence. Also has a per-user "shows I've attended" thing, Setlist Bingo. It's been fun to hack on.
Lastly, less a tool, more just a toy: last week Google released their Magenta model for doing live music generation. I thought it was really neat, and it's open source, so I opened it up with Claude, and after a few passes and some extremely annoying toolchain issues, I was able to add a spectrograph which does key / chord analysis to the "Collider" app, so you get a live readout of "what the band is playing" and you can pull out your guitar or whatever and join the jam with some info at your disposal. It's the kind of thing that would have taken way too much effort to be worthwhile in the past, but with AI, it's a really neat result of a fun night of weekend hacking. See the README I added in my fork for a screenshot:[3]
[0]: https://github.com/epiccoleman/tuber
[1]: https://github.com/epiccoleman/scrapio
[2]: lotuseater.epiccoleman.com
[3]: https://github.com/epiccoleman/magenta-realtime/tree/eric-mo...
Heaps, most recent is just a little applet that stops my Mac from going to sleep with the lid closed: https://transitivedev.gumroad.com/l/doppio-app
Bunch of security tools: Some are at https://diffsec.dev others:
I've made a harness to discipline it and get consistent output regardless of model. Using it daily. Is the opposite of vibe coding, it delivers great planed code with my engineering taste. I had it open sourced for a while then I've closed it. Just a month or two after closing it, I read an article about this "clean room" thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
https://github.com/haydenk/overseer - a Go port of foreman
https://github.com/haydenk/homestead - another Go project, working on a better uptime dashboard that can also be the main homepage for accessing homelab resources.
I also used AI to find and create issues and milestones to for me to get the project to 1.0.0
Three that have been really beneficial, and all support/build on a hobby / volunteer effort of mapping mountain bike trails:
This one generates maps from OpenStreetMap data + some custom curated info in YAML: https://github.com/c0nsumer/trailmaps.app-map-generator
This one converts a basic chunk of OpenStreetMap data to an SVG so I can mark it up (by hand) in Adobe Illustrator to make specifically-styled print/PDF maps, such as what get installed at trailheads: https://github.com/c0nsumer/osm_to_ai
This one takes GPS recorded rides and builds custom/personal heatmaps serving up the map tiles so I can use them in map editing software: https://github.com/c0nsumer/local-heatmap-tile-server
And all of this has been put together to make the custom, local, specific-use-case maps that are at https://trailmaps.app (which, via local curation, are overall better mobile/online maps than many of the bigger auto-generated systems such as Trailforks, Gaia, RideWithGPS, etc, for visualizing local systems).
It's neat stuff where I understand all the inputs, outputs, and how most of it works, but AI tooling (Claude, mostly) has allowed me to bolt it together much faster than I would have writing it myself.
Year ago I made for myself a simple jar editor https://jar.tools, now it has 8000 user’s monthly
I built a half-baked CRM that has a lot of custom fields and visuals for statistics that are relevant to my potential customers. I'm selling primarily to registered data brokers, so being able to pull up their self-published compliance stats (gleaned from their own privacy pages or public filings) and contextualize them in terms of the rest of the industry ("your deletion request volume has been in the 95th percentile year over year") has been extremely helpful when starting conversations. I also gamified it a bit by giving myself targets for cold outreach and gathering hard numbers on my cadence for outbound calls and emails per lead.
I also built this site for educating potential customers and other privacy professionals about the increasing tempo of CCPA enforcement actions driving compliance: https://ccpa.world/enforcement
I could have probably coded this from scratch quicker considering that it took me two weeks to remove all of the hallucinated imaginary enforcement actions against real companies and also the citations to non-existent California law that the models kept injecting into my enforcement summaries.
I'm building a source code analyzer with AI. It's a TUI that you poin at a local codebase and it generates Mermaid diagrams.
While I was doing it I needed to render those diagrams as ASCII and I was surprised there's no Python library for Mermaid to ASCII. So I wrote one: https://github.com/fasouto/termaid (https://termaid.com/)
I built a browser extension to create podcasts from HN stories in French (and English), I created it for myself in first, then I released it with a shared quota for the community but no one else uses it as it was forbidden for me to post show hn.
I am building my self-hosting llm-wiki system (https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...). My approach is to start with a theory of how such systems could work. Then since llms can interpret theory - this theory becomes an executable llm-wiki system itself.
It's called Commonplace: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/
Oh man a few things
1. A dashboard that tracks my personal metrics (github, strava, todo completion, flossing)
2. A eink display for that dashboard
3. A realtime node graph that shows a codebase (and/or its diffs) in a way that I can visualize what functions call which, and under what conditions
4. A agent that automatically fills out government forms and creates invoices for my friends brewery based on the delivery notes in their google calendar.
It evolved out of some weird interaction someone was smartassing me that the moon wasn't full when I was pointing to how pretty the full moon was. After that, between a friend and myself, it became a bit of a running gag how full (or not full) the moon actually was. This was my first real project I kind of "vibe coded": https://moon.masca.teide.cloud/ - showing you how full the moon is to the 10th decimal
Math_MCP: https://github.com/amichae2/Math_MCP
Automatically rename screenshots: https://github.com/amichae2/screenshot-renamer
Could we please stop putting price tags on 15-commit repos? It's just crazy that every idea, created with ai, now costs 10$ or more per month, despite it costs 5$ to create.
I'm building an app that generates lifting mesocycles and tracks every set and rep. Each week, it uses feedback from the previous workouts to adjust training volume and intensity. It's replacing an app I currently pay $25/month for.
- app to help buy/find books for my wife - app to help manage my climbing wall - app to help finding good films/series - app to track weight - app to manage my board games and find the right ones to play - app for planning wood builds (e.g. climbing volumes) - telegram bots for: - picking restaurants for weekly lunch with friends - managing our 5-a-side football games, make teams, elo ladder - fantasy football leagues
Among many others
I like the capabilities of C++ and imgui but didn't want to deal with C++ anymore so I had AI do it.
imping - PingPlotter-like app. They didn't have a Linux version and I'm a paying customer, so I vibe coded this one: https://github.com/zenakuten/ImPing
utcolor - text colorizer for Unreal Tournament 2004 https://github.com/zenakuten/utcolor
utquery - Unreal Tournament 2004 Game Browser tool https://github.com/zenakuten/utquery
utstatsdb - This is an old project that did not work anymore with modern php+mysql. I had claude fix it. https://github.com/zenakuten/utstatsdb
A github client / dashboard that can pull 20 of so repos for all internal and client projects in one UI so I can stay on top of project delivery and long standing bugs. It has global search, bookmarking and text based / minimalistic ui for maxium space utilisation and information density. It's read only so to comment on issue i click a link to open GH in new tab but helped me a lot to have this birds eye view on my company. Don't get me started on GH Project. I tried Linear many times but multi project / multi repo is just not their core focus and it shows.
A dashboard to see what my local commercial free radio station (89.3 The Current) in Minnesota is playing. It shows how often tracks are played, track and artist play history as well as some other fun lookups and visualizations.
A terminal-native agent multiplexer built on tmux. Similar idea as herdr but wraps tmux in an outer TUI instead of replacing it entirely: https://hmx.dev