alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
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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.
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:
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
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
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.
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 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/
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 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.
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
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.
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.
A MacOS desktop app and a mobile app for instrumenting GPS routes.
Screenshot here: https://x.com/LyleMakes/status/2063784301594853657/photo/1
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.
Most of it has been to maximize productivity with AI
1) Use chatgpt pro from codex cli, opencode, claude etc as you can't get it via API. This has been the biggest boost in productivity for me as I don't have to copy and paste.
https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop
2) A small gate to make sure any agent cannot run destructive rm -rf or git reset --hard commands, it has saved me many many times
https://github.com/agentify-sh/safeexec
3) For mac users, summarizes and speaks out loud after codex finishes a turn
- 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 have a bunch of ffmpeg scripts for specific things like compressing to 10MB for discord.
Some things I’ve used AI for the last year or so:
- small club website: https://www.kolibrinkpg.com
- ticketing system with Stripe payments and QR scanning at the door
- Instagram/media ingestion for the club site
- genealogy tool with GEDCOM import
- scripts for downloading/archiving public-domain film material
- playlist/library tooling for DJ use
- music collaboration/sync tool for Ableton projects
- normal work stuff in a much larger existing codebase
I have become a lot more strict about process after being burned a few times. Mostly: make the change small, be clear about what it is supposed to do, check the assumptions before coding, use tests/logging/manual checks as evidence, and don’t merge anything I can’t review and explain myself.
Scrobble tui to track vinyl record listens on last.fm, sourced from collection on Discogs
Calibre web UI 2.0 to replace Calibre's mediocre web interface. Used for browsing ebook catalog, searching and cataloging with a simple list feature.
Project Gutenberg local mirror UI to browse my local copy of Project Gutenberg books
A couple of MCP servers for self-hosted services to give access to OpenClaw. Currently working on a daily digest that Claw will generate that includes feeds from these: what news stories were popular in my feed reader, did my baseball team win, etc.
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)
Math_MCP: https://github.com/amichae2/Math_MCP
Automatically rename screenshots: https://github.com/amichae2/screenshot-renamer
In 2023 I wrote from scratch a iOS native app using SwiftUI. This year I used AI extensively to improve and add many features to it in a span of couple months. The app is free and there are at least 2 users of the app - myself and one complete stranger (not a family or a friend) that is using this app.
I've made a brainf** interpreter in C, from scratch. I didn't use any "AI" though. Does it still count? :)
Dictation tool which works better than the built-in Apple functionality, for my use cases.
Bc my version uses simple copy/paste rather than deeper OS integration, it works more reliably in the Claude Code terminal (has to do with active windows or cursors or something). And bc it uses local Whisper, I also find it transcribes technical words such as “git” more accurately.
Nothing technically challenging but practical for me.
A JS image pixelator: https://kremerman.me/pixelate/
Can be used to resize images, but the main purpose was pixelation for a game I was making.
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.
I recently posted Show HN for https://www.useorganizer.com/ which helps organize stuff using timelines and stores data in a local folder not the cloud. Open source.
No code or docs was hand written for this one.
I wrote a note taking app that synchronizes across iOS/iPad/MacOS and stores my notes in markdown files so that my agents can summarize them each morning, delivering me to-dos, etc.
Starting making hyprwhspr because no other stt library was quite there for performance and model availability.
After that I started writing opub.dev because even minimal success in recent oss showed me just how much has changed, and I’m worried about how expensive everything will get for maintainers.
So, now I’m trying to GIVE people compute so they can start building a helpful filter layer above their projects.
I made my own lisp, Loon! https://campedersen.com/loon
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.
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.
Recently I made Vocast (https://github.com/cnrmurphy/vocast) - a cli driven tool that uses local TTS models to convert articles to "podcasts" and expose them via RSS feed. I wanted a way to listen to articles without having to pay for an app. I convert the article on my PC (which gets added to a managed library), run a web server, run Tailscale on both PC and phone, then I can use a podcast app to access my library. Nice way to consume some articles while out for a walk or anything else and has worked reasonably well for me so far.
A desktop markdown editor for design docs in git repos with markdown diff highlighting. Has been a time consuming but super fun experience https://github.com/emrul/md
Too many to mention. Daily drivers: replacements for CapCut, Granola.
A remote image viewer to see screenshots in VMs.
A simple agent harness to drive spec to verification.
A YouTube video summarizer.
https://github.com/ozten - some public repos, but the majority are private repos
The tool that converts my telegram channel into web page with catalog of all the records where emoji used as a tags, so I can quickly find any post:
Code: https://github.com/VadimKey/xorpingtonian
Catalog (in Russian): https://vadimkey.github.io/xorpingtonian/
During vibe coding I found that emojis are not that simple as I thought about them.
LockIn - Beautiful scriptable terminal countdown timer that can block time waster apps. Enjoy fun visualizations and improved productivity that your agent can trigger to start a focus session. Install today with brew.
I built a tiny tool to help decide the seating chart for my small wedding. It was a cute GUI on top of a simple constraint solver.
It wasn't perfect, but it helped me feel confident in the final result.
I wrote a client & server to monitor all of my computers.. ec2 instances, raspberry pis, etc. Similar to Monit & M/Monit
Built a quant system that reads earnings transcripts for what management is trying not to say. The model is surprisingly bad at this. Turns out management is too.
I’m a UK teacher. I have built a custom GPT that marks essays for the subject I teach in a repeatable and reliable way. It gives actionable feedback to students.
I use it, and have given my students access to it too - they use it to help their revision.
- a personal and private webpage for: health: garmin metrics, apple health metrics, blood tests, rx.. - a kind of readitlater and bookmark index - personal finance: wip - in my homelab only available within tailscale.
The final idea is to own all my data, but I’m still on it.
Pretty happy so far
Claudette: A Sublime Text package that adds a Claude AI chat interface to the editor.
Built a book rotation, reading activity tracker, OpenLibrary ebook reader for my son’s story time.
https://bedtimebookhelper.com/
After coming back from paternity leave, I found that my team had really leaned in to AI driven development. This project was half catching up and half attempting to solve the burn out from the repeated books my wife and I were experiencing.
A ninteneon3ds game explorer where i can look at games and bookmark them with comfortable screenshot preview so i can check what i would like (i never knew what game i should play on it and there are hundreds)
Mainly Andurel, which is the fullstack framework I always wanted for Go
It follows a lot of the conventions of Rails which is probably why it has turned out quite well
I've most recently used it to build a system design interview simulator and a job board crawler which sends the best roles to my email every day.
I'm building an app that uses cosign similarity across a bunch of vectors to derive team productivity metrics. To be honest the maths is trivial; the hardest part is gathering data and normalizing it in a vaguely sensible way.
I've also built a release notes app for my QA teams, a DORA metrics app, a thing to map UX journeys with Playwright, and a ton of games and stuff. AI got me back into enjoying building things again.
Code review tool that breaks up diffs and regroups fragments based on runtime execution paths and/or architectural boundaries. I find it useful sometimes to see changes organised that way.
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