alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
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I was running a DnD online game and didn't feel that all the battle maps out there were easy enough to use. I am running using a screen share on discord so all the extra features of Roll 20 for example just got in the way. So an hour with Gemini made the rather bare bones map that I have here.
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
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
Built a pwa (NextJS, Mongo) to manage a friend group prediction game for the World Cup. Every year someone from the group would volunteer to put together an excel sheet, collect predictions, etc etc. It was A LOT of work, so decided to try building something with Claude. https://toqui.app/en
It’s getting good traction in South America!
I finally shipped a Chinese learning app I wanted for myself for ages at https://wenmoji.com/. Just never had enough time to sit down and code it end to end. Still need some improvements of course, but will slowly chip away on it. I use it daily/weekly myself now.
Highlights are that it completely free, no login required and works offline (once you "downloaded"/cached some files the first time around).
I made an android app for my badminton club which allows me to take registered players from a whatsapp group through to Square for easy payments and reconciliation.
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.
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 wanted to use worktree's the same way that cursor/windsurf/jetbrains air etc. do, i.e. but in intellij idea using claude code. It's a bit rudimentary and I wouldn't release it on the marketplace but I made a really good plugin that allows me to work on multiple tasks at once using worktree's and has all the great functionality intellij has.
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek
The wow moment came when it wrote syntax highlighting rules for 40 languages and file formats in ~10 minutes:
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rule...
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 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
MCP for magic the gathering
A game engine / MVP game
A tool to replay shell commands during presentations
A tool to generate ttrpg book pdfs from obsidian markdown
A tool to generate confluence pages from markdown
I've always used notepad++ with one single giant .txt file for taking notes with dividers separated for each day so I codified that practice into a desktop app
Just a super minimalist thing where each day is one .txt file with the newest one at the top and a lazy loading scrolling list with every note going back 5 years
Supports CTRL + F searching, backups, and a bunch of other QoL features/macros
Its kind of a revolution that with agentic coding everyone can have their own hyperspecific customized apps
Mostly I was not an "I have a script for that" guy before AI, except for the occasional VERY simple or VERY high ROI thing. Now I've got more oddball scripts that do things I couldn't be bothered to automate before, including: workarounds for buggy software, stitching tmux together with other tools, automating common operations so I don't have to use the god awful GitHub UI, etc.
I restore old non-functioning radios with nice design and good audio. I replace the old tech except the speakers with a raspberry add a mic array and package them with an easy to use ubuntu. whisper and the small gemma models made everything so much easier and private. I basically rewrite the whole backend with claude and created a nice first setup experience akin to other smartspeakers. It's amazing how good the sound is from these old speakers.
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.
Also I had a redis clone from before, but with AI i separated the epoll layer from the actual database engine which made it sort of embeddable. And hooked that embeddable database into a JNI interface, and now it can run inside Android applications, sort of like a concurrent hash map, but one that lives off heap and has support for TTLs and mget, msel, mdel, hashes and all that. I use it for some silly android games.
I've spent the last 3 months making it super fast to set up new OpenClaw agents in the cloud
https://operator.io - multiple isolated agents in Telegram with their own memory and tasks has been great for automating reminders, keeping tabs on things, and acting as a personal exocortex
A docker-compose equivalent for running native processes: https://github.com/sciyoshi/decompose
Similar to another tool called process-compose but with a CLI that mimics the docker one more closely and doesn't start a TUI by default.
Useful if your team's on nix and doesn't need containers.
I've been working on a tool to design laser cut jigsaw puzzles https://jiglu.dev/
Since I live far away from family I also added an online game so I could play with them or show them what I was making more concretely.
I've cut some jigsaw puzzles that it made, but without access to an uv printer or a laser cutter that works reliably it's been challenging to actually make them
a TUI that runs all my daily Linux updates from one place.
Updating my machine used to be a dozen scattered commands: apt, fwupd, and a pile of dev tools I want kept current (node/npm, go, claude, opencode, plus binaries like kitty and lazydocker) that each update their own weird way. Now it's one Bubble Tea dashboard that checks each tool's installed version against upstream and only downloads what's actually behind, so I can see at a glance what's current and what's not. Adding a new tool is easy enough that I just toss new ones in as I start using them.
It also has a cleanup mode that hunts down all the pesky cache files that quietly eat your disk and reclaims the space in one pass, which has saved me from the "laptop full again" scramble more than once.
Currently, testing it privately and tweaking to make it awesome.
Another tool I made for myself is automated video editor (takes folder of raw photos images, and generates edited video that can be shared online). Used it among other things to edit all my GoPro raw footage laying around (hundreds of files).
I built a little web app that just collects job descriptions - currently up to 3m+ live / 15m dead descriptions - I mostly just use it to search to find stuff out - I should probably make they the main feature rather than the matching service idea.
I've been a longtime user of Logseq, and thankfully both it and its plugins are open source. I've just been having a lot of fun tweaking plugins I use a lot to have the additional features I've always wished they had. It's so easy to clone the repo and just say, "Claude, make this do X as well."
- 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
At work, I've created a few convenience scripts in bash and Python - the second of which I am not fluent with. So, I used anonymized LLM access to create boilerplate/simple scripts with a bit of argparse and NumPy, which I then adapted to do what I actually wanted.
Would have made them without UI with a bit more elbow grease invested in web-searching for some examples, maybe even a StackOverflow question.
Generally, I'm not a fan of LLMs and their social effects.
- 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
- little visual web app cataloguing a small vineyard by vine vigour
- 5 min web app that helps show my daughter netball zones per position
- web app to track manual irrigation runs of 30ish taps across our property
- a calculator to cost-compare types of retaining walls by length
- a virtual card deck for testing a game idea
- scripts to help clean up an unruly Gmail inboxA simple one - a small MacOS status bar widget that shows me if my Ethernet adapter is the default connection or WiFi. It also shows the reported link speed. I have a _very_ flaky USB/Ethernet adapter so seeing "Eth 10" in the bar is enough to prompt me to unplug/replug and get back to "Eth 100" (yes, it isn't gigabit).
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.
- A few Tmux plugins to automate workflow tasks (jump to pane, resize panes) - lots of TUIs for displaying relevant information from services (github, jira, obsidian), that are tiled on a "home" tmux window, gives me a live dashboard of work that I can refer to over the day. - TUI games, started with a simple dope wars clone … for when I need a quick break.
https://termonmac.com/ A relay terminal that lets you connect back to your Mac from your iOS device. I spent about 2 months building TermOnMac.
I am going to develop the next version TermOnHost, which will let you connect to all kinds of hosts (Mac, Windows, Linux, or any Linux embedded system) And your hosts can connect to each other.
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:
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.
I made a world cup match ranking that ranks matches based on excitement level using a formula for lead changes, higher scoring, late goals, games that decide who advances etc. It's spoiler free and only ranks on order games should be watched. And then each rank is a link to watch the game so it can be viewed with no spoilers.
Since the advent of AI, I've built a voice memo app for myself. I can go on an hour-long walk, talk stream-of-consciousness style, and then have Claude structure my thoughts into organized notes. It's a great way to process ideas just by thinking out loud.
I built several prediction models for the market price of gold and cryptocurrencies. But this is always more a fun task than serious stuff - you can't trade with it. Yes, I think it would be possible, but not w/o having the hardware and data resources. I also built a music player with an LLM agent, helping finding the right tracks.
I downloaded the database of traditional Irish tunes from thesession.org and now I have a tool that lets me search with fuzzy search and instantly pull up full screen renderings of every setting for each tune. I can also add tags and set my preferred setting.
It's really removed all the pain points from my practice hours, especially when internet access is shaky.
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'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.
I didn't like how diagram making apps were built so I developed https://grafly.io
I also built https://github.com/lnenad/difiko as AI generates a lot of code that needs a nice way to review it.
A catalogue for my e-books with integrated semantic search. I embedded the e-book records, saved the embeddings into a vector database and I can now search them with natural language: https://trnq.eu/en/projects/eblioteque/
I built a synthetic aperture sonar / radar simulation engine so I could generate endless amounts of procedural generated scenes to train a world model. Data for sonar is especially hard to come by.
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.
- A Tailwind based design system for my projects.
- A self-hosted comment system for my blog (https://github.com/karthikeyankc/discuss).
- A custom RSS reader with AI capabilities to keep tab of our competitors at work.
- A git-based CMS for my personal blog (which was also built with AI).
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 lot, but these I still use a lot
A grocery app tailor made for me and my wife, offline first, seamless instant sync, barcode scanning, GPS/location hints
A macOS native high performance infinite canvas scribbling app for use with my Wacom for thinking through ideas
Lots of stuff for one pretty much finished video game, and currently lots of stuff for my new video game
In-browser AI image/video generation: https://intabai.dev.
And now working on an inference engine specifically geared to low mem situations. Both basically vibe coded. Not broadcasting either project widely as they remain unstable, unpolished side projects.
Here are a few small tools I built:
Tubenote, a free YouTube video summarization extension. Mangata, a walking app that makes it easy to take notes and photos while walking. NotebookLM Clipper, a browser extension for importing content into NotebookLM. Knock, a notification tool that sends me a Telegram alert when Claude or Codex finishes a task.
and more products are also in the works.
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.