alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
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I used copilot to make a basic MCP server for a large DB, so it could write better queries.
I also got it to write a mysql DB importer I could use instead of "mysql", since I often import large DBs locally. I wanted progress, estimated completion time, and I wanted it to prevent my machine from going to sleep during the import.
I made my own lisp, Loon! https://campedersen.com/loon
So many. Every time I encounter a task that is repetitive and has room for automation, I try to make a custom tool. It’s so easy these days. That doesn’t mean building a serviceable app is easy though.
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 agent harness inspired by OpenClaw, but with internal group messaging between agents and memory sharing confined in agent groups. Plus Telegram integration with multiple agents in one channel using topics: https://bazilion.com/
https://hrvsync.nglx.io/ Simple iOS app to sync Garmin HRV to Apple health. It's nicer to see the trends in Apple Health - I know that the measuring is different but that doesn't really matter if you not don't mix it.
We used AI to build our AI platform and now we are using the AI platform to build the tools that we need for AI. :)
But no honestly, unfortunately most tools I did for myself are not for hobbies but something that I needed for work... like this one (https://github.com/crmkit/crmkit) most recently.
I have created a native mac app for querying / managing Clickhouse . been using this for some time to test the capabilities of models.. ( starting from Claude 3 Opus )
screenshot: https://ibb.co/gbW4rW7G
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…
I'm close to releasing a memory safe programming language, with a declarative concurrency model, that runs on a Go-like runtime.
It has "levels" of compilation, with EASY mode being about as easy as Ruby, and the compiler can present you with options to get that as strict & performant as Rust/Tokio.
I'm going to need at least a month to finish all the documentation, though.
https://app.refutu.com - Tool for planning and executing together as a team, either at home or work, planning with or without ai and controlling the board with ai chat or dnd. Simple Goal -> Action -> Tasks. Paid for 3 or more users.
Built this little tool for editing audio with text https://edit-with-text.oncanine.run/
(Transcribes the audio, marks the timestamps, so you can delete a word in the transcript, and it’ll crop out that segment in the audio)
I made a nice little CLI tool for testing the subjunctive in Italian. Claude code spun off a bunch of Claude API calls to generate example sentences with fill-in-the-blank spots for the correctly conjugated verb. Having an AI generate a prompt for and call out to other AIs was a bit surreal!
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 vibe coded multiple helpful apps and websites for recording data. But longer term, I'm building with its help an internal research system to organize, search, compare, analyze, and esp reuse all the large amounts of data my firm produces, with the public materials without constantly starting over in separate ChatGPT or Claude conversations.
Many! Mostly browser extensions.
* Highlight do-follow links.
* Spoof GPS - I live in a non-english speaking country. Sometimes Google sets my location to my gps, despite having an english vpn. This is an attempt to correct that.
* Local translate, rather than sending everything to Google.
* (non browser) An SSH selection screen, so I don't need to remember the IPs
I made a media center replacement for something like plex or jellyfin, streaming video or audio whenever I am; transcoding, subtitles, specialized dupe and renaming metadata. A little automated datawarehouse that manages all my output in an object store. My own tag system of course. A personalized eval system for llm tools.
I've made a brainf** interpreter in C, from scratch. I didn't use any "AI" though. Does it still count? :)
I wrote a TUI to search for words/phrases in a crossword dictionary. I’ve never written a reactive TUI before, and never written Go either. I was very happy with the assistance rendered by ChatGPT.
Of course, it was great to have exactly the features I want, and I enjoyed learning some new things.
Virtdev, my own rootless development virtual machine system. Use it every day. Even integrated it with tmux.
Pugneum, my static site generator based on pug/jade. Technically made many years before LLMs, but AI is fully maintaining it now so I think it counts. It's gotten to the point I believe it's superior to markdown.
Math_MCP: https://github.com/amichae2/Math_MCP
Automatically rename screenshots: https://github.com/amichae2/screenshot-renamer
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've built a lot of chatbots specifically in the space of retreving and updating large databases, where business users can query their huge database instead of sitting and writing SQL queries.
I am planning on building a run club app next trying to build a community of my own
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 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.
1. A fuzz tester rubygem
2. An app that receives forwarded text messages from my iPhone and then outputs the text message onto a dedicated television connected via a raspberry Pi to display a cold-war era style GUI teletype sort of interface. It actually looks really stinkin cool
here are a few i have put time and effort into. these are not “vibe coded”, but an agent was utilized at points to save copious amounts of time implementing my architectural decisions; my schedule is pretty slammed as is.
https://mithraeum.studio - local first agent and editor in C, also a few models on HF (mainly jsut qwen wrapped atm but working on from scratch) https://fieldopt.dev - SaaS for dispatching jobs to the field (technicians, trades, delivery, etc.) https://github.com/zblauser/ytcli - youtube music from the terminal in zig (ps it’s free, no sub needed)
I made a semantic search-based wallpaper setter by indexing a couple of 1000 thumbnails off wallhaven :)
I built a terminal app for myself that conflates worktrees & tabs, runs every pane through a terminal multiplexer, lets me join in from my phone and generally makes me happy.
My agent checks my session logs to look for things that I should automate. I blogged about how I got there: https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html Maybe I'll share some of the skills.
A clone of Insomnia/Postman/Yaak for my own use: https://www.apikulture.com https://codeberg.org/Sheldonari/APIKulture
A few, but the one I use regularly and am quite proud of is
https://mediaden.ca - iOS app for storing encrypted photos/videos on storage I (the user) exclusively owns, with zero servers, zero telemetry, and a host of other privacy related features.
German language tutor, a midi piano tutor, and an isochrone map generator.
Static site generator for my blog, or at least bits of it.
Made a local, in-memory OTLP traces viewer because I don't like running heavy alternatives like Jaeger, Tempo for simpler use cases https://github.com/pawanjay176/trace-top
in case you forgot instruct your ai text generating tool to do so: replaces — with -, removes emojis and changes quotes to look like human-typed (even though they are not grammatically correct)
I use agents to do most of the tedious admin for my hire business, and I built www.vessels.app to run them on the go because there was no native solution to talk to my agents. I’ve started working towards releasing this to the public because it’s so much better than setting up agents via telegram or slack.
https://hiddensignal.app - newsletter aggregator and digest. I have a few users but I’m the power user and love it.
I made a small pantry application to track what foods I have in storage. It can spit out a json blob of that information which I feed into an LLM to make meal suggestions optimizing the ingredients I already have.
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
I created GitSocial, it stores issues, PRs, etc straight in git. Works on any git forge and allows cross-forge PRs and collaboration in general.
I made a CLI tool that securely stores and injects your AI API keys into scripts, so you never have to worry about .env leaks. Have a look at https://llmvlt.dev
Ive made my own agentic IDE centered around worktrees and containerization. it allows me to run multiple development environments on my machine with each development server running in parallel, allowing me to spin up feature branches and test them instantly.
I am working on my own Youtube Music/Spotify replacement, just so I can ditch the youtube premium on mobile.
Already have $180 ARR prebooked (the money that I used to pay for youtube music), looking forward for more.
if anyone has links for open-source self-hosted spotify/yt music replacement, I would gladly appreciate links
A MacOS desktop app and a mobile app for instrumenting GPS routes.
Screenshot here: https://x.com/LyleMakes/status/2063784301594853657/photo/1
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 don't do a ton of programming on my own time to be honest. But I did make some recipes with Calibre. Seeing Gemini basically jsut take the HTML from some news Web sites and come up with recipes really opened my eyes to how good that stuff had gotten.
I made an encrypted static site framework: https://github.com/4pito3pito2pi/unveil-static-site/
Made a janky little website for managing board-game meetups
https://third-space.astride.com.au/invite/c0378a6f-b1b9-4c26...
Out of a the stuff beyond a shadow of a doubt the most useful is https://ductile.run
This started off as a fancy cron with webhook and became a comprehensive runtime. I have been using it for months on several systems.
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.