alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
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I built https://sdocs.dev and use it daily. It’s a CLI-driven markdown reader which (privately) renders Markdown in the browser.
When you install the CLI, it (with your permission) asks to update your base agent prompt files (e.g. `~/.codex/AGENTS.md`, or `~/.Claude/CLAUDE.md`) with info about how to use the tool.
This means all your agent chats know about SDocs, and it’s nearly always your agent which invokes the tool: “Hey Claude, sdoc me a list of all my open MRs”, etc.
I did a ShowHN about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
I made a simple tool to find gaming buddies based on your schedule and language - https://broop.id
https://github.com/sktguha/android-joystick
Will improve the read me
I made a typing game for my kids that has Middle English, right-hand word and left-hand word modes. And makes darkly funny comments between levels.
Android browser wrapper that can download any video, audio, text
html snippet playground - for testing html/react snippets
token speed calculator - for estimating tg/s of ai based on ram speed and model size/params this helps in comparing different hw, estimating likely speeds i will get on hardware
prompt assembler - to create prompt and context once and reuse it in different ai's, picking and choosing context in a prompt, creating agent.md etc.
dashboard builder - for viewing gsc, ga, stripe data in one place
Built an Apple Watch app that streams music from Plex. It’s more stable than Spotify and Apple Music and it’s been a blast running to my own music collection!
Lots of fun toys. Nothing productive :D
Revamped my blog to have a funky 3d background and animated cursor after years of minimalism: https://bdickason.com
A little screensaver inspired by After Dark: https://bdickason.com/static/experiments/flying-stuff/
A little toy using (mobile) screen tilt: https://qwertle.bdickason.com
A funky RTS designed for mobile: https://chasm-nine.vercel.app/
A start of a little 3D RPG: https://misty-woods.vercel.app/
Note: all experiences in varying states of completion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I stopped paying for Wyze subscription after replacing the camera backend service. Saving me about $30/m and a much finer tuned OpenCV to Claude API vision model.
Image hosting built for AI agents: https://pixelvault.dev/
I created a realtime lead generator that scraps Reddit and then looks for the people that seem like they would like to buy something that im selling.
A todo list to track different learning sources, resurface things like online courses or long videos, and log my learning sessions.
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.
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.
Automatic self hosted transcription service. So nice to be able to get my thoughts all down as context for projects. Really accelrates things.
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 created a realtime reddit lead generator. It scrapes reddit and looks for people that look like they would like to buy what im selling.
I made a simple electron app to download podcast files. I needed an easy way to sync with a mp3 headphones that registers as a usb drive.
www.propelcode.app - cursor on my phone. www.propelagent.app - voice agent for my home health care agency, but it also tells bed time stories to me and my daughter a few times a month.
I also built a new web framework we use internally which is amazing. We might open source it soon. It has a postman clone that has a bunch of features I wanted. It really is the case that we can just build tools any time we want.
A local search indexer that indexes every page I visit (with tools for obvious exceptions) and lets me full text search them.
I built a tmux clone in Rust:
Made a fully autonomous Facebook marketplace scraper so that I get telegram notifications of car deals
I made a streak/goal tracker that tracks the things I want to work on like being more grateful, working out more, and learning.
https://dartsva.com/ - a darts training plan app.
magpie - extracts book recommendations from reddit threads. I had a bunch of saved threads from 'books' and 'suggestmeabook' and 'printsf' etc., and I realized I could pull them down and do a semantic search.
After losing to quickly allotted amount in Las Vegas decided to vibe code a console traning program for playing 21...
oh boy, lots. i made a trainer that coaches you in nondual philosophy by quoting from the Upaniṣad; a Vedic Aspectarian that calculates your chart and analyses your transits; a better I Ching program that utilizes a time variable to throw the hexagrams; and then there’s our research software. none of this would have been possible without AI.
I custom Zed to get a better markdown preview, every time when I see the beautiful rendered markdown file, I feel very happy.
None of my tools use AI in any way, shape or form. And building them didn't make use of AI either.
https://jaicast.com for fun.
Currently working on a Gmail clone.
nowplaying.cjlm.ca - CFUV radio station song identification, basically shazaming every few minutes from a fly.io instance
I've been really into local llms and trying to create self healing/self evolving codebase architecture
A few things:
Reminder.dev - Quran app and API that includes RAG search to provide a more authenticated source of summarisation. The first thing I dabbled in with AI.
Micro.mu - Rebuilt my entire product idea from 10 years ago as a super app for daily digital habits. Something I use everyday for myself.
Aslam.org - An islamic knowledge base that uses sources of data as a way to ground AI chat and make notes. Very useful tool that I'm using on a daily basis.
Go-micro.dev - Totally revamped the open source project, docs, etc with Claude.
A tool to manage Claude Code conversations based on my typical workflow which integrates with my desktop OS and terminal app.
created a chrome extension to sync linkedin messages to my crm (pipedrive) rather than being charged 30$ a month
- https://www.yourfriendly.ai/. a desktop pet that lets me have an ai chatbox readily available
nothing groundbreaking but this little tool cleans up build artifacts automatically so my hd frees up every once in a while.
Hi HN, I built (yet another) webapp (PWA) for looking up guitar scales and a bunch of other tools.
https://guitar-tools.eejalab.xyz/
There are plenty of other tools already that do this but hopefully this one adds some quality of life niceties such as dark mode and a mobile responsive design that seems nicer to use than the others out there.
Hope the colours look ok. I'm a colour blind person (deuteranomaly) and I've optimised it for what looks good to me. Am open to adding a mode in line with what regular vision people might prefer.
No frameworks used, vanilla JS. No sign ups. Data/state persistence is purely local storage.
Absolutely no commercial interest here. Built this purely for the love of it. Will forever be free.
A terminal thats prettified and has a dashboard with affirmations and a feed of trending design posts.
I made a SaaS platform that automatically generates a customer support and lead gen bot using clients' website!
I wrote a Mac typing tool to speed up typing
I have always been interested in computers, building my own, playing pc games, etc. However, I never learned to program. LLMs have given me the ability to bring things to life that would have otherwise been impossible. I have a lot of pent-up software I have wanted for a long time.
https://github.com/frankieg33/fade - A program that minimizes screens inspired by Marco Arment's Quitter https://marco.org/2016/05/02/quitter
https://github.com/mxpv/podsync - a personal video podcast feed through podsync
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spaced-math/id6770719584 - ios application for my kids to learn mental math.
a daily newspaper for my 3 kids with themes around what they are into, jokes, and today in history.
https://github.com/frankieg33/MewgenicsBreedingManager - mod for the game Mewgenics. it had ~600 users which feels amazing.
Finally got my glove 80 split keyboard to work the way I want. Love typing on this thing :D
Art search for magic cards
Can this be a quarterly Ask HN?
macOS app that auto joins my Zoom meetings. Few hours later I found out I made a mini version of https://meetingbar.app/
I build a lot of data pipelines, and I've had to deal with too many inconsistent "source to target mapping specs" (usually Excel files) in integration and data projects in my life. They're too opaque for AI coding tools to get consistent results for generating implementations, suggesting tests, making test data etc. So I made "Satsuma" (https://equalexperts.github.io/satsuma-lang/)
At first glance, it's just a nice version-controllable, parseable DSL. But I also made succinct prompts with the grammar that lets LLMs produce and reason about Satsuma, a language server, CLI tools for the AI tools to use to navigate specs token-efficiently, reason about lineage, pretty viz in vscode plugins/syntax highlighting, some agent skills etc. There are metadata conventions for succinctly representing a lot of quirky formats and capturing common analytics conventions (scd2/Kimball/datavault/etc c.)
Yes, yes, I may have gotten carried away.
But I'm finding it really useful as a specification tool in projects for reverse engineering mappings from code/workflows, generating new code (dbt, Spark etc.)
This definitely isn't something I would've had the bandwidth to push this far before AI!
I replaced the router supplied by my ISP with a MiniPC running Arch Linux and an Alfa AWUS036AXML.
i'm start to develop a linear algebra tool to run in a cli for study and research https://github.com/cecinuga/lacli
I made a modal editor, like Vim and Helix, in Rust that has some prose features I wanted, and with a keybinding system I find more logical and consistent.