alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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I'm working on (yet another) Hacker News browser extension, mostly to scratch my own itch. The desktop experience on HN is fine, but I don't love mobile support or lack of dark mode.
I've tried some alternatives, but Modern for Hacker News seems abandoned. Harmonic is great (they just released v3 as well), but it's Android only. According to Firefox the extension has a grand total of 2 users, with one of them being myself.
I’m building a little tool to organize my sheet music, let me share it, organize rehearsals, and manage performances.
FreeBSD 15.1! Scheduled to be announced 2026-06-16 00:00 UTC; just need to get some release documentation polished now.
trying to get AI-powered YouTube playlist generator to work well with podcasts: https://playlists.at/youtube/generate/ (GPT doesn't seem to be very good with podcasts.)
https://www.learnchess.ai — The chess app I always wanted (I've tried a lot of apps in the last years but they always lacked some fundamental feature and/or had terrible UX).
working on DevRoulette
You start a task in Claude Code, and it automatically matches you with a random dev who’s also waiting on theirs.
You can chat, skip, or end the chat anytime.
I am building a e-com tracker that help users to Track competitor pricing, product launches, promotions, and stock changes automatically. Get alerts the moment the market moves.
I built a dictation and meetings after trying other apps (Wispr Flow, Willow Voice, Granola, open source) and realised they're either user hostile, buggy or have limited feature set. For example, many of these dictations app opt you into Context awareness, which means your entire page contents get streamed to their server. The open source apps don't have dictionary, shortcuts (say "linkedin link" → and it pastes your actual link), or ability to use any proprietary API.
So I made my own dictation app. Supports arbitrary API providers (e.g. Deepgram, Speechmatics, Elevenlabs), Offline models and a subscription if you want it. Otherwise it's free forever for BYOK and offline models. Deepgram is a YC startup from 2016, and have models that are genuinely good - so it's up to you if you want to use them.
Also, Granola doesn't let you read your own meetings after 30 days. So I added a feature in DuckType to import your data from Granola, unlocking all your meetings from their paywall.
Another app: OpenCook https://open-cook.com/ . We curated and wrote our own recipes into StashCook, which requires a subscription just to read your own recipes on the web app. So I got Codex to extract our recipes and rebuild one that is open source, OpenAPI and includes AI features.
This won me 1 year of GPT Pro at the codex event :)
I hope you can tell... I'm tired of companies designing their products to lock you in, to charge you more, with no added value. I build software for people like me. So I'll be building more apps that replace this user hostile software.
A few tools to de-enshittify/enhance specific websites.
I don't have to tell the Hacker News crowd how junked up the web has become.
* Bookmarklet to cleanly extract lyrics from Genius.com. * Firefox add-on to cleanly display lead sheets and guitar tabs on UltimateGuitar.com * Firefox add-on to show Distance From City on TrustedHousesitters.com. https://versastudio.com/projects
App to upload images to a PDF file. https://imagina.xplaya.com
I'm developing a tool that will help you easily delete your data from services. It scans the subject line and sender email address of the emails in your inbox and suggests an email draft to help you delete that service. It's open source and self-hostable, with privacy and security as top priorities. I got the idea when Saymine.com was acquired by McAfee and became total bs...
This is my first project that I want to release to the public, and the official instance will be free to use. I'll try to keep costs low without sacrificing service quality, and I hope to keep the project afloat with donations because I believe everyone should have the right to easily remove their data, regardless of cost or technical expertise. I don't have anything to share yet because it's still in the early stages of development, but it's looking good so far.
still working on https://hcker.news, which has an absurd number of features that improve your QoL when reading hn.
i've massively improved a bunch of things like the AI filter, which now gives you the option of filtering out github repos with AI authorship.
Also improved comments, which I'm serving through my own backend which has made loading of comments super fast, and it's going to be the foundation for some really great other features coming soon.
Soon: HN feature parity via browser extension and sync'd accounts.
self publishing scientific papers, with IP defensible via DOI and bitcoin timestamp:
Built a logic puzzle at https://daily baffle.com/truthsorting, try it out!
serverless hosting for wordpress: https://www.agiler.io
The hard part is doing it without modifying WP, and serverless mariadb that can scale to zero.
Personal (as in, "for personal use, not a product") conversation partner -- I speak in German, one level is correcting the mistakes, allowing me to reformulate the statement, another level is responding to the intended idea. Rinse, repeat.
the internet backbone for booksellers: https://bookhead.net
I've been continuing work on cardcast.gg. It gives you the ability to play Magic: The Gathering with your friends remotely using a webcam.
In the last month or so I added a few nifty features:
- Auto-scan functionality: Instead of having to click on cards to discover what they are, I can now do whole-frame detection on an interval (configurable), so players can mouse over the webcam stream of another player and automatically see what the actual card is. Super helpful for deciding who to attack and makes turns quicker!
- Card view is now grouped by player, since auto-detection will populate a lot of cards during the course of a game.
- Switch the video stream to Livekit from my homebrew version. Players were having video trouble and I hope Livekit is good enough so solve that problem.
Next up: I really want to build a community around this, and I'm struggling on getting the word out to people / having them try it out. I've done some SEO and word of mouth advertising, but haven't had much luck. I feel like I need to switch directions a bit. I'm a developer by trade, so this is wholly new to me.
Come check it out: https://cardcast.gg
Refactoring the D code generator to make it more modular.
I have been experimenting more with agentic iterative optimization: using LLMs to actually speed up code by finding and testing lower-level optimizations, specifically by having it build a real-world representative benchmark, then tell the LLM to optimize that benchmark without a) cheating the benchmark and b) ensuring code quality by some metric does not regress, e.g. MSE for machine learning algorithms. This is extremely effective with GPT 5.5, and recently I found another prompt optimization (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48413304) that surprisingly results in another 2x speed improvement on average.
So far, I have mostly feature-complete implementations of the following, which are faster than the state-of-the-art implementations, up to 20x faster in some cases while matching or beating them in quality:
- a new 2D data visualization library, along with more bespoke data viz implementations such as word clouds and Primitive.
- programmatic image generation
- image compression
- a new statistical machine learning library, along with more bespoke algorithms such as UMAP and HDBSCAN
- a novel modelless invisible image watermarking approach
- a novel machine learning approach which may be a crime against data science but the performance is really good
- local text embedding generation with MLX
- image-to-ASCII art conversion
- grep/jq replacement (faster than ripgrep)
I aim to open-source them over the next months but the main bottleneck is the inevitable barrage of "gtfo AI slop" comments even if I dot every i and check every t, in addition to the distribution of new software being extremely difficult nowadays due to the death of social media and "20x faster" raising red flags even if I have the data to justify it.
Working on a multi-agent chat, about Yoga, Ayurveda and wider scriptures: https://livingshastra.org
https://trax.legacyfactory.dev/
> Guild manager for my MMORPG guilds with Discord integration
Built TechnoJam (https://technojam.app), a music-making app for kids 4+. It’s a DJ launchpad (drums, bass, melody, chords) but every tap is quantized to stay in scale, so kids with zero music knowledge can have tons of fun making electronic music.
Deliberately no ads, no subscription, no tracking, works offline.
Fairly predictable given the times: a plugin for coding assistants that supports a development workflow that I like :) It's at https://www.shipsmooth.net/.
Perhaps the more interesting bit is that it's in Java (not Typescript or Rust)! Java 25 is pretty neat. Bonus: getting to know how to distribute a self-contained Java program using jlink and the likes: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/specs/man/jli...
tirreno — open-source security framework
An Eisenhower Matrix for my to-do app.
https://github.com/abstractspoon/ToDoList_Dev/tree/9.3---New...
https://proxybase.xyz - No Kyc residential proxies, Xmr accepted.
Been working on https://spaceindex.io.
I wanted a site that aggregated as much space industry data as possible, but most other solutions were behind paywalls, even though most of this data is public or free in one way or another.
2 things:
- A hand-crafted browser game-engine and game for the engine, with things like determinism at the core. I will be launching soon and can't talk too much about it yet because its quite novel. It actually has quite a few novel ideas within. Very minimal usage of AI in this project, I've been working on it for ~6 years now. A bit toooo long.
- A pure slop-crafted browser extension, because I paid for claude code Fable and it got rug-pulled so I am burning my tokens on a 100% slop project just to see what hands-off coding is actually like. A slight distraction from project 1 I do when I'm feeling a bit burnt out. Super fun so far proc-gen type stuff. Derivative
I make 3D Laser cut maps! themapsguy.com
The nichest of niche social network clients. It's for people in one particular country, who watch one particular TV program, on one particular day of the week.
Now that the cost of writing software is zero, I love that my focus have moved from vain attempts to generate passive income to just building whatever random shit I feel like. Wish I'd made that choice earlier in life, but no worries!
So many cool projects you guys are working on. I'm trying to implement a Multimodal Swarm Management simulator, idea is to use agent to process operator intents, form swarm and build a mission for a set of drones and other available assets based on their capabilities. Inspired by my other more practical projects where we are operating large fleet of platforms and current mission planners have very imperative model and so low level. More speculations are there https://uglydrone.com/posts/052920261.html
Sun Signal. A simple signal for the sun in your zip code, USA only now though happy to expedite your area if you want, it lets you quickly intuitive the sun through your day, week and month and plan around sun events.
kinoto.io/orrery
We're releasing this next week.
Just playing Doom
huntbot: AI offensive security harness for Security Research pentesting bugbounty
indiesecurity.com
I’m developing a class for non-technical people on the responsible use of AI.
Continuing development of online training for software testers, with a heavy emphasis on AI, since that’s where the demand is.
During a livestreamed demo yesterday, I ran into a ridiculous bug in Copilot for Excel. After all these years Microsoft still can’t manage the basics of reliability and still deny that they need good testers.
Guitar plugin
Working on making my first video game (unannounced, https://gamedepartment.com). We're also spinning out some of our internal playtesting tools into a playtesting service that I think is going to be really cool.
reverse engineering the red one mx cinema camera.
https://github.com/verdverm/gmd
> gmd indexes local markdown with full-text, vector, and hybrid search on Typesense; web search, fetch, crawl, and research; llm-wiki pattern and agents; local or cloud.
Still working on CopDB, started adding jurisdictions outside of Utah and were thinking about doing some mass imports from select other data sources.
Built an app that helps you detect if a video (tt/reels) is lying about those "do this and you'll make 10k a month"!
still very early and im trying to keep it very affordable, since the whole point is I dont want people wasting their money on hustles that were never legit
llm testing for stability and reliability.
Working on exocomp [1] and gooey [2]. The former being an agentic environment for pentesting and reverse engineering and the latter being a UI framework in Go.
Currently working on some networking parts, because I want multiple exocomp instances to be able to cooperate in terms of knowledge sharing and workforce sharing. So I'm experimenting with websockets combined with multicast DNS-SD via UDP sockets. Might be kinda nice if I can make all services discoverable and plug and play. Also using DNS-SD for my llama.cpp wrapper already, which allows local model and inference service discovery quite nicely already.
Stack based task manager with integrations with GitHub, Linear, and some others to manage and automatically update your immediate todo list, free while in beta (still very early beta)
I launched a monthly course in May on how to build products with proper engineering and product rigor using LLMs as support tools:
Just getting started really and you can see a bunch of the stuff I post every week on our Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/@givedirection
It’s going really well so far in the second month, to the point where I now have an advanced class and some possible organizations lined up that want me to help to train their staff.
I need to fill up my classes or get org contracts so tell who you know.
The cool thing also now is that we have a small community of builders in the discord that have shipped so it’s good to see people working together.
CSSON - CSS as a data format https://github.com/crowdwave/csson
Agents
Starting a new team at my company for AI Enablement for org-wide tooling, governance and long-term AI strategy.