alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
Comments
Mourning the Fable 5 shutdown, I hacked together https://ismodelavailable.com/fable The long-term plan is a sort of JustWatch for LLMs - which models are live, where, on what terms. Right now it's just a toy.
Slightly neglected but still chipping away at https://dataello.com — a cheaper alternative to Flourish for building interactive charts.
And the more serious stuff: - a domain-agnostic engine for generating predictive models - papers on disinformation, and on approaches to analyzing survey data
Working on Keel v0.2 this week — constructor pattern, optional Gin, dependency injections.
in spare time working on https://coderscreen.com/, an open source technical interview platform
I am looking to build a platform that allows for real interview workflows like takehomes, agent coding sessions, as well as the standard leetcode-style questions
Open-source Shopify for every vertical. Then leveraging that to build an interoperable, decentralized marketplace
FreeBSD 15.1! Scheduled to be announced 2026-06-16 00:00 UTC; just need to get some release documentation polished now.
I’m building a little tool to organize my sheet music, let me share it, organize rehearsals, and manage performances.
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).
Im tired of busywork admin work. Electron app to automate and/or make it feel like doom scrolling or tinder.
Starting a new team at my company for AI Enablement for org-wide tooling, governance and long-term AI strategy.
Working on Gaming Couch, a web-based local multiplayer party game platform. It's like a lovechild of Jackbox Games and Mario Party: https://gamingcouch.com. More specifically I'm currently working on the 3rd party development tools so in the future anyone can make their game dev dreams a reality and make a simple and fun multiplayer party game for the Gaming Couch platform, ideally in only one weekend! If you're a game dev or aspiring to be one and want to develop and ship your own party game, check out https://gamingcouch.com/developers
The TL;DR of Gaming Couch:
- Currently in free Early Access with 19 competitive mini-games.
- Players use their mobile phones as controllers (you can use game pads as well!)
- Everything is completely web-based, no downloads or installs are necessary to play
- All games support up to 8 players at a time and are action based, with quick ~one minute rounds to keep a good pace. This means there are no language based trivia or asynchronous games!
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.)
I'm working on (yet another) git worktree multi agent development tool that just runs in any terminal. Supports Claude Code, Pi and Codex agents and provides a CLI that allows them to work together in a given worktree. Currently messing around with having the agent drive the app itself to record and caption screencasts. Fun project that is also my daily driver for agentic development at the day job. Idea was born out of using Conductor and similar tools but preferring to work in the terminal and still lean on my preferred tools like lazygit, neovim etc... https://github.com/bakedbean/workspacex
WebCLI - screenshots are a dead end. MCP is too verbose and clunky. Agents native language is text. Web CLI is just a Unix-y CLI that pipes/translates the web to text. Run any task on a web browser, but don't do it yourself (only the parts you have to - MFA, Login, CAPTCHA, whatever). An agent + WebCLI does anything you throw at it.
web go news.ycombinator.com
cat reply.txt | web say -
web find add comment
web do 44
Taking a break from coding side projects and instead learning how to DJ :)
Chat Octopus: AI video creator and editor.
Made a video about PG's 'Billionaire' essay:
video: https://chatoctopus.com/share/d93d661a-0e5b-43f3-946e-a9dea0... full chat: https://chatoctopus.com/share/chat/8d044aa2-dc48-47a0-aa65-1...
I have two projects that I'm hoping to release in the months ahead. These are both pretty pointless but fun projects.
One is a TRS-80 Model I emulator in JavaScript called Trash80. About 10 months ago I started this project just for fun while experimenting with what now seems to be called agentic loops. I got things working pretty well with the Z80 passing the ZEXALL suite and a lot of real TRS-80 software running fine. It sat for months untouched before I decided it is worth releasing and recently started it up again.
I didn't want to release it without a ROM, so I rigged up some agents to build a clean-room style L2 ROM w/ a fairly complete BASIC and even readline-style control commands, history, and a proper cursor. That went very well, but the agents cheated on floating point and implemented some weird Q5.2 like-thing. I told them to fix it, but I guess I didn't give clear enough instructions because they replaced it with a BCD hybrid monstrosity instead of proper floating point. The proper floating point is now underway, but I'm mostly using excess Codex credits before they expire, so it's only moving forward when I have credits I don't need.
I also built a silly ASCII fractal browser in Z80 assembly so that I can ship with a virtual disk that has software on it. The emulator works in the browser and the terminal. Unicode sextant block graphics map very well to TRS-80 Model I semigraphiccs/squots, so it really does run everything very well in the terminal, even games. I also added a line-mode for line-based applications, so you can use a readline-like interface and feel like it's native terminal app as well, though that has some issues I need to fix. And of course, you can shebang TRS-80 BASIC files and run them through the emulator too.
Another project was a demo of chromesthesia, a form of synesthesia where sounds trigger experiences of color. I thought it was done and ready to release, but then I had a new idea. The visualization while cool, was kind of boring. I decided to replace it with an attempt at a semi-physically accurate cymatics simulation with artificial coloring based on chromesthesia. Cymatics is the practice of making sounds visible by vibrating a surface, such as a plate with sand on it. As the sound changes, symmetrically interesting patterns form and evolve. I've got something working now with wave generation and microphone input, but sometimes it gets a bit stuck and stops evolving as it should, so I have to find time to figure that out.
Currently all unreleased, but when they do release it will be at www.leshylabs.com. I sometimes post updates on X, but not too often. (https://x.com/LeshyLabs)
I’m getting back into it again after a long break due to burnout. I’m still burned out but it’s getting easier to think through problems.
I’m building a home server. This was something I put off for years due to some perfectionism. Eventually I just threw together something with old hardware and headless Ubuntu. Much to my surprise, the power draw is only about $4 a month. I can live with that so no need for specialized hardware.
I’m doing the common -arr stack using docker compose. I’m using plex because the jellyfin doesn’t work as well on an Apple TV.
Having a server running is nice. I can set up some stuff on a whim. Most recently was the Mealie recipe manager. It’s great knowing my data won’t be paywalled. I’m using syncthing as a simple backup method between my devices - everything but media of course. It’s fine if I lose media.
An unexpected benefit of having the server is that it inspires my wife. She decided to give vibe coding a try. She’s an artist, not an engineer, but with a little help she was able to make a task tracker for us. She tailored it to the way we tackle our tasks and, again, it’s really nice knowing it won’t get paywalled in the future.
I’m still burned out, but having a server to tinker with is helping.
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.
AI slopping a Backrooms game, Fable was the only one that can do it and now its gone
I’ve been doing 1:1 therapy style sessions to make adults better readers!
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
Built a logic puzzle at https://daily baffle.com/truthsorting, try it out!
self publishing scientific papers, with IP defensible via DOI and bitcoin timestamp:
I have been building a coding agent for small and even tiny LLMs, local inference. I experiment with Qwen 3.5 0.8B but that is too tiny. 4B is a better one for most of my needs. I mix with 9B and then up to 20B models (not on my computer).
It builds on an opinionated tech stack - Rust (Actix Web, Diesel, SQLite) and Typescript (Solid, DaisyUI). There are multiple agents which play roles like PO, PM, Architect, Rust Engineer, Typescript Engineer and so on.
The idea is to go from user prompts to Epics/Tasks - PO/PM do this. Then to go from Tasks to YAML or similar syntax (I have not figured this out yet) and break into Rust and Typescript code dependencies.
I am focusing on the Rust side: how can small models write Model, Controller, Router, User/Permission and custom business logic in helper functions (called from Controller or BackgroundTask). Building a set of types to express business logic, for example in https://github.com/brainless/nocodo/blob/feature/praxis_agen...
Then I will use tree-sitter to build a graph of which business logic (in the helper functions) correspond with which provenance (source of truth given by user).
There is no tool calling for most of the agents, no MCP, no multi-turn chats. Most of the code writing agents one-shot the response with a lot of code reference in their prompts.
macOS runaway process monitor https://macdispatch.jurajb.dev/
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 working on three things that keep turning out to be more connected than I expected.
The first is Networks by Analogy: https://networksbyanalogy.com
It’s a book about computer networking, but deliberately not protocol-first. I’m trying to explain the shape of the system using analogies and mental models first, then map those back onto the real machinery.
The second is Verachi: https://verachi.io
That one is about risk management. I’ve been noticing time and time again, in multiple orgs I’ve worked with, that direction and implementation don’t align in many cases. Devs end up doing work that no one asked for, and middle managers tend to “invent” irrelevant work.
The third is Midflight: https://midflight.dev
This is about learning software architectures using chaos testing. You can bring your own architecture, inject failures in safe environments, practice, and ultimately generate agent skills to automate fixes for these types of failures.
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.
I'm finishing a game I started writing before my first daughter was born. The in-laws have been beta testing and they like it so far!
I am on iNaturalist helping to identify organisms.
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
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.
there are many interesting project here, but currently just looking for a job. Anyone hiring on contract work?
I'm working on deprecating JS and HTML... :)
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.
Refactoring the D code generator to make it more modular.
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.
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.
a vscode extension for intel assembly formatting cause none exist, and some other side projects
the internet backbone for booksellers: https://bookhead.net
I'm building a browser for designers: https://matry.design/
After attempting a charity push up challenge in Feb I wanted to contiune with a similar app to track reps, so I build paayn (push ups are all you need).
It's deliberately minimalistic PWA that uses you mobile's sensors (camera, using lux levels and/or acclerometer) to count reps.
I included squats and sit ups later to round it out but it kinda made the name bad :)
Feel free to sign in as a guest and try it out.
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
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
A full stack Golang framework (I know).
I make 3D Laser cut maps! themapsguy.com
learning to build local coding agents with mastra framework, doing basics at the moment, like reading the code, editing.
if you have built coding agent in the past using mastra, what are the problems you have faced with mastra? does it support complex branching/context trimming and other features required to efficiently manage context for AI agents?