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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Helping my wife ship https://quantral.com - a platform to monitor X and Reddit for financial chatter and score companies and authors. We discovered lots of stocks early in this AI cycle from X. There’s lots of noise, so we built a platform to more easily monitor the social sentiment for our investment purposes, but now we are trying to spin out a fully fledged consumer product.
On-demand game servers: https://www.instalobby.io/
Basically every game server hosting provider bills monthly, but most players don't play all the time. So I'm building instalobby with a friend to provide to gamers on-demand hourly billed game servers.
We're starting with Valheim, but expanding to more games hopefully soon.
(If anybody wants to try we are offering $1 worth of credits to every new account)
A share collab rich text editor: https://collabedit.duckdns.org/ and trying get back to open source contrbutions.
I’ve been playing D&D for a few years with friends, and over time we’ve built a rich world..full of contradictions because I can’t remember half of the improv I do as DM.
I built https://loracle.app to automatically build a wiki of various entities in our campaign and enable rag q&a with an ai assistant about specific world facts.
Launching https://leafy.you soon - a general-purpose in-browser assistant. Compiles reports, fills forms, interfaces with 900+ services you own.
More broadly, I spent ages developing a self-solving Kanban for mid-sized companies and enterprises (https://kodan.dev) - controllable autonomy level, multiplayer support, remote coding server, works on multirepo projects, mobile support, previews, and more. The pain exists, but it's pretty hard to break the integration barrier.
So I'm spinning the feature I used the most into a separate, easy-to-understand product for now.
Working on a brand-new version of my free project management tool, Post Haste. It’s a tool for creating new projects from templates where you set the initial folder structure and project settings, as well as enforcing naming conventions. It was initially created for video editors but you can use it in any industry.
It’s a complete redesign from scratch that combines Mac and Windows into a single codebase via Dioxus (right now they’re two completely separate codebases).
Existing app is at https://www.digitalrebellion.com/posthaste
Trying to adept an O. Henry short story into an AI animation short. If I'm happy with the results, will be sure to publish a detailed breakdown of the work.
Tritium, the legal IDE.
This week we're working on a modular WASM build to allow others to embed Tritium directly into their own platforms. AI native startup law firms love it.
I’m working on my guitar practice app, Captrice https://www.captrice.io after a brief gap.
The last few months I’ve been reading a lot about neuroscience behind learning and practicing music and I’m fascinated by the subject. It has helped me realise why the app works for me, as well as my own mistakes that held back my progress for many years despite putting in decent efforts.
It was a much needed inspiration to continue working on it with a re-evaluated roadmap.
I recently wrote a blog post about it - https://www.captrice.io/blog/what-makes-captrice-work.html
https://badombre.com/missing-link/
I haven't decided to release it publicly (if so, it'd be free). But it's a link library for my Mac for all the links sent/received in Messages. Apple's new suggested way to do this, of course, is with Siri AI. But I have been using this and like it.
Curious if anybody else would want it.
When I was working at amazon (left May 8) working on agents was all the rage. Combined with initiatives that set goals for nearly all services to have a MCP built and available by the end of the year agents will be even more emphasized in the future.
However what happens when you actually build and launch your agent is customers try it, do some initial runs and then go ask your manager to automate their use case. That is why I have been building https://toolscaled.com/ The goal being work through your problem space using agentic chat (like Claude Desktop) and then at the end convert it to a workflow. I am pretty close to launching and have been testing. If you're interested send me an email! (if you do sign up just fyi its still in beta so YMMV.
Still working on my web site quality assurance software. Getting close to private beta (hopefully very soon). Back end is written in Java and built with Javalin and Jsoup and persisted to PostgreSQL. Front end is JS/React. My back end crawls the designated website and for each page runs a number of analyzers to assess the quality across the following categories: accessibility, content quality (spelling, missing spaces between words, etc), performance, security, content policy (required phrases and forbidden phrases), site integrity, and seo. Each site can be configured to have its own custom dictionary (for spell checking). It's been a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to taking the wraps off it.
Web-based markdown editor that can handle notes, colab documents, todos, long stories, as well as chats or communities.
I know that there are already way too many markdown editors out there, but I think Kraa still offers something unique in this space (combination of minimal UI, plentiful features and some unique stuff like real-real-time chat).
Example of how easy it is to create a 'community' on Kraa: https://kraa.io/kraa/trees
Also - no AI integrations whatsoever.
Working on my version of Dynamicland. Today I got this small thing working where I can now live-edit the behaviour of the editor script, see https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZjxPIv-XwoU
Repo is here if anyone wants to have a look: https://github.com/deosjr/unreal-talk
And a browser-based version can be found here: https://deosjr.github.io/dynamicland/live
safe/efficient junctions on the road network where I live:
I have a nonlinear attention mechanism which seems to improve data efficiency, but it's slow. I'm trying to learn the python CuTe DSL to speed it up.
I'm also reading Principles and Practice of Deep Representation Learning, Or: A Mathematical Theory of Memory.
I'm working on a semantic layer for Nextcloud: https://astrolabecloud.com
The service is composed of two open-source services, namely a Nextcloud app (Astrolabe) and backend (nextcloud-mcp-server). I use the service as an MCP server across a number of apps, and others use it primarily for semantic search over large numbers of documents.
Both are open source, and I'm working on a managed offering, completely based in the EU, for individuals/teams that already use Nextcloud and want to be able to use semantic search across some or all of their documents.
Essentially your data stays in Nextcloud, and the MCP server backend keeps a vectordb in sync to enable semantic queries over your content. The number of supported apps is growing, including:
- notes
- deck cards
- files
- news items (RSS feeds)
- cookbook recipes
- contacts & calendar
And I'm adding support for other apps as I go.
I'm working on a framework for general purpose interactive tutoring systems. An SRS background process over a pluggable system of pedagogy protocols over a given curriculum. This is at https://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder, or https://patched.network/skuilder
With this framework, I'm making (among other things) an early literacy app at https://letterspractice.com. My aim here is to hit >= 75% efficacy of Mentava at <= 1% of the price.
The app is near to production readiness, and I'd be happy to share access now with anyone who has verbal but non-literate kids. Be in touch if interested at colin at letterspractice.com
CS Final Year Project: Multi-vendor Food Delivery System
2 person team and we didn't do anything manually beside creating the entity relationship, and briefly documenting the overall design system we wanted. Now we are sitting on an almost 80% completed system with 6 more months in hand.
Any fans of Divvy/window management software? I'm working on a replacement, its near production level, open to any thoughts/suggestions. for apple silicone.
I am working on https://coderscreen.com/
an open source technical interview platform built for modern interview workflows like takehomes, agent coding sessions, as well as the standard leetcode-style questions.
I'm working on a dashboard for ranking llms, then finding the best local (by size) and/or hosted (by price) variants of the models. Currently have ArtificialAnalysis leaderboard for ranking, ollama registry for local models and openrouter for hosted models. https://ollamadash.up.railway.app
By default, home page gives all models in the leaderboard, local and hosted. Search for models in the search box on the home page to find the top models by ranking, local(by size) and hosted (by price).
You can also do deep querying/sorting/searching filters of models in each of these three nodes (see the other tabs on top).
The next steps I am working on (would love feedback on this or anything else):
Phase 1: - Change clicks on home page model tiles in one column to search and show models filtered by that across Artificial Analysis, Ollama, OpenRouter - User specifies their system VRAM (unified/dedicated) and we automatically filter the home page with models that would fit on that RAM - in the three columns. - User specifies their price range (per MTok, max across input and output), and we similarly filter and rank by those models across all columns. - User specifies both (VRAM and price range), and we filter by both - leaderboard is union of local and hosted, local by VRAM and hosted by price range match.
Phase 2: Once I have this working, add a local desktop client that automatically reads user system and infers VRAM, renders app as webview. Considering pyside6 with Qt for this.
Phase 3: On desktop client, user can download and chat with the local models automatically based on leaderboard, optionally call hosted models, etc. Used primarily to evaluate and compare local vs hosted models for user's use cases. Also have some interesting alternate experiences to host within the local private app for user to interact with llms, agents, etc.
Do let me know whether this seems useful, or how I can make it more useful.
I’m building https://design.withfudge.com, a Prolog-backed design search engine that lets designers/agents query structured design knowledge from real websites. It uses data from my other startup, https://fontofweb.com, to help designers find concrete inspiration e.g fonts, colors, layouts, screenshots, and patterns, so they can make better design decisions.
Agent harness for durable workflows, starting with Temporal.
Most agents for durable workflows feel like toy examples. There is no "Codex" or "Claude Code" for, say, Temporal. So I'm building full-featured agent for these runtimes. Why? Because it makes long-running agents easier to operate and scale. Currently, all frontier harnesses need to run inside a guest OS and need a dedicated process, this is quite challenging to orchestrate and maintain.
To make it work, I had to figure out what part to run as deterministic workflow code, and what part to run as I/O or side effects (aka activities). I'm using a CAS for most of the payloads to maintain a lightweight footprint in the workflow code.
Currently supporting skills, MCP, prompts, a virtual file systems, and soon sandboxes.
https://github.com/gagarwal304/meridian - Simplest way to analyze your opentelemetry data from claude code to optimize claude.md for better prompting
VERDURE is a creative sandbox where you grow and shape plants through trimming and pruning. You can also unlock a 'recipe panel' to further customize them and build a entire collection of your creations. I like to try and recreate real plant designs with it. It is a bit unusual.
ive been getting claude to reverse engineer my raybans glasses case, so i can figure out a 3d printed insert to put in thats less likely to break.
in the process, figuring out some tricks for getting opus to work with 3d a bit better
two tricks ive found is to:
1. get claude to present all the orientations to you, then pick which one after 2. convert 3d problems to 2d ones - get it to draw streamlines describing the geometry, rather than trying to look at the whole thing in 3d
fable was a fair bit better at working in 3d than opus is. well, opus mostly isnt
I'm working on GPS tools to help support my current contract. I've found there are no good tools for tracing a route on a map and having a mobile device think it's traveling that route. I'm not just talking GPS coordinates, but speed, direction, motion detection, precise timing between waypoints, being able to play these trips forward and backward, step by step, etc. I'm talking time-travel debugging for GPS applications.
It's still early days, but I have a demo running. Unfortunately, it requires using a drop-in replacement library for CoreLocation. That alone may make it infeasible.
I'm working on a system-wide desktop ad-blocker and privacy guard called Zen (for almost 2.5 years now): https://github.com/irbis-sh/zen-desktop
Working on it has been a joy as ad-blocking tech touches so many aspects of software engineering - from systems and security to the intricacies of JS environments in browsers.
Benefits-wise, system-wide filtering disables ads and tracking not just in browsers, but desktop apps as well (which you'll be amazed how much they do). It's especially relevant now as Google is re-activating their efforts to hinder ad-blockers by killing Manifest V2 in Chrome. So much of tech is actively bleeding cash on AI right now, which means the efforts to screw over users will only accelerate. This makes something that sits at the network level indispensable imo.
I needed to get customers for Hyperclast [1], but I keep putting off GTM (go to market) tasks. I'd rather be building, you know. So I created https://tractionbeast.com/ as a tool for myself. It gives me bite-sized GTM tasks every day. I just review and do them. This completely removes the inertia for me! My other founder-friends like it too so I turned it into a product.
[1] https://hyperclast.com/ - open, fast, self-hostable replacement for Notion
I'm working on Ito.ai : https://www.ito.ai/
It's Agentic QA + auto-provisioning sandboxes. Makes it plug and play to do code reviews that actually run your code instead of looking at it really hard. B/c the agents control all of the environment (ie running all of the services), it's able to collect runtime evidence about pretty much everything.
A couple open source examples: (Excalidraw) https://app.ito.ai/share/d1cb1475-fbe5-4c71-901b-409ba2aa6d6... & (n8n) https://app.ito.ai/share/bb7d73aa-fd08-482d-9938-87938e2a232...
I'm still working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce dependence on online search engines.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides offline result previews, a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore saved content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.
I've been using it for a few months and as my local index is growing I can avoid opening google/duckduckgo/kagi - and even websites listed in results - more and more frequently.
The initial reception is overwhelmingly positive with already more than 30 contributors and hundreds of contributions - perhaps you can find it useful as well. (Or at least have some constructive criticism =])
GitHub: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
Website: https://hister.org/
Small read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/
I made a book, Simple Machines Made Simple, and I got about 11k copies shipped to my house about two weeks ago. I'm now trying to fix all the books and get them shipped out. They are books with little mini demos in them, and about 80% of the books need some type of rework. So it's going to be a long few months.
I also made Computer Engineering for Babies which I've posted about on here a couple times before.
I’m working on Peak Flow Meter Diary, a simple app to help people with asthma record peak flow readings more easily, then combine those records with environmental data to provide earlier warnings about possible triggers.
In the UK alone, around 7.2 million people have asthma. Globally, WHO estimates that asthma affected 363 million people in 2023 and caused 442,000 deaths.
Peak Flow Meter Diary is not meant to detect every possible trigger. It will not warn you if someone suddenly sprays perfume nearby, or if a dusty bag is opened in the same room. But it could help with risks that can realistically be monitored ahead of time, such as weather, pollen, pollution, cold air, storms, and similar factors. The aim is to make daily tracking easier, show simple visual warnings and notifications, and make it easier to share useful records with clinicians.
I’m also trying to build it in a way that reduces paper, plastic, and electronic waste. If funding allows, I would like to make the project carbon-negative.
That is the bigger dream: to make a small example of how even modest start-up can think about environmental impact from the start, and use it as a practical showcase.
The pitch and full project explanation are here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/why5/peak-flow-meter-di...
Feedback welcome, especially from anyone with asthma, clinicians, carers, or people who have worked on health tracking tools. By now I know that my kickstarter is not going anywhere, so I would value any input was the idea that bad, or lack of marketing and accessing appropriate groups etc. I think this community has a lot of experience so I would like someone to share what could have I done better. Do not be shy to tell me if you think idea was waste of time.
I'm working on Bsharp, an Android app to teach perfect pitch (absolute pitch) to my kids: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bsharp.app
I am making Cargo for C. I have 3/4 of a working demo; the tool can build itself, including some non-trivial dependencies which I've ported to build natively with the tool (instead of wrapping their Make or CMake or whatever). The pitch: It's insane that we have to pull in Python or Lua to build C code. CMake is an abomination against god that has become usable in spite of itself. Zig cc is proof that this entire ecosystem is an embarrassment. My tool gives C projects a TOML manifest, and builds scripts written in C and JIT compiled by the tool. Now, you can write build scripts in the language itself, pull in dependencies you wanted to use anyway. It also provides a stable ABI. There's an HTTP-backed index and a Git-backed index. And it generally does the same thing for C that, say, Bun did for JS/TS. You'll be able to run C files from source and have the entire ecosystem available. You'll be able to trivially generate single file static binaries, or dynamically link to an older glibc without arcane tricks. It will fix C.
I'm also still working on my "what if we wrote a real standard library for C"; I added some feedback I got from the release.
Also, some side projects: I'm making something that's a mixture of chezmoi, Omarchy, and Unraid, for Arch. It has a nice web UI installer. You store everything about your machine as a Git repo, and it brings it up. I wanted to make a system where you could install things manually as you're learning, and once you know what you want have the configuration system naturally absorb it back in. Unraid was great, but once I had real infrastructure running on it the ad-hoc nature made it a huge pain to do it right.
I am also experimenting with a new UI framework that is like HTMX but can also target native apps. UI trees are JSON, not HTML. The runtime is a small core of WASM which takes in JSON patches and applies them. Each backend just translates the UI tree to native calls (e.g. DOM calls, or GTK calls, or...). It's kind of like React Native, but the point is that RN is insane because it synthesizes complex widgets and pretends that the abstraction is clean, and when it isn't it causes problems. There's...a lot more nuance to where this sits among all the UI frameworks, but the best way to describe it is "I wanted something that renders UI server-side for simple apps, and I wanted to be able to run it on the web or natively without bundling a browser". It's very much a sketch to see if this is even possible, and very much missing critical features still, but I have two nice examples that show a plain C backend and a TypeScript backend.
C standard library: https://github.com/tspader/sp
A route from the UI framework: https://github.com/tspader/spry/blob/main/examples/form/nati...
A UI tree from the UI framework: https://github.com/tspader/spry/blob/main/examples/form/ui/t...
A TSX version of the same app: https://github.com/tspader/spry/blob/main/examples/form/web/...
AWS for AI agents - https://instavm.io
Providing sandboxes through a CLI. Guardrails such as egress control and secret injection and audit trails built in.
We can also be used as 3rd party sandboxes in Anthropic managed agent and OpenAI sdk.
https://instavm.io/blog/self-hosting-claude-managed-agents-o...
I’m working on tools optimized for agents, not humans, as the main users. Token efficiency, state, and loops matter more here than traditional UX.
- vibesurfer (https://github.com/frane/vibesurfer): a web browser for agents, without Chromium and CDP.
- agented (https://github.com/frane/agented): a “text editor” for agents, with undo, state, and LSP support.
- grpvn (https://github.com/frane/grpvn): a local chat for your local agent and LLMs.
I'm working on water treatment equipment that does not use chemicals. Manufacturing is bloody hard!
We are in the process of writing our own vertical stack with Go to control the machine instead of expensive and handicapped solutions from Siemens and etc.
I'm working on Totem (https://totemkb.com), a collaborative knowledge management system built entirely in Rust without any HTML or web-tech. Currently supporting Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu, and iOS (although the iOS build is currently in review).
Although the goal is to build an efficient all-in-one-workspace, I wouldn't run a company on it just yet. Right now I'm looking for early adopters who don't mind the rough edges and relatively minimal feature set.
You can grab an early build at https://alpha.totemkb.com.
New workspaces will be in a 14-day 'trial' mode, email [email protected] if you'd like me to upgrade your workspace free of charge.
I’ve been considering new features on Book Bounce for my use cases. I’m pretty hesitant to start anything new on it while I’m waiting for approval for Google Play…
https://bedtimebookhelper.com/
In the mean time, I’m working on a recipe application I’ve had countless false starts on. It’s centered around iterations and version on recipes, tracking changes to ingredients and directions to build new a new recipe from an existing one.
I’m starting with a go Bubbletea tui this time and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it compared to the React SPAs I’ve tried before. Not feeling compelled to style anything while working on the UX has been nice.
I'm working on https://xingolak.pages.dev/
I've been learning Basque and wanted to see a visualization of how the semantics move into different grammatical structures when translating between Basque and English/Spanish.
Under the hood it's using Stanford NLP to analyze the input then that analysis is given to Claude to generate the data structure needed to visualize the translation. It's really cool and maybe my favorite of the itch-scratchers I've built for myself over the years.
(Xingolak is Basque for "ribbons," a nod to the visualizing metaphor used in the UI.)
https://mdview.io - the best way to read big technical documentations. Right now I am working on Grill Me feature for rigorously questioning and stress-testing plans or designs without leaving the app ui
Adding agents to my SQL canvas (https://kavla.dev)
Here's a live example of it figuring out when to post on HN: https://kavla.dev/hn (spoiler, its noon UTC on Sundays)
And here's it generating an interactive map of 20000 earthquakes: https://kavla.dev/quakes
I feel like the canvas is actually a great way to interact with an agent, everything it does is visible, so auditing what it did is (relatively) easy.
I still got some credits to burn so agent usage is free atm (you still have to sign up to use it though)
Continuing to work on a high-performance observability / log analysis SaaS:
https://logging24.com/landing_a/
The basic idea is to make Regex-scans so fast/cheap that "a metric" can be anything numeric in the text and "tracing" is useless because you can just log (and filter) more things. Turns out Regex at >200GB/s solves a lot of problems.
Metric cardinality explosion is immediately a non-issue, histograms have arbitrary resolution, and you can get from histogram pixels back to the underlying logs. And no need to instrument everything thrice for logs, metrics and traces.
The next big feature I'm aiming for is needle-in-a-haystack searches. The data block headers support it already, but the scan engine doesn't yet use it.
I'm working on a competitive coding gameshow. I'm imagining a combination of great british bakeoff, battle bots, and dota. Basically contestants get dropped into a fully equipped dev machine (all the bells and whistles one could want/expect including neovim, agent harnesses, cool styling, etc and if you want you can always clone your dotfiles and stow them!). I've gotten a decent prototype that live streams from Fly.io sprites to twitch, and I'm able to voice over or have OpenAI do commentary on the match. I've got a demo here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2792893261. Still a ways to go, but it seemed like a fun way to tinker with Sprites.
Implementing a solver/optimizer for the Minizinc challenge in Rust! It's very fun, and maybe next year I will even try and put it into the competition properly. As well, I am working on tracking down the history of Sudoku prior to Wayne Gould's popularization of it in the 2000's, and I have found some really interesting postings on Japanese forums from the 90's about the game.
https://www.storystarling.com - create a non-fiction children's book explaining your super-niche-geek topic to your kid. Pick any topic, your kid becomes the little explorer, we illustrate and print it. Requires registration, but then lets you read the whole book before paying.
Still working on stelae.eu (private WP editor -> static deploy: more secure, faster, cheaper). Its pretty solid already, only working on minor things. The main issue is that I think that I have a real cool product (maybe a bit boring, but in a good way) with good values (anti lock-in, privacy respecting, EU centric, fair pricing, no VC money -> sustainable business approach) but I can't reach the people that would love to use it. So thats what I'm really working on: trying to be more visible.
A DSL for machine learning programs: https://pypie.dev/ Embedded in Python, written like Python, but with static type safety (e.g. it catches tensor shape mismatches at compile time)