alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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Working on Morpheus, an experiment to improve tool usage over small llm like Qwen 30b by introducing JEPA (https://github.com/ichiriac/morpheus)
I'm working on https://artifacts.iofold.com, a way to use artifacts (self contained html + optional assets like image/video/json) easily across agents, with feedback loop and docsend style wttribiti gates.
Have made it agent friendly enough that my teammates' agents can read and drop commennts on specs/storyboards etc, and my agent can close the loop by iterating with a new artifact version.
I started toying with perlin vector fields as a level design tool for a game idea, then became more interested in visualizing them than the game they were meant to support. this weekend i realized i think im making a (short) ~game in which you control a dust mote riding air currents, trying to gather enough water to fall back to earth as a raindrop
I was an experienced game designer and producer (mostly RTS and narrative RPG). Some years ago, my career was derailed by major health developments. Since then, I haven't been able to work as I once did. I didn't expect I'd be able to meaningfully contribute to a game again.
Earlier this year, a colleague encouraged me to experiment with Claude Code. So now I have a little game project. :) Being unfamiliar with genAI, I chose something modest so that I'd more likely be able to push it to a fairly polished state.
Tentatively called Vestiges, it's a single player 2D roguelite strategy game with meta progression, some narrative, and a card minigame (the latter inspired by work I did on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II). It's set in the near future. You are using software (the game) to navigate a person's digitized mind, reading their memories.
I hope to have a playable demo within the next month or so.
MatGoat (https://matgoat.com/en/): a software for managing BJJ and martial arts academies that it's both easy to use and have everything they need like assistance tracking, payments, communications, etc.
It's going quite well so far with growing MRR each month.
Lately, I've been trying to focus more on marketing, and sales. I might try ads soon as well.
I'm working on: https://pasal.id/ - A machine-readable database of Indonesian laws and regulations.
https://laws.sg/ - Singaporean statutes structured specifically for AI agents.
https://mylaw.my/ - Malaysian federal acts formatted for easy agent parsing.
I'm on a mission to make all Southeast Asian laws easily accessible by AI agents!
I am working on a few things:
* TimeTracker (https://time-tracker.hosgeldin.click/) because I needed a privacy friendly freelancing tool that I needed personally.
* A simple exercise tracker that my wife requested from me (https://daily-menu.hosgeldin.click/) - later I will build a menstruation tracker that is connected to the Daily Menu.
* My magnum opus, "MyApps" (https://myapps.ideasofhakki.com/) - This is no less than an OS running in your browser, equipped with whatever "Apps" written in it. I am building it with GunDB and Svelte and foundationally it will be a web of apps running completely in your device (i.e. offline first), with privacy and data security built-in.
* Cram school management SIS for Turkish education system (https://edusis.hosgeldin.click/)
Currently working on a CLI tool that performs property-based testing from Arazzo documents: https://github.com/IgnacioGoldchluk/cuerdo
I heard an episode of the Odd Lots podcast about HayWire (haywireag.com), a site that pulls public data from government PDFs + APIs, uses LLMs to parse it and turns it into an easily readable website that has all of the latest info on hay prices.
The host made an offhand mention that there's probably a bunch of other similar sites that could be created with all the of useful but difficult-to-access government data out there. That sounded interesting, so I thought I'd give it a whirl!
Working on a few of them, including The Waterline (https://the-waterline.com/) for water info for the western US, The Scramble (https://the-scramble.com/) for egg prices, and The Dwell (https://the-dwell.com/) for container ship dwell times.
All pretty fascinating topics to learn about, plus it's been interesting to see how much of the website setup I can fully delegate to Claude. With Cloudflare to buy domains and put the sites up, a Google Service Account with access to Google Search Console and GA4 to create those properties and a Buttondown API key for weekly email sending, it's almost all hands off for me. Though it refuses to take control of the browser and create a new Buttondown account, which I was surprised is a red line.
Working on https://razzify.in - Learn hacking using CTF challenges and get hired. https://securepilot.in - Indias first cybersecurity incident management platform for individuals.
Two side projects I’m actively working on:
https://openaltfinder.com - To help people discover selfhost-able open source projects.
Been maintaining this for almost a year, and it’s been fun. Keeps me up to date with new OSS.
https://getpinnd.com - A small social network for map makers to created shared lists of places.
Was just a spur of the moment, and ended up building it in little than a week.
Happily continuing work on https://cardcast.gg. It's a way for my friends and I to play Magic: The Gathering online using a webcam. Spelltable has been neglected by WoTC, and we wanted more features, so I rolled my own (and learned some Computer Vision stuff in the process!) Most recently I rolled out automated card tracking, so there's no more need to click on cards to know what they are, they just automatically scan on a set interval. I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner. If you play MTG, I'm looking for more people to come give me feedback and contribute. Feels like something others can benefit from!
I built my own weather prediction / visualization app: https://wx.rsp.li (on-device temperature lapsing, on device interpolation modes, user-selectable aggregations, etc…). One of these days I should do a writeup.
I also asked Claude to build a photo gallery for me https://places.pascalspoerri.ch (HDR, map support, similar images)
My side project is now codebase explainability. I basically don't buy the premise that we just have to give up on comprehension as code generation scales; I just think that text is too limited by itself. So going a step deeper than asking Claudex "teach me this project", but having it produce a navigable snapshot of what's going on.
Big bang prototypes have been pretty awful, even after feeding the LLMs huge documents / wishlists / descriptions of how it should work, etc. Part of the experiment was giving LLMs some leeway to make product decisions with a lot of north star guidance, but AFAICT they are really bad at this. I also tried basic bottom-up efforts, which have been better but obviously more tedious. Now I'm trying to find a more scalable bottom-up approach that is more LLM-accelerated
Currently working on https://agentkavach.com which is a safety net for AI agents
A competitive word guessing game, play against family/colleagues etc, it tracks your solves and some other fun metrics. Totally free, no ads or other crap. No login needed to play.
I'm exploring triply periodic but non-minimal surfaces. https://codeberg.org/okaleniuk/faitps
Triply periodic minimal surfaces are the golden standard in thermal management, acoustics, and even medical applications. But minimality itself doesn't contribute much to practicality. We use them because they are simply studied better than the non-minimal surfaces.
So I'm studying the non-minimals. They are much more governable, what I link to is a demo of a surface builder with two levels of control. Next, they are conjugatable including conjugations with different period of self (that will be the following paper), they generalize nicely to non-periodic or partially periodic surfaces, and they work in other space configurations. E. g. I'm now playing with bi-periodic curves that cover the 2D space with self-replicating hexagons.
If all that I'm experimenting on today in 2D will turn out well in 3D too, we'll have a whole new direction in implicit modeling.
It's a calculator for what an AI feature costs to serve. Cost per request, cost per month, which part of the bill is eating you (output tokens, usually). No signup, all the math is on the page. Any feedback is welcome.
Just finished Veritas - Truth Across Cultures[1]. The idea is that many different cultures have written sayings that are basically the same. Similar to how one would give more credence to more than one person saying the same thing, the same is true for cultures. So, this is like my catalogue of what diverse cultures agree on. I have been promoting this book. [2][3]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H7FLQDYD
[2] https://www.chestergrant.com/7-truths-from-veritas-by-cheste...
[3] https://www.chestergrant.com/what-different-cultures-agree-o...
I'm creating a "spy mission" for my granddaughter. Using an Axiometa Genesis Mini with some modules for gating access. Real-world challenges, enter results into the Genesis, get directions to the next challenge.
I am trying to involve family members' specialties and interests so she can elicit help from each person: entomology, mechanical engineering, etc.
All that for her to discover the Secret Planned Activity the following day (visiting a theme park.)
Java Server Side Rendering Web Framework -- zero external runtime dependencies outside the web server layer -- https://github.com/vadimv/server-components The idea is to provide complete Java-centric modern web UI stack for building internal tools and admin panels.
I have a daily puzzle game called https://lettered.io and I’ve been playing around with shareable replay gifs via gifenc. It’s been fun trying to get good looking replays without sacrificing size for quality
The age of AI has been incredible for the daily game space because you can play around with ideas so much faster and riff to find something that works. On the flip side, there’s a lot more games that just rip off another idea and change some mechanic slightly to make it “new”
I'm slowly building an IDE with mentor/skill-level awareness baked in.
I've noticed that juniors and new hires often fall into an impostor-syndrome trap when reading an unfamiliar codebase or reviewing a senior peer's PR. Documentation helps, but it usually runs into the curse of knowledge: it's written by someone who's spent so much time in the code that they've lost sight of what it's like to be new to it.
I've always liked the rubber-ducking process, and mob programming too, so I'm trying to combine both into a modern AI-enhanced form:
- "Duckies" with distinct personalities (really, skills) that each specialize in a particular kind of problem
- "Teachable moments" (working title): small bubbles that surface something novel, tangential, or foundational as you work
- Skill-level detection and a routing model, so the app doesn't overwhelm or annoy you with explanations you don't need
Each duck also runs on a tiered memory model, rather than one flat context window. There's a core memory, essentially the duck's resume, defining what it's actually skilled at. Above that sits a longer-term memory for company standards and code style, and a separate long-term memory scoped to the project itself. Short-term memory then covers whatever task or feature is currently in flight. The idea is that a duck should reason more like a team member with a real employment history than a chatbot that forgets everything between sessions.
It's called Duckies AI (https://www.duckiesai.com). It’s very rough, working locally, but not in a state I’m ready to ship yet. I'm hoping to ship an alpha soon. Turns out there are a LOT of table-stakes features an IDE needs.
I'm building a Go to WASM reactive UI framework called Goowee. Fine grained signals (no VDOM), components run once, SSR and hydration built in. The JS bridge is about 200 lines. Still experimental but I've thought about it thoroughly and have used it for the landing page of the project and some other projects of mine.
I know Go UI frameworks have a long history of not quite getting there. The bet I am making is that WASM is now fast enough, the tooling is mature enough, and the fine grained signal model avoids the VDOM overhead that held earlier attempts back. Would love an honest critique of whether the framework actually solves the problem and whether it's usable for other's development experience.
I’ve been continuing work on https://mybulkcards.com, a phone app and website for scanning, organizing, and searching Pokémon card collections, especially the thousands of bulk cards that my daughter and I have in our closet from playing.
The goal hasn't changed too much, make building decks easier by knowing exactly what you own and where it’s stored. You organize cards into boxes, search your inventory, search friends’ collections, and keep track of trades instead of digging through a similar closet of cards that my daughter and I search for.
The fun part has been the AI. I trained computer vision models that run entirely on the phone to detect and identify Pokémon cards. Training has become the slowest part. For the model that needs to be retrained every new release, I’m up to about 5 hours per epoch on my M4 Mac with 16 GB of RAM.
The Android app is currently in public testing with people from my local Pokémon league. It’s built with React Native, and I’m working on the iPhone version next.
Still lots to build, mostly around product and ux, and because a recent stupid mistake on my part, backups and deployment safeguards.
I made it specifically to bring back what was amazing about the old internet, and do it as authentically as possible. takes inspiration from old internet messageboards, usenet, bbs, and pubnix hosts. it has sealed mail, boards, an rss reader, built-in media player, custom profiles, a links directory, and quite a bit more.
it's just a little hobby art project for me but i've really appreciated talking to like minded people in a calm space.
I’m working on https://checkpost.dev, a lightweight and easy-to-use osquery manager. It is open source, easy to self-host, and ships as a single binary. It only requires osquery to be installed on the endpoints. Checkpost is readonly and doesn't make any changes on the enrolled hosts.
It can run adhoc or scheduled queries and send the results to ClickHouse, or store them locally in Parquet files and use DuckDB to browse the results. It can also initiate YARA scans and collect the results. It also supports policy evaluation and alerting.
Working on https://github.com/AqilbekAbilaev/ozendb
Free, open-source and drop-in replacement for Studio-3T. All the featured behind Studio-3T subscription for free in OzenDB.
Released beta version recently. Feel free to check out. Will be glad for feedback)
I built a fully locally hosted language learner app. It build language lessons based on a 4 year college curriculum, using a local LLM, Qwen TTS, local STT, and comfyUI image gen. I formulates themed lessons, around 'interesting' stories, generates dialogue, images, audio, quizzes, and pronunciation tests. Each lessons progress is tracked and new lessons are generated daily to reinforce concepts and extend past lesson story lines.
Overall it acts like a 'Choose your own adventure' book, but you learn while doing it. Currently supports Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. Runs on a 4060 16GB card.
As an engineering manager and later a director, a regular and often difficult task was assigning ROI to projects that had recognizable but diffuse impact. It's easy to calculate a dollar figure for certain projects by projecting additional conversions or revenue. It's harder for a security or SRE project that doesn't have a direct impact on those things, but can help reduce risk or empower a bunch of other teams to operate more safely or move more quickly.
I have been working on a set of tools and standard formulas that can be applied to these cases and demonstrate a more accurate view of a team's or department's overall ROI. The plan is to open-source the bulk of it, but provide a hosted service for folks who don't want to manage it themselves.
Note: this involves blockchain VMs. If that's a dealbreaker, feel free to skip. I get it.
I've spent 8 years working on RISC-V VMs for blockchains, recently also contributing to ZK VMs. Modern blockchain VMs are drastically more powerful, and I'm curious how far we can push them. I started porting real game logic to blockchain VMs, running game loop, physics simulation, collision detection, etc., on blockchain VMs. So far I have:
* Teeworlds to CKB-VM: https://xuejie.space/2026_06_16_teeworlds_on_ckb/
* One Hour One Life to CKB-VM: https://xuejie.space/2026_06_29_porting_one_hour_one_life_ga...
* A small ray tracer to Jolt ZK VM: https://xuejie.space/2026_07_10_cpp_ray_tracer_on_jolt_zk_vm...
Source is available for 2 of the 3, I need to clean up the OHOL one.
Some context: CKB-VM [1] is a RISC-V virtual machine I designed for Nervos starting in 2018. Jolt ZK VM [2] is a zero-knowledge virtual machine developed by a16z. Both execute RISC-V code, but due to different design, Jolt ZK VM is a much faster CPU than CKB-VM.
Technically this is a fun challenge. Many techniques I used resemble game development tricks from the 90s on game consoles: fixed point math, banked memory in ROMs, aggressively inlining tricks, etc. I want to push to see where the ceiling is. Right now I'm trying to get a Godot [3] + JoltPhysics [4] game loop running on Jolt ZK VM.
Happy to answer questions about the VM internals, the porting process, or anything in general.
[1] https://github.com/nervosnetwork/ckb-vm
A simple web app that generates scenarios for practicing spoken languages. Read a news article and then chat about it with AI. https://fluenly.ai/
Finished my hobbyist analog computer [1]. (Just need to make a YouTube video, blog about it…)
[1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Anna-Analog-Computer
Many things:
- BrowserBox just landed WebAuthn (passkeys) - for now just macOS clients: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
- This website is served entirely from a 200Kb binary: https://200kb.freelang.dev
- An open SSH server with a TUI web browser: ssh krnl.duetbrowser.com
- All the government's 300K+ pages of UFO files released so far: https://hypergrid.systems/war.gov-ufo-viewer/microfilm5?fram...
And more
I’m still working on a price API for the Counter-Strike 2 market that provides real-time & historical data.
Since my last post in February, I’ve gotten to ~25 paying users, which is cool considering it started as a fun project. Sorta a niche within a niche here.
The market is distributed across a bunch of 3rd-party marketplaces, and there's no 'simple' API that provides genuinely high-quality data for the few marketplaces that matter. It’s a surprisingly complex problem, which is probably why nobody else is bothering :).
It's been a super fun project, and I've been able to learn about collecting & managing a high (to me) scale of data, building an API from the ground-up, and creating my first 'commercial' website.
Website is @ https://cs2.sh/
The API is built w/ Go & Clickhouse, which I've also been super impressed with so far in terms of performance and efficiency.
Web design is inspired/somewhat taken from turbopuffer's site, since I really liked it.
I also recently got JBD2 compliant driver merged into GNU HURD's ext2, and I'm now improving documentation, and things like that.
Here is the repo where the work was happening: https://github.com/mnikic/hurd-journaling
https://cheapcloudstorage.eu - SSH-based cloud storage for long-term off-site backups.
I am building https://EasyAnalytica.com - single place for all your dashboards. It generates dashboards automatically from data without using ai. It supports getting data from google sheets, api's, url's etc. I have recently added support for gsc as data source and i plan to continue adding more in coming weeks.
I'm doing a personal research project into the technical maturity of ccTLDs. So far I've mostly been working with easily accessible public information, which I'm almost ready to publish, but the next phase is going to be trying to identify markers of stack complexity (provisioning etc) which is going to be tricky.
I'd love to hear from anyone else doing work in this area!
Just finished working on a new version of customizable Clarity Linux (GTK+) icons.
Created a new website and new icon manager: https://clarity.pl.eu.org
Complite - Elventy template/starter
And a Polish WikiZEIT project:
And ALT - LanguageTool for Emacs
I am building https://nexaflow.com - a customer support AI agent with built-in modules so small businesses need not buy 4-5 services to run a business. We ship with CRM, Ticketing, Appointment/Scheduler, Booking management system (for Small clinics, etc). Nexaflow agents can answer (and take action on) customer queries coming from Whatsapp, Email, Web (widget) and more.
I'm working on https://topicle.com/ An alternative to Reddit that more aggressively polices bots, spam and astroturfing and has strong guardrails in place against bad moderation. No private profiles that bots use to hide, every mod action can be appealed, mod logs are public, LLM posts are blocked. There's so much obviously inauthentic activity and questionable moderation on Reddit, I decided to try addressing it.
I'm working on a side project to clean up and fix EPUB files with transcription errors, incomplete or inaccurate metadata, and other issues. Users can accept/reject/edit the fixes as they go through it. I have the command-line interface and TUI working (thanks to Ratatui), but I'm still working on a Calibre plugin and web-based version using WASM.
This is my side project turned solo bootstrapped startup that I've been working on over the past 2.5 years. Pastmaps has been solely a US-focused platform since it's initial launch but I'm currently working on launching to the UK and Ireland within the next week. If all goes as planned then I should have a first wave of 30K fully digitized, hi-res, and fully georeferenced 1800s ordnance maps available soon to help folks discover the history all around them.
I'm likely going to need to start building out my own global LiDAR dataset next though. My coverage for the US is quite stellar thanks to the data provided by the USGS' 3DEP program but I'm way out of touch with what's available and possible in the EU. It's gonna be a challenge but I'm excited to dive in.
I am working on a Jupyter notebook client for VisionOS. It allows for 3D data to be visualized on visionOS. Right now it supports point cloud data, USDZ models and Gaussian Splats. I am working on it to launch on the App Store. Sign up for more information at http://www.pulto.org
A Web-based, self-hosted database client and editor for teams - https://github.com/p-raj/collab-sqlc
Supports - Postgres - DynamoDB - Clickhouse - Redis
Primary idea is to evolve from SQL client to a Database Client, where users would be able to host queries, share queries and the work remains auditable.
Previously it was an SQL client, a PopSQL alternative. But I am trying to re-work the architecture so that it can support more databases, and services (query-as-service, query-as-reporting-job, etc).
Automated network port change detection. Scan17 provides a solution to the question:
So your CTO decides to outsource firewall management - and the vendor carelessly leaves a network port open, exposing your production database. How does your team find out before an attacker?
Think of it as nmap port scan diff-ing. If a network port goes from closed to open you get an email or webhook alert. There is a REST API for automated workflows and privately hosted engines will be supported for some plans. There is a wait-list form on the website if you want to stay in the loop.
If you work in infosec / cyber security and are interested in being an early product designer / beta tester, let's chat! See my profile for how to get in touch.
I'm working on a nationwide US parcel dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye....
It's mostly "public" data, but incumbent data vendors charge $90k+ for this data because it has to be acquired and aggregated from 3200+ US counties. This is a lot of work if you aren't using LLMs and agents to do much of the work for you.
I'm trying to make quality parcel data more accessible to everyone.
Underscore: https://underscore.audio/
On-demand, procedural audio programs (w/LLMs). I’m working to make these embeddable in software such as games and health/wellness apps.
Would love to hear how developers might use it.
I’m working on https://main-duck.com/ which simplifies converting your code to mcp. I plan to make this easy to integrate into CI so mcps can be updated easily. It’s hosted remotely and I’m very excited about where it’ll go.