alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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Working on putting together a self-paced "Coding with AI" course for non-SWE(s).
Since I could not find anything out there, I am scratching my own itch.
RapidCAM.app is still taking up all my time. It is a 2.5D, parametric CAD/CAM program for CNC and laser with flat or 4th axis. Open source, free, run completely in browser.
This is a passion project that I want for my own use but am happy if other's find it useful and very open to feedback and collaboration.
The file system is open and very well defined so that AI can write files. There is an AI Assistant dialog that helps you to write prompts and then takes the AI file and runs the file through a solver and checks.
TermDOM: A terminal renderer which used real DOM nodes, so you can write TUIs like web apps with HTML, CSS, and whatever framework you want. I didn’t really write this, more like spent intense weeks of effort where I product manage (yell at) Claude and did visual testing.
A Golang web framework.
https://github.com/gofabrik/fabrik
I’ve been waiting for a spine surgery and to do something with my time I started experimenting with an idea I had. It completely pulled me in, and helps me to distract myself.
It is work in progress, lacks of documentation, I am not even sure I will release it.
Mostly hardware.
A cheap rowing counter. Competitive rowers use a training device that counts their strokes per minute. I figured out that the major parts are really cheap, even as individual purchases, so I wanted to build a budget version. So far it counts strokes fairly accurately and I've just completed initial tests of the display.
Drone experiment. I'm building a image recognition drone from scratch. It's based on a H743 Slim V4, with an RPI5 and a OAK-D Lite. I'm currently trying to figure out why the back left rotor is producing way too little thrust.
Like everyone else, I'm also working on an agent harness. tl;dr I don't trust any agent to not be dumb, but the agents seem to have some success recognizing when the work of an other agent is dumb. In early tests, the back and forth seems to provide more stable and better results.
Building a repairable e-bike battery at https://infinite-battery.com
Working on goldy: https://github.com/koubaa/goldy
A new kind of GPU library written in rust with backends for CUDA, DX12, Vulkan, and Metal (tenstorrent and wgpu are planned) and bindings for rust-dynamic, python, c++, c, and dotnet (Java and Fortran are planned).
Uses the slang shader language exclusively. All submissions are expressed as graphs (like cuda graphs), are retained automatically (sometimes partially with a graph partition algorithm), and automatic synchronization of GPU resources. No runtime dependencies (slang is vendored) and new calling convention for shaders using a virtual entry point that allows resources to appear as arguments to the shader 'main'. Includes automatic VRAM and resource recycling for device resources.
Shader coroutines, rust shader authoring, and automatic kernel fusion are planned.
Supports both GPGPU and graphics.
Made it because cross backend GPU libraries usually either target lowest common denominator or are specialized for either compute or graphics or ML. In my experience GPU programs and frameworks are written to target a different kind of machine than a tape machine, but nobody outside of tenstorrent have bothered to describe that machine. So I defined a new kind of abstract machine for cooperative resource-oriented computation called a Fondaco machine for which goldy is the reference implementation.
My games, and cleaning up my ext3/4 journalling code for the NetBSD kernel. I've got it opening, reading, and replaying the journal upon mount, now I need to move on to getting it to actually log disk transactions during use.
I make a podcast client for iOS that detects and skips ads for you using an on device model. This allows me to sell without a subscription. I am working on v2 which will bring support for video podcasts and YouTube podcasts.
I'm building a language with AI as a personal project. My hobby is tinkering with my homepage [1], and for paid work, I'm handling a project related to autonomous drones
Sun signal. You can time your life events with the sun: think optimize work time, sleep time, rest time by following sunrise, solar noon and sunset.
It was my counter cultural bet to burn out and AI vibe coding all night long. Has worked pretty well.
I've continued working on my game project, Vestiges, which is a 2D narrative strategy rogue-like in Godot.
I'd hoped for a more meaningful update from when I first mentioned Vestiges last month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884984). But I've often felt discouraged and haven't worked as much as I'd intended.
As was recommended by guiambros last month, I started the process of setting up Vestiges on Steam, but that's still in progress (currently, my identity is being verified). I also set-up at micro.blog (https://ksaun.micro.blog/) and (https://mastodon.social/@ksaun), but haven't posted anything yet.
I bought a Linux laptop for this project (I was working on a 2020 Surface Book 3). (I had used Unix in the 1990s, but not much since then. The video game industry being so Windows-centric, I'd stuck with that OS throughout my career.) So recently I spent a few days enjoying (not sarcastically!) setting up my new computer and work environment. In doing so, I also took improved some aspects of my development process.
Limited meaningful work on the game itself. From a technical perspective, I could release the demo now, but I'm dissatisfied with the content (specifically the writing). Not that it needs to be amazing just yet, but I want it at least less embarrassing. As I've worked with some of the best game writers in the industry (in my opinion; people like Chris Avellone, George Ziets, Neal Hallford, Brian Mitsoda), I'm accustomed to quality that exceeds my personal ability. And this writing work requires greater focus than I can usually muster, so I've been procrastinating, polishing other things that were already sufficient to ship.
Since last time, I've finished most work on tutorial features and content as well as the other implementations I wanted for the demo. For the modes that are ready, I added full support for keyboard-only play (which was a more substantial effort than I'd anticipated, taking close to two days (very part-time for me, but Claude was fairly busy)). I also now have an MCP server implemented so that Claude can playtest as a player would, but I've only just started to make use of it. (And some progress on the aforementioned writing, just not much.)
Software Factory. MIT licensed. runfusion.ai
I put together a nationwide (US) land parcel dataset over the past year and a half, and have been building a bunch of apps on top of this data: https://landstats.com
I'm working on a guidebook. Not putting it online to get scraped!
My health
Avarand, a classic WoW like mmorpg
Northstar web browser :)
My home media server! I’m so rookie compared to many of you, but proud of what I’ve got. We’ve (family) been on it with no paid streaming for 18mo now but it really became turnkey/low Maintenance a few months ago.
Still on plex, next step is Jellyfin.
Olympic wrestling education tool.
Indexing multiple captured video streams with awarded action points and adding athlete/referee positions overlay. Stretch goal -- controlling PTZ camera for predictive capture of the high intensity actions.
I am not really working on anything new as such, but I am mostly just polishing existing workflows. For instance, the task for today will be to use mechanize (in ruby) to automatically tap into a webservice which I use manually right now via a browser interface. I want to do this all from the commandline next. (Ideally I'd not want to depend on this and do it locally, but it does various things with .pdf files which I have not yet been able to do myself. ghostscript is surprisingly awful, and while there may be alternatives, I am not too familiar with all of what they can do, whereas the webservice really has all pdf-related tasks already solved, as-is, including optimising for size. For some reason ghostscript produces much worse results, from A to Z.)
Nothing too interesting though.
I have more interesting projects, but these have to come after I focus on more pressing reallife requirements; on my next todo list, though, I want to extend the code I use to compile from source. I track almost 4000 programs already and can compile most of these (for some reason GCC 16.2.0 does not want to compile today); I want to extend this, finishing an automatic build of the linux kernel and full bootstrap into a new system while also adding more language bindings, such as lua. And also allow for this to be compilable via a web-interface.)
https://httpstate.com // a super easy, batteries included, library and server to exchange small bits of data between apps
https://wafertown.com // the first LLMORPG, you write a prompt and your character "lives" through a simulation of life using it as a guide, interacts with others, etc. sends you a summary of what it did and allows you to steer it for next day. think of it as a small tamagotchi but with hundreds (hopefully thousands!) of other players
rust based agent orchestration tool that works offline
a lightweight portable foldable seiza bench. yes I know there are such but none are good. mine is good
I am working on a discussion board for HN’s Who is hiring.
Too many times I have been burned by applying to scam listings or people who are just to self-promote and use people who want a job as a marketing channel (looking at you BetterStack, fu in particular).
I want people to be able to discuss and flag companies which are lying or just a waste of time, yet HN refuses to do anything about it and doesn’t allow threads as discussions and removes comments.
Hit me up if you want on the beta testers lists, already got a couple of people.
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I am building very high yield ETFs directory, like... Ponzi-scheme-alike levels of dividends, and I am collecting each and single RoC to actually know if they generate any income or do they simply pay your money back, I still have long road to go, but it is coming along.
About 100 games and still yet to finish 1..
..but I get to take the common stuff from each and put it into an open-source Godot framework so as to not feel totally useless :')
https://github.com/InvadingOctopus/comedot
and all of this is making me want for a better programming language designed from the ground up for games, with no need to care about hardware, so I've been brainstorming and rubber-duckying about that as well.
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A slop detecting browser extension for LinkedIn because I have to use it these days to find a job, I was getting tired of seeing all the AI slop content.