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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I'm slowly working on a spacecraft design webapp: https://vesperastro.com. Think PCPartPicker for spacecraft.
You can build out and trade hardware in the master equipment list and immediately visualize how any changes impact mass, power, propellant, and link margins, or break power or data interface compatibility. You can also play around with orbit and operating modes to optimize things like orbit average power.
I'm hoping it can be useful in rapidly iterating early stage spacecraft designs and weighing system-level trade studies across CONOPS and hardware. Its still very much a work in progress so I'm always open to feedback.
I'm backporting the modern 2026 WebKit framework to work with Safari 7 on OS X Mavericks, from 2013.
With the updated frameworks in place, this ancient browser becomes able to access the modern web again! Even webapps like Figma work!
https://github.com/Wowfunhappy/WebKit
(As I make clear in the Readme, Claude wrote this code, a project like this would never be feasible otherwise. My main job has been to decide on larger infrastructure questions and find bugs and make them reproducible.)
Helping a friend build a midi controller replica of a legendary vintage synthesizer (Yamaha CS80)
A modern game engine that can play the Classic Fallout 1/2 games on modern systems (including mac, linux, iOS, Android). Hoping to bring these games to a wider audience.
I am building this:
It is the most comprehensive collection of benchmarks of the safety, ethics, and values of LLMs. I also aggregate sparse safety benchmark scores into a global ranking by optimizing the global ranking to maximize correlation with individual benchmarks.
I'm working on writing up pages for projecthammer.org, the new website where I'll host my database of Canadian grocery prices. It's getting interest from more academics and needs a more formal home.
I've been curious about ways in which politicians who are in the minority/out of power can still make progress on issues that matter to them.
I'm working on a browser IDLE game made with Go. I've never touched Go before. The game core it's 80% done and it was pretty easy to code but I have no idea what I'm doing in with the transport/http layer.
At this rate I'll have it finished by the end of the next decade.
A lot of Claude plugins.
https://github.com/mrieck/demoday-claude-plugin - create demo videos for your projects using Claude
https://github.com/mrieck/overboard-plugin - CTO assistant, PM helper Claude plugin
https://plugmyplugin.com - Weekly voting contest and directory for Claude Plugins similar to Devhunt/ProductHunt
Two open-source initiatives:
1. https://preseason.ai Basically a benchmarking platform that measures how the top LLMs recommend devtools when prompted to build different types of web apps.
2. https://widen.dev A native Mac desktop Postgres GUI with text-to-SQL. You can even use the LLM that already comes installed in your MacOS.
I am working on Cangjie Workbook. I am trying to create the best in class tool for learning Cangjie. It's a Chinese input method based on decomposing characters into sub parts (not necessarily related to how they are written). It has a high learning curve, but it is a lot of fun to type with and helps you remember characters. It is a tool that I use myself. I already have a couple of users that have been giving me feedback. You can use a subset for free and without any login credentials. The complete product is available for a small monthly fee. Any feedback is welcome!
Research on an AI super agent that manages memory, knowledge, skills, tools, other agents, channels, management and orchestration, and auto update its own code at the end of every session if needed
Previous agents developed:
Working on https://localhero.ai, automating i18n translations for product teams (runs as a GitHub Action, translates new strings on PRs matching your brand voice and glossary).
Shipped "bring your own translations" feature this month, built together with a customer who wanted Localhero for the workflow and review layer but writes some translations themselves. Otherwise smaller improvements and marketing. Better Lingui support, for example: projects using explicit IDs keep the source text in the source locale's msgstr instead of the msgid, which our CLI got wrong before. Also wrote some blog posts, a comparison of GitHub Actions for i18n and a guide to auto-translating gettext .po files in CI (Django, Phoenix, LinguiJS). Content is slow going but it seems to be how people find us via perplixity/gemini/chatgpt.
On the side, https://infrabase.ai (AI infrastructure tools directory) grew ~16% MoM. I leaned further into the agent angle: added a public query API plus llms.txt/agents.md/etc so agents can query the directory directly, and exported the full dataset to a public GitHub repo. Starting to get som traction and people wanting collaborations.
I am building my "dream tool" too, a cross-device roaming profile-experience context-focused UI. Many, many iterations that go back maybe 15y, even built a custom linux distro (iolinux) back in the day(ro root, containerized user-spac with composer-like app handling). Always worked on side-projects, consulting gigs or one-off implementations, often times across multiple customer-devices. Switching context is damn expensive, hence tried to build a tool to help with that. Always failed on the UI parts - native linux tooling was just awful. What do you specifically mean by "context" you ask? Well, you get a call, switch to work on `work://customer-foo/project-bar/task-baz`, every bound device / tool / application loads data related to that task (your filesystem mount shows relevant files, browser loads relevant tabs, obsidian relevant notes etc). Building my own small db engine to accommodate that use-case, getting more fun working on it every day
Akariq has taken most of my time [0]. I sell travel eSIM plans for 190+ countries, no app or account needed! Since last time, many HN readers have tried it with very positive reviews. I reply to each and every customer who reach out to me and also implemented some feedback they gave.
On July 24 2026, all major eSIM providers including Akariq faced disruptions. However, Akariq was able to serve all customers even during the downtime either by switching to backup resources or issuing replacement eSIMs free of cost. Some customers of major providers like Airalo experienced serious down time. I wrote more about the incident here and what I am striving to be better in terms of automation etc [1].
One review from a customer in China [2] made all my effort worth it. They said that they were able to use Akariq to access Gmail, WhatsApp etc around the GFW. It even worked smoothly in areas like Beihai and Weizhou island apart from the cities. Tethering with their laptop was helpful too.
[1] https://akariq.com/en/blog/akariq-backup-esim-service-interr...
An overhaul of my original PlayStation bare-metal programming tutorial repo: https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal
It was never really meant to be an SDK of sorts that other PS1 homebrew projects would pull as a submodule and depend on, but since it more or less became one I am likely going to split off the examples from the "core" (headers, CMake build scripts and tools). I have also been asked to add more examples, particularly on how to play sounds through the SPU and access the CD-ROM drive, and may cover I/O on some PS1-based arcade systems in the future.
A graph-based code editor https://miralume.dev
A few things actually.
I’ve been working up reimplementations of Nikoli puzzles to host on my personal blog, the goal is to work through the maths and then explain how it’s relevant or helps create a fun games. Nikoli is the magazine that helped create sudoku and made it famous - they have a lot of other pen and paper puzzles that are really fun to play.
I’ve also got two other open source tools I’ve built to help me work daily:
https://tajd.github.io/cofferdam/ which is a rust based cli tool I wrote to parse the ast of codebase and enforce architectural preferences - eg don’t reimplement design system for components down to DRY
https://tajd.github.io/projektor/ Is an ai native project management tool where I can plan work on the train and then have my agents pick it up autonomously. Bootstrapped it quickly but then have been incrementally adding more functionality to it. It’s like self hosted jira on cloudflare but much faster and has more agentic development tools. I added tooling around being able to autonomously work through epics, manage quality and fix identified bugs - https://tajd.github.io/projektor/agents/playbooks/epic-goal/. The goal being deliver useful features and then to ultimately surface the number of bugs identified by agents and users so that I can see the health of the project and figure out if I need to write more code myself or improve feature descriptions to reduce discovered bugs. I don’t think this is new at all but it’s reliable and done well, I hope.
Enjoying retirement. Amazed how fast I was able to just stop thinking about software. It's very liberating.
For the last 6 months I've been working on a local-first replacement for accounting and business management software. I just finished building a modular system that I'm pretty proud of, which lets users develop their own modules and import them into a running instance without having to fork the repo.
Blorp. https://blorp-lang.org
It takes inspiration from Python, Rust, Go, and functional programming. It's oriented toward readability, safety, and speed.
I'm finishing up the journey of completely self-hosting. Then I'll be tidying it up for an initial release.
Currently building Tensou in my free time
https://github.com/kofta999/tensou
I always get frustrated when using local file transfer tools like:
Dukto: was my personal favorite, but is tiring to run cross platform, and most importantly does not support transfer resumes (so if copy got cancelled/disconnected at 99% you either have to copy again or search for the diff and copy it manually)
LocalSend: pretty good cross platform support, but does not work when connecting 2 devices using a LAN cable, and resume support is poorish
So I'm building Tensou to be an alternative that doesn't compromise all these features. Supporting resumes, folder syncing similar to rsync, cross platform (well I don't have a Mac to test on but it should work, and mobile support is planned)
Performance wise it's on par with Dukto and even slightly better with large files (and I'm still working on optimizations for small files too)
Would like to hear HN's feedback or what other features should I add? My goal with Tensou is to be the best, most performant and feature rich local file transfer tool ever.
Been going a while, working to shift into a verification layer on existing static scanners rather than a standalone product: https://rsolv.dev takes a highly opinionated TDD approach to _proving_ (or disproving!) scanner-indicated codebase vulnerabilities and writing red tests against the desired secure behavior, so that customers can trust that they're not just making code mutations without cause, and that the shipped fixes actually work, and that there's regression protection in their suite.
Aside from that, I've been getting into building hyper-local services around public data; it feels really rewarding and relatable to invest more locally!
Already up and running: https://hailpass.com/?ref=HAILHN9 (ref code there knocks $10 off the season price) as a "season pass" for latlong/street address level-targeted hail notifications, built specifically for damaging-size hail (not just _any_ hail) on the Colorado front range. Email is free, texts are on the season pass model.
On its way, likely first ship today: https://denverbroomsday.com, same season pass model with same free email/paid-per-season text split on reminders to move your car before street sweeping days in Denver.
I’m building cloud managed self improving agents at https://sanbox.cloud.
Each instance gets its own persistent file system, root SSH access and a web terminal. The goal is to let an agent build skills with experience rather than start from scratch on every task.
I started with Hermes as the first harness and now exploring Prime Agent. You can use it for a personal assistant, use it to build LLM wiki, connect it as part of an agent team, or run any coding agent on the cloud with dangerously skip permissions.
I’m also working towards a more general-purpose agent setup that can connect to channels such as email, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Buzz.
I'm working on a family organizer app Mana - The AI-Connected Home App for Households & Trusted Circles https://share.google/dCKfODeN7c1QhHhft
Tandem bike physics game with device motion, controller gyro and multiplayer. Open source.
https://tandemonium.jimandi.love
Steam play test: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4482940/Tandemonium/
Open source: https://github.com/petegordon/tandemonium
Working on https://letterspractice.com
This is a high efficiency, narrowly-scoped, low screen-time early literacy app for families with kids aged 2+.
GrandpaCAD - AI 3D modeling software focused on simplicity. Made it so even my grandpa could model. He’s been asking me for years when will I teach him how to 3D model. I tried, we failed and then I seen him use ChatGPT so I knew there was a better way than traditional CAD tools.
Recently we also got European funding and the project got some traction. Very exciting times ahead.
A tabletop adventure game generator. Instead of tediously rolling for disconnected content in limited ways (enemy to fight, loot after fight, etc), you generate an adventure and print it out. Random events can be connected, enemies can be elegantly scaled. You discover a rich world rather than tediously generate a low fidelity one.
I’m working on The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton, a chess app for Apple platforms:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/mqfhpmHY
This work is motivated for my lifelong love for chess, my passion for Apple hardware and software (not as much as before, sadly), and my frustration of not having an Apple-native app comparable to ChessBase. My disappointment with the trend of recent macOS apps using Electron or other cross-platform frameworks instead of the native toolkits is also a factor. I miss the days when Apple users demanded more from macOS apps.
My aim with MBCA is to create a serious chess app that satisfies the needs of everyone from club players to professionals, with a native Apple look and feel and iCloud sync. Currently the app supports the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. I hope to make a visionOS port later. There is still a lot of work to do, but I’m having a lot of fun developing it, and I already find the current version very useful for my chess training.
The name, in case you wonder, is from a short story by Gene Wolfe, my favorite science fiction author.
I’m iterating on a constellation of git collab services that I’m calling “the disappearing code forge.” All self hostable with a focus on minimalism and Unix philosophy.
I just revamped the collaboration portion which is a patchbin service: https://pr.pico.sh
As part of that I work im also iterating on the ci/cd solution we are calling pici: https://ci.pico.sh
AMA
I've been having fun building out a link-in-bio tool / micro-site builder in my spare time. It started out as just something that a solo-dev could build without a lot of experience... but it's turned out to be more complicated and interesting than I thought! Right now I'm working on getting embeds and other 'fancier' types of blocks built out. Also… if any SEO wizards are lurking, I would love tips on getting more Google impressions/CTR, lol. If you want to check it out (would love some feedback!):
Nearing the release of my first game ever - Silent Shark, a tactical, map-based WW2 submarine sim releasing this Wednesday on PC, Mac, and Linux! I'm at about 17,000 wishlists on Steam and I'm having such a blast. Very impressed with Steam so far.
I designed Silent Shark to be the sweet spot of minimalism meeting realism of dials and procedures (like a simulated Torpedo Data Computer) that scratches my simmer geek itch without being impossible to write the game myself.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705650/Silent_Shark/
Browser demo: https://silentshark.app/alpha
I've been a hobbyist game dev for years; nothing published.
Over the time I've built a massive collection of assets from various stores and stuff I've built.
The solutions for managing assets seem to be largely in house tools studio build themselves and don't share.
So I'm working on a digital asset management system that plays nicely with the tools I use; unreal engine, unity, and blender.
I don't have anything public yet, but hopefully for September or October edition of this post!
A newspaper for kids. Printed on real newspaper and delivered monthly. Full of puzzles, math challenges, nature facts, science experiments, outdoor scavenger hunts, and even custom card/board games for families to play. https://thecuriositytimes.com/
Limiting screen time has been a primary goal in my household and has been going well. But I wanted something that would take my kids hours every month that
1. isn’t on a screen 2. educational 3. fun
I'm building Duolingo for blackjack card counting. It's a Progressive Web App so you can install, learn, and practice cross-platform, and it is designed to combine a mastery-styled lesson plan (e.g. you can't move onto until you demonstrate mastery of the current lesson) along with exercises and tools for keeping the skills sharp. A complete novice should be able to pick it up and become a profitable blackjack player.
It also contains tools for scouting casinos, logging sessions, calculating effective profit-per-hour based on table rules, and other things a professional would need.
I'm in the process of polishing it up, and am aiming to launch Fall 2026. Current pricing plan is to be ~$10-15 per month for the pro tools, but provide the offline capabilities, lesson plan, and learning tools completely free without ads or weird gimmicks like a limited number of lessons or practice per day.
A C++ lib to write SIMD code like you would write GLSL: CPPShader https://github.com/gitdepierre/cppshader. I need to clean up the code a bit right now, and I'll add SSE2 support for older CPUs (currently requiring SSE4, but I want to see it working on C2D and Atom. I just need to replace the blendv functions with something compatible with SSE2). Then I'll focus on adding NEON support.
Working on a 5 min multiplayer dungeon https://escapethe.app which the kids say “is actually fun”.
And taking a second crack at a feature flags with https://quonfig.com because I seem to be unable to put this problem down and finally feel like I have the right git native and agent first approach.
i'm working on a mobile app which spins up https://sprites.dev/ sandboxes, allows you to log in with your coding agent cli/subscription (claude code and codex currently supported), connect other services (github, vercel) and run+manage your coding agents in a convenient chat interface
it's for people who dont own a home server, don't like to keep their laptops open and working, don't want to trust on magical stuff openclaw does and instead would like to work with the usual harness they are working with day-to-day, don't want to be vendor-locked (crush/opencode/glm-5.2 and other models/providers support to come) but want to have a way to execute ideas while being away from their laptops
the demo is available on testflight and going to be released to play market soon as well
it's very alpha version but it's functional
lmk if anyone would like to test
Building a simple sandboxed way to run open weight models over a copy of all my personal data (email, docs, messaging, photos, etc). Think it'd be cool to have a self hosted AI "chief of staff" that has full read access to my personal info.
I've been hacking away on some scripts to clean up saved ChatGPT transcripts (surprisingly annoying because of how the app's JavaScript works, and I discovered too late that some of them were incomplete; but I have workarounds now) and convert them to a fairly minimal Markdown with some custom restructuring. This is mainly so I can share them on my blog and discuss some experiences of using the LLM; but also I'm extracting some code samples as the basis of some small projects I've had in mind for years but could never motivate myself to start (at least partly from an inability to choose).
In particular: an image viewer with a small suite of extra functionality; and a browser extension for cleaning up URLs and then bookmarking them in a more organized way that I might actually use meaningfully.
I'm working on a go (the game) server. still unpolished, but it's functional! currently hosted on a raspberry pi in my living room and proxied to the public Web via Tailscale. Rust backend, SQLite, preact frontend.
Working on an open-source alternative to Loom/Jam/Birdie/Screendesk
It captures the screen recording along with console logs, network requests, and session activity so you can get to the root cause faster
My side project this quarter has been building a system that adds steering / planning to LLMs/WAMs/etc. (T, DiT, etc.) in a market/physics/other-ground-truth-constraints aware way. I have a small model outperforming some of the largest frontier models in some games (i.e., adversarial settings) now, but that is not very impressive because "plain old LLMs" are the wrong mathematical object for gameplay, IMO. So far, it's a mix of RL + optimization (e.g., MILP) on the planning side, and not quite realtime enough to play RTSes, but that's only a few weeks away. Have been very impressed at how far the open source ecosystem for this stuff has gotten since the last time I tried something like this.
Few things, trying to take full advantage of AI coding and my domains.
FutureOfGaming.com - In-depth weekly analysis revealing what's actually being developed in gaming, from new player experiences to technical innovation. Over 1,000 gaming patents covered since Nov last year. Every Tuesday for patents and Thursdays for filed.
ContentCreators.com - education, free toolkits, tools directory, job board for content creators. Recently also set up creator profiles to build out a creator directory and connect with brands.
WebsiteAudit.com - does what it says, run my websites through it to identify gaps - anything from performance, security, SEO and get recommended fixes. Looking to expand to also add brand AI visibility, hoping to launch soon. Still in testing
I'm remaking an old MMORPG Canaan Online to be fully native web client, learn a lot like reverse engineering the client server protocol, a bit of network programming, and how to render that sweet nostalgic 2D sprite with WebGL. Currently had somewhat playable server and the client going, got lot of help from AI to learn the domain I quite not understand.
I’m building FitBee, a fast, ad-free, no-nonsense calorie and macro tracker for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. The app is built with Swift and SwiftUI, with a Python backend. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fitbee-calorie-macro-counter/i...
A daily estimation game: https://estimatle.com
Every day, players answer 5 questions that require estimating some quantity, such as distance, year, cost etc. Then you can compare against answers of other players and the real answer.
Working on finding the right balance of questions that are both fun and also help understand facts about the world.
I resurrected an ancient UIUC x86 ASM game, built with some friends in the summer of 2002 for ECE291. Claude Code drove most of the work.
The first attempt was a full on x86asm->webasm transpiler which ran into some difficult stack issues.
The second attempt was successful via conversion from x86asm->c->emscripten->wasm [0]. It plays pretty well on mobile and just about any browser now.
Fair warning it is pretty difficult to win, unless you can figure out where the enemy weaknesses are [1].
[0] [code] https://github.com/gottebp/alan_parsons_project
[1] [play] https://particlefield.com/projects/alan-parsons/game.html
I've been working on two projects.
## Tab Highway: Browser extension focusing on the UX/process of decluttering
It turns tab cleanup into a game.
When you pile up too many open tabs or whenever you want, it opens a night drive where each tab is a road sign you drive through or send to the trash.
[GitHub](https://github.com/pravj/TAB-HIGHWAY)
This is still a work in progress. It works on my machine, but not fully distribution-ready.
## A short satirical blog on the overly-expressive/interactive web experiments fueled by coding agents.
Ironically, the project listed above falls in the same category.
[Woodworking Has Been Achieved Internally](https://hackpravj.com/blog/woodworking-has-been-achieved-int...)
I have been working on couple of open source projects related to package intelligence and AI tooling.
https://secchi.dev Secchi is Open Source Package Intelligence | python based
https://tuffcli.dev tuff is Capability lifecycle manager for coding agents | rust based
Both would be very helpful to be part of developer tooling. I built package intelligence when I need to monitor the downloads of my other personal project packages from package manager.
I have learned a lot over in terms of rust language, design patterns in rust, also how the ecosystem of AI capabilities within projects use cases and needs
That sounds interesting, give star to repo :D