alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
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Been working on a replacement for my Git GUI of choice, Tower, for the last few months. I've been using Tower 2 for almost a decade now, refusing the monthly subscription to upgrade to a fresher version. I'm going to keep mine a one time purchase with support guaranteed for a year. If a major version releases after that, it'll be another perpetual license for the new version. If you want the new features, you can choose to upgrade, if you don't stay on the version you're on until new feature warrant it.
I'm looking for land to buy in Wyoming to build my AI apocalypse bunker on.
years ago i sat through interviews for front end & back end engineering roles at my old job while other folks were out (as member of a panel), and consistently I found that where we gave some real bugs to debug & fix, through a shared IDE, then worked together to solve it or go over the persons thinking, those situations we absolutely always got a better sense of how the person worked and solved problems & whether we'd like working with them or not (to some degree). I also found a few of those exercises to be educational myself.
this year i thought itd be great to help prepare myself and other people in the job market with a tool that presented broken front end code, and then allow debugging on the browser and patch code right there, to test if it worked or not. if cant solve it, theres a nice explainer popup. my main hope is to help level up interview code chops and confidence in debugging just like we would on a real production system , at least the simpler bugs.
still working on it, here's the draft of the idea: https://bugcloud.app
It's an extension of a longer-running project (https://www.forth.news) where it exposes and organizes 100s of newsworthy primary sources -- statements, press releases, press pool reports, emergency alerts, etc, whether from press email lists, X/Twitter, Bluesky, RSS, etc. The web UI is similar to TweetDeck - and it sends notifications.
Latest update now allows some panels to be based on an LLM prompt (i.e. "everything about the Iran War and its effects in the U.S.") which searches the entire catalog of sources as they are posted.
I'm making a WebGPU renderer with WebGL fallbacks, with a path tracer for 'photo mode', specifically targeting agents writing web 3D things. I'm not especially far into it though. It doesn't use 3D models; there's a DSL for making things.
There's a demo app here that only works on desktop - https://fab.ooer.com/ (scroll down in the right hand menu to quality and change to 'trace' for photo mode)
I’m working on two projects that make public data easier to explore through maps.
US Energy Cost Explorer (https://energy-maps.com) is a free tool for exploring electricity and natural gas costs across the US. You can compare states, follow prices over time, and look at bills and energy burden. I work in energy affordability, and I wanted to make this information easier for people to access and understand.
MarketGround (https://marketground.io) lets you draw an area or choose a travel time around a location, then explore its population, income, housing, and nearby businesses. It also shows daytime versus nighttime population, which is useful when thinking about who might actually be around a potential store or restaurant during business hours.
MarketGround is a side project, and I’ve found getting it in front of potential users harder than building it. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has evaluated a retail or franchise location. What information mattered most, and what was difficult to find?
I'm building InterviewMe ( https://interviewme.now/ ). It lets employers interview you via AI and is intended as a better way for people to get deep answers about your work history and experience than they could by looking at a simple online resume or LinkedIn. You upload your resume, answer some questions about your background, optionally upload any other documents you have (cover letters, awards, articles, etc) and it ingests all of that and creates a conversational agent people can use to ask questions about your professional experience. Check out my profile to get an idea of how it works: https://interviewme.now/@max and then get your own: It's free!
Still plugging away teaching kids to code and hand draw their own computer games:
https://breaka.club/blog/why-were-building-clubs-for-kids
Have been running an in-school pilot over the last school term. Has been super insightful and led to a heap of changes to optimize UX. However, the biggest challenge has been delivery in this environment.
Trying to run a game in a browser on school iPads powered by really locked down networks has been challenging. Some school iPads will crash (out of memory) when launching the camera view, whilst others run flawlessly. We use a fork of Godot, and are constantly fighting to strike a balance between UX (increased parallelism) and browser device constraints i.e. a limit on how many web workers we can fit in memory.
In addition to our main (build and play your own RPG) experience, we also stream games direct to iPad. In particular a modded version of Overcooked! 2 that teaches kids to code — Overcooked itself was never even released on iPad. We've built our own Kubernetes system that spins up (a license limited number of) games/pods on demand backed by (time sliced) NVidia GPUs. This is literally running out of my home office. Despite the complexity of building all that, the Kubernetes and GPU time slicing wasn't even the largest hurdle. Turns out UDP is a no-go on the school network, so direct WebRTC was out the window. Instead we're using Cloudflare's TURN relay with TCP. Which much to my surprise, is holding up quite well.
Definitely a learning experience. However, kids are having a blast. Can't wait to roll this out further!
ChonkyBlox: A new approach to Block based coding - instead of complicated algorithms to derive the code from block programs I am using AI on the back-end, which actually makes a higher level of abstraction possible with the blocks. Each block has an LLM instruction attached, along with rules defined in the bespoke back-end harness.
Also: kids can code using cardboard cut-out blocks and just take a photo to import, generate Arduino firmware, compile and flash to ESP32 - all from a single docker web application.
Hoping to bootstrap a cheaper, open source alternative to current systems (one of which my son is using at his school). I have had success doing this with another project on Patreon so that's where it is going to be launched. https://www.patreon.com/ChonkyBlox - so far just a couple of demo video's but code will be released in full once I have added more blocks and a tutorial.
Ultimately this is aimed at the South African education sector, where many schools may have only one computer available for a classroom to share, hence the cardboard cut-outs. There is also a hardware component still in development - a simple pcb breadboard break-out with connectors for components instead of kids having to use jumper cables on the breadboared. We also have a working Desktop application which does code assistance from within the Arduino IDE - using the same web server with api, so literally everything from very small kids to advanced is covered.
I’m working on an app to help my late diagnosed ADHD - through sound.
The app wraps whatever is playing on mac through device convolution (old radio, hifi system) - Room convolution (a bedroom, a forest) and adds ambience (rain, wind, waves) and Apples spatial processing - so it sounds like a real space.
For me - hearing the sound in a space really helps more than just the dry sound.
Making AppletForge, a modern JavaCard/GlobalPlatform developer experience for secure elements, with the ease of use of GlobalPlatformPro gp.jar and all the modern DX expectations of anno 2026. https://github.com/martinpaljak/JCardEngine/wiki
Hey everyone!
Last year, Mozilla released Orbit, an AI-powered browser summarizer hosted on a GCP server. After people started digging into the extension, they discovered things like backend endpoints such as store_result. Eventually, Mozilla discontinued the project. For the past month, I’ve been trying to rebuild Orbit from scratch, but with one major difference: Apogee is fully local and privacy-focused. Apogee doesn’t send or store your data. It can directly connect to your local Ollama instance for inference. I’ve also added WebGPU integration for Chrome and Transformers.js for Firefox to provide faster, local responses.
It can summarize: Articles and websites, YouTube and Billie videos, Wikipedia articles, Hacker News and Reddit threads.
You can check out the source code here: https://github.com/darshi1337/apogee
Install Apogee:
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/apogee/pgemlpomhkdc...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/apogeeext/
Obviously it is far from complete. Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions!
Working on a full workout and dieting stack!
17,000+ users already! It's a completely ad free, subscription free product. MacroCodex app, which results in guaranteed weight loss or weight gain outcomes within 2-3 weeks. Many people will start seeing results within the first week. Don't believe? Read the reviews.
MacroCodex is a "Total Calorie Burn of the day" using completely sensorless method explained here: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/macrocodex/smart-calorie-bu...
CalorieCodex - calorie tracking app which has a Agent Harness built in using BYOK (bring your own key model). How does it help? Using this anyone can track calories and plan their meals. Agent includes skills which help you accurately track calories and plan meals.
Symbiote App - Think "BoostCamp" but completely free, no ads, and fully programmable workout tracker
Example of GZCLP: https://symbiote-studio.macrocodex.app/?builtin=gzclp
I’m building TraceDB[1] because I think observability needs an overhaul. We pay a premium to index millions of near-identical spans, sample away the rare ones that might explain an outage, and still have to piece together what failed, where it started, and how it spread. All the data is largely there, but no one can make sense of it! Observability was hallucinating before AI made it fashionable.
I’m seeing near-100% root-cause accuracy on synthetic test data and am looking to validate that on real production workloads using OpenTelemetry tracing. If you’re open to chatting or experimenting, drop me a line! I’d also love to hear ideas or how we can improve observability.
Working on a better way to do email. Every solution I've seen so far is trying to solve the problem from the wrong end in my opinion. Filtering, privacy extensions, walled gardens, throwaway email addresses.
https://dmcn.dev - an email where you can be sure who it's from. And you get to decide whether to trust it.
Working on Clor, an agent multiplexer for Claude and Codex with shared memory. It's free on your own machines.
The idea is to help developers multiplex agent sessions and run Claude and Codex together, which is much more powerful than running one or the other alone.
My secret goal is to figure out how to make software development the kind of focused, meditative work it used to be.
Very happy to get critical feedback from any HN'ers: [email protected]
I’ve been hacking on a single Anki extension for… the last three years now:
The idea is to make an extension that allows you to flexibly fill out fields on your cards with AI generated text, speech, and images. Think generating example sentences for your entire deck, or adding furigana to kanji (small phonetic characters with a very delicate syntax). It works just as well for language learners as it does for medical students, etc.
The secondary goal has been to make this the most well designed, intuitive, and stable Anki extension in the world. I don’t think it’s there yet, but it’s on its way. It’s been very interesting to try to work out a design that affords the flexibility to generate anything for whatever you’re studying but remains approachable and discoverable to your marginal Anki user, many of whom are younger and have varying levels of English ability. Many interesting technical challenges as well.
Slowly building towards the Show HN post, but need a few more features. Connecting with and chatting with dedicated users in countries around the world over the last few years has made this the most gratifying thing I’ve ever built! It’s still at the scale that receiving support emails is fun and I can build relationships with power users and long term subscribers.
Recently refreshed my FFmpeg command builder tool:
I originally built this around 7 years ago in Vue2 and Bootstrap as a simple static frontend tool to generate common ffmpeg commands.
I recently ported it over to Vite/React/Tailwind via Claude (Opus 5) and thought it did a pretty good job. So refreshed it as a version 2.0.
Quite impressed how fast AI was able to port this over. It made me think about revitalizing some old projects. :)
Porting over Video Hub App - my 8.5 year old app from Electron to Tauri
https://videohubapp.com/ - an application that lets you browse, search, organize, etc the videos you have on your computer, external hard drives, or network drives.
I’ve been working on Foreclosure Data Hub, which aggregates foreclosure auction data across the US.
The interesting part has been the data pipeline rather than the website itself. Foreclosure information is scattered across county sites, auction platforms, and other sources, all with different formats and update schedules.
I’m currently pulling from 20+ sources, normalizing the records, deduplicating properties, and enriching them with property/location data. One surprisingly difficult problem has been handling stale records when upstream sources change or republish old auction information.
Still working on improving data freshness and coverage:
https://www.foreclosuredatahub.com/
Would be interested to hear from anyone who’s worked on aggregating messy public datasets at scale.
Working on two things seriously. One is an ssh based tunneling tool to share localhost ports over the internet - https://pinggy.io
And the other one is a AI rank monitoring for brands - https://lumirank.ai
working on adding webmcp support to my new free tool https://easyanalytica.com/tools/gsc-insight , webmcp was recently added to codex desktop app and it would be interesting to see how users use it with ai, would it get good adoption or it would just go away.
I am working on an SRS based early literacy acquisition webapp: https://letterspractice.com
The app has recently moved into production, so I'd encourage anyone with verbal but pre-literate kids to check it out.
The basic pitch is high efficiency acquisition of the highest yield phonetic mapping skills, and nothing else. I myself am something of a screen-time zealot and very wary of applying engagement mind hacks against kids. The narrow focus allows for good progress on a very modest schedule (recommended cap at n minutes per day for n years old, n >= 2). I defer the social and cultural aspects of learning to read entirely to parents.
It is mostly intended for parent-child co-use, although kids with a bit of experience can drive many of their own sessions most of the time.
A web app for saving internet recipe pages that strips out all the crap.
Static site generators are super passe in 2026, but I spent the last couple of days on mine. https://get-taxus.org
Big re-factoring, I have a data model now and am closing functionality gaps with Zola and the like. Also, I wanted actual documentation. No one else seems to care about that.
Check it out! I'd appreciate someone other than me banging on it.
A site summarizer built in 2 minutes by DeepSeek https://briff.site
Also, an orchestrating agent that supervises subagents running tasks by checking their output and qualifying their results by efficiency and time consumed. It is amazing!
I am currently building an app every couple of days, but with this orchestrator I can build many apps in parallel. It is raw at the moment but it works
Now the time we spend writing prompts will be spent writing plans, tasks, schedules and metrics. While super interesting, this is definitely not the route I want to take for the sake of my sanity. I think we may start asking our model to write plans and tasks for us too, but the more complexity we add, the more complex thoughts we have to manage as AI architects
Also hacking DeepSeek Harness to circumvent all restrictions it has, giving it super powers to run unattended with full access to everything
Using AI to catch up on reinforcement learning advances, trying to 'solve' Gin Rummy. Will move on harder games after that.
I’ve been working on https://computeprices.com for almost 2 years.
My goal is to better understand the economics of AI and make something useful in the process.
(Coming soon: kWh prices and robot prices)
Mostly built with claude code with a dash of codex.
A recent, useful unlock in the process has been a daily CC routine to check the health of the 53 price collectors in the project.
My wife and I are working on a math/science/CS-inspired jewelry: pieces that stand on their own aesthetically but have a hidden meaning.
We currently have two styles: lambda calculus based pieces (we depict the Tromp diagram) where we have Y-Combinator earrings (well, strictly speaking they are one beta reduction away from Y-combinator. Aesthetic oblige) and a pendant depicting a lambda expression computing Graham's number. The other style is quantum computing circuits, based on quantum computing research my brother (a physics professor) is doing: a pendant that is actually a non-local controlled-NOT gate.
I wrote a tiny DSL to describe the jewelry pieces, and an interpreter to produce CAD files. We then either 3D print them or have them produced by lost-wax.
We have our pieces in consignent in a jewelry store, and are working to put them in a museum store.
Marketing is the hardest part. Ideas are welcome.
I’ve been working on Opslane, an open-source agent that identifies user-facing issues and investigates them.
Traditional error trackers have two failure modes:
1. False positives: They show you thousands of errors, and you can’t tell the impact on the user
2. False negatives: Many user-facing issues don’t throw exceptions, so they go unnoticed.
Opslane combines error tracking and session recording. And there is an agent that acts on both.
Opslane reduces false positives by ranking issues based on how many users are facing a particular issue. It also learns about your product by reading your code and watching your session recordings.
False negatives are harder. Opslane reviews session recordings to spot frustration. They look for rage clicks, dead clicks, and abandoned forms.
Here is a link to the repo: https://github.com/opslane/opslane
Not something I'm working on, but want to: a competitor to Perforce that will be cheaper and easier.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that being better is enough to compete, so I'm sitting on it for now.
I've have been working on a simple browser game based on the eastern front (1941-43) , I saw a couple of videos explaining using maps the battles on the eastern front.
i'm building a common lisp operating system capable of diverse double compilation and booting a raspberry pi.
well, claude is: https://modus-lisp.github.io
I'm needlessly reinventing the wheel in replacing almost every part of my X11 environment like a menu, bar, wm+hkd (except terminal since I don't want to mess with carrying terminfo around) to be portable and not at all interdependent.
AI is making it possible to (expeditiously) have everything I want or need on Linux or BSD written in POSIX shell or C is doing wonders for me. The initial effort and time pays off in knowing it will essentially function as intended forever, and no developer can make changes that disrupt my workflow or preferences for my environment.
I'm working on a self-tracking app and an Astro Web Starter Template! :)
The app is very customizable, local-first and is built to adapt to what you want. Goal is to combine habit tracking, health logging and journaling into one fast and easy to use interfact.
Have been working on it for almost years now and it's making great progress.
Doing closed user testing right now and will release an open beta soon: https://dailyselftrack.com/
My Astro Web Starter is built for building well-designed, performant and accessible websites. It contains everything a high-quality website needs (In my opinion). I built it so I have one good base on which to start my web projects on. Using basic HTML and CSS that can scale, without bloat.
There's a lot more on it which you can see here: https://starter.bryanhogan.com/
About fifteen years ago a puzzle game called Trainyard came out for iOS and took my dev team by storm for a few weeks. It ceased getting updates some years ago and isn't on the app store anymore. So I came up with a variant on it and just put up https://www.geoffcanyon.com/lightyard.html I need more puzzles to include in the base pack, if you come up with something interesting, export it and send it to me!
A FHIR Validator and Snapshot Generator that works offline and can communicate with the German national Terminology service
[HYBRID]
Eylo (a take on Hello) a voice first agent platform, multi-tenant, focused on B2B2C use-cases - https://github.com/DigiCred-OSS/eylo-os
It’s a distilled fork of a closed source product that we are offering to our customers.
I am working on a modern is-it-down website checker that checks website statuses from two geographical locations. This was the interesting part for me, to get them working together to avoid false positives. For example, when I check website like irs.gov, ssa.gov and ups.com from Singapore they showed as down but it was only due to datacenter IPs being blocked.
The second probe in Boston fixes this and the site can now say "unreachable from Asia" versus "down for everyone". Many of the existing checkers do not do this and they are prone to show false positives.
Site does not use cookies or analytics. Pageviews are counted from the proxy access log. There are 634 curated sites so far.
There are no ads either, it's mostly been for my personal learning experience, hopefully others will find it useful.
There is even a free API and of course a MCP server.
https://downforjustmeoreveryone.com
Any feedback is welcome!
I open sourced kavla, the SQL canvas I'm working on: https://github.com/aleda145/kavla
README is very bare bones, needs a video or a picture too. The website should tell you some more things: https://kavla.dev (and now the demo does not require a login (also need to remake the demo to fit the new self hosted version))
It's still lacking an analytics agent for the local version though. I've explored using codex CLI, but it feels like its extensive system prompt cripples the agent a lot vs Kimi 2.7 that I've been using in the cloud version.
I think it would also be nice to lean into the fully local LLM setup too, especially for data that shouldn't leave the device.
I’m building Hammer Labs (https://hammer.ai) to study when healthcare AI agents are wrong and when they should refuse to answer (judgement).
It started after spending 15 years building AI for insurers, hospitals, data companies, and startups. Almost every system ended with "a human reviews the output". That person was usually a nurse, medical director, or certified coder. These are some of the hardest people to hire, and the same people automation was supposed to help.
The problem is that real claims do not have an answer key. You cannot reduce human review until you can measure when an agent is wrong.
Getting claims data is also difficult. It can take a year of data agreements, privacy reviews, and procurement. Even then, you may not know what the correct decision should have been. So we generate claims. Utilization and case mix come from published data. Claims are priced using real fee schedules and contract terms. Payers behave differently, like real payers do. We plant errors on purpose, so the correct answer exists before any model runs.
On top of that, we are building benchmarks for overreach, refusal, errors by record type, and detection time. We are also building small MCP tools that refuse when evidence is missing. Every number includes its source, date, and basis.
What I find interesting is how much of this sits between actuarial work and machine learning. Both are needed, but I do not see many people connecting them.
25 published refusals: https://hammer.ai/worlds/refusals/ .
Runs on rate and policy evidence https://hammer.ai/reimbursement-evidence/ and savings claims https://hammer.ai/savings-claims/ .
AgentPlugin is Apache-2.0: https://github.com/hmmrlabs/hammer-plugin
I thought it might be fun to have a “proper” search engine for my laptop, so I wrote a thing (with my fingers! No Claude Code or codex here!) to scan my home directory and put data into OpenSearch so I can search stuff. [1]
For that matter, I also decided to self-host SourceHut because I will no longer be in compliance with their new policy. I have the flakes set up to inject them on my server [2]. This was very AI assisted.
[1] https://git.brucewillis.sexy/~tombert/fs_index I promise it’s safe for work, despite the URL. That’s just my dev URL that I play with. Code is still a mess though, so proceed with caution. I will eventually clean it up.
I'm working on a own x86_64 UEFI Operating System (OS). The idea is to make an OS that looks like Windows Vista but behave like Linux, so it's a mix of Windows and Linux. I've startet three weeks ago with a custom bootloader and the legacy bios VGA textbuffer and now I'm working on a real USB-HID (USB-Human Interface Device) and have troubles with the keyboard. I also have problems with booting from real hardware. If anyone is good at low level developing the project is source available and I appreciate collaborations with other os developers. Link to Codeberg-repo: https://codeberg.org/vntx-labs/VeloOS
Hope that is no problem that I use this thread a bit for self-promotion. If so just write a reply I'll remove this comment if this is a problem
My funny essays newsletter on substack. Link to latest post: https://yelluwcomedy.substack.com/p/the-fascinating-world-of...
Please let me know if you enjoy!
I'm working on an open-source, self-hosted revenue recognition and analytics for Stripe.
Here: https://bookofrevenue.com
To my surprise, I think it's the first open-source revenue analytics for Stripe.
I worked at Stripe building both revenue recognition and analytics, and I always wanted to build an open-source version of those. Finally, I had the time to do it.
Bonus: Revenue is not MRR nor payments: https://medium.com/@tanin47/revenue-is-not-mrr-nor-payments-...
I've been building my own IDE that works the way do (and those in my social circles/professional life do). It allows for use of multiple agent harnesses (i.e claude code, codex, pi, opencode), and makes worktrees much easier to work with. Also has its own code review workflow. My coworkers and several friends have all started using it now. Its been an absolute blast to build, and has definitely increased our productivity vs VS Code, Zed, or Cursor.
I am still working on MyTinyCafé https://mytinycafe.com/ a PWA to help you be the barista at home and take (free) online order from friends and family. It is fun and I am happy to share it for free !
And also Kronikle https://www.kronikle.eu/en/ an app for local libraries. It creates public display interfaces that (I think) are good for showcasing their events.
I've been working on building hyper-local services, sort of as a love letter to my community in Denver, Colorado. Before decent LLM harnesses, these would've been prohibitively expensive in time and resources to build out and would never break even. Now I think I might be able to at least cover hosting costs and tokens; that's enough to keep these sustainable for my neighbors.
Broomsday: https://broomsday.com sends folks emails and SMS the night before street sweeping parking restrictions for their block(s). Email notifications are free, SMS on a paid season pass. The schedule here is block-by-block and easy to forget, so people get ticketed _a lot_ at $50 a pop. The city has an email-only notification service that's free, but it's poorly supported and the interface sucks. This is ready; I'm testing with friends and family currently before attempting real marketing.
HailPass: https://hailpass.com similarly is a notify-before-pain service that integrates a bunch of open weather services (NWS/NOAA mostly, plus a handful of impact reporters and working on a small hail-specific ML model) to give folks on the Front Range 5-10m heads-up before damaging hail arrives at their location. Weather prediction is (not shocking) hard so I'm still tuning to get as much signal out of the noise as possible; some false alarms will be unavoidable but I want to cut them down before even a F&F release. This year's season is pretty much over with, so aiming for an April '27 release.
There's a lot of ski/snowboard/winter sport culture here, but there's also existing services for those, and I'm mostly trying to offer new coverage where there isn't a good option for my neighbors. Might do an ash borer treatment/prevention service navigator yet.
None of this is going to make me wealthy or famous, but building things that help the people that I actually interact with every day and that are a part of a community that supports my family feels _really_ good.
I'm hosting an book club themed event calendar for New Yorkers!
We also have an official meeting once a month to do book club matchmaking in person.
I made a database[1] a few months ago and now I'm beginning work on a Github replacement (for me). Here's what I'm thinking for the UI[2]. I'm not trying to have feature-parity out the gate, I just want something that doesn't give me the ick. I self-host public repos with cgit but that's too basic and there's no built-in support for private repos.
The existing Github alternatives...look like someone drawing Github from memory.