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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A rag api to power better, more tailored ai features in saas products. By default it indexes customer websites, but also supports notion, YouTube, email and custom connections. https://www.context-link.ai/for/white-label-rag-api
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'm working on CLI/TUI tool that stores all code collaboration (issues, PRs, etc) in git itself. It lets you publish repositories as static sites to S3 buckets and use them as remotes:
https://gitsocial.org/ https://github.com/gitsocial-org/gitsocial
I'm working on https://pushrealm.com the AI-first knowledge sharing network. Think StackOverflow for bots. It works like this:
- When your agent is stuck on a bleeding edge issue, search Push Realm first for a solution. - If you find a solution, your agent can mark it as successful to help surface the solution to others (and hopefully save fruitlessly burning more tokens) - Can't find a solution? Post an open problem with your current investigation. Another agent may be able to solve the problem, and will have a head start thanks to your context - Solutions can be linked/edited/have addendum added by any agent, allowing complete, up-to-date solutions for a range of cutting edge issues
Cranpose - Rust GUI with jetpack Compose API https://github.com/samoylenkodmitry/Cranpose
Working on https://tenjin.sh/ . It's a knowledge layer for agents so agents stop duplicating work.
Rides Claude Code/Codex hooks and captures useful information, and injects it at need (like when there's an error) for other agents. It works across your team then at a global marketplace layer, so there's incentives for people to contribute.
We're in the process of benchmarking and we are aiming for 10% in token reductions. If any team is interested, we're accepting preliminary design partners and can get you started with the benefits.
Working on https://kuberik.com
It's a CD tool for Kubernetes built on top of Flux and OpenKruise canary controller to bring a full-featured end to end delivery on Kubernetes over multiple environments in a declarative way without the pipelines.
I wanted to stop reinventing the wheel with pipeline engines every time I needed to deploy something. Every stage of the delivery is just a composable component (health checks, smoke tests, schedules, environment promotions, service dependencies).
I just released a new version recently that integrates with GitHub so one can track exactly what's deployed where and how far your change progressed.
I spent way too much time doing fancy infographic-style stuff for a video about the 4th book in the Wheel of Time : https://youtu.be/ONs2inKELR0
Meanwhile, Daniel Greene's dodgy whiteboard video has a million views. Don't mind me as I eat these sour grapes...
A FHIR Validator and Snapshot Generator that works offline and can communicate with the German national Terminology service
https://cou.sh, https://jun.is and https://abr.ac — some experiments on offline-first crdt
QuickMDSim - An easy way to run molecular simulations in the cloud: https://quickmdsim.com
This simplifies the setup for researchers who want to simulate materials science problems like battery electrode performance on GPUs with a simple usage-based pricing model instead of traditional HPC
I just published a first version of a gateway that redirects to the correct proxy/frontend
The "official" syntaxis is
https://yups.io/?url=https://twitter.com/Wikipedia
But it is very flexible to manage errors
https://yups.io/www.instagram.com/reel/DdOFgxdlMjv/?stkn=MWR...
I published a big update to my open source project FluidCAD adding support for sketch constraint solver and assemblies.
I'll continue working on improvements aiming at the first stable release by the end of this year hopefully.
Recently:
- I've been tweaking a bot that I built to doomscroll job boards for me, to recycle more parsing logic between target sites. It turns out that, much of the time, I can cut down on DOM-based scraping a lot by just parsing schema.org-based JSON-LD. Also casually researching vanilla Web components, view transitions, and Signals in a general effort to make the whole thing less framework-heavy. (Plus it will have side benefits to building the crawlers to have a better understanding of light vs shadow DOM.) Eventually I need to get to figuring out how I want to handle distributing this local-first app across multiple clients... I've been putting that off for a while, but it kind of crosses over with the JSON-LD thing, in that (even more than it did before I found this) it also just makes a lot of sense to use a browser extension to collect potential matches passively.
- 3D printing experiments. I got a used SV06+ a few months ago that turned out to be a lot more finicky than is suited to a first time user... but that was in the course of trying for several months to make plans with a friend that was getting rid of her Ender -- which I then managed to resurrect using all the cleaning tools and tinkering research that I put into my fussier machine. I've since been toying around with a lot of different ideas on how to clean up my workspace and/or fix/reuse stuff I have already (parts trays, Skadis panels, a case for an old Framework mainboard, various instrument stands...) and also toying around on paper with what kinds of printed items I might be able to sell.
- Starting on cleaning up a basement that resembles the Research floor from Control. Also a use for the printer, because if I can just print cheap tools out of PLA then I don't have to care about possibly needing to sacrifice them to the mold.
- Various Coursera stuff. My state has some partnership with Google for "AI readiness" training, that grossly undersells the various other adjacent topics offered, ranging from cybersecurity to marketing and eCommerce. Stuff where it may be a relevant topic at points, but isn't the subject matter.
Haven’t see a lot of app in this space but most of them focus on wastage rather than usage so I am playing around with https://usurp.onrender.com/ the idea is to challenge friends based on time spent using an AI coding tool, thought was more like what wakatime did. It’s also open source.
Still working on my traffic simulator. Pushing up past 62500 updates per tick on 16 threads, just barely enough for 512 cars with full tire/drivetrain/suspension/physics kernels at 120hz, or a great deal more at increasingly slower rates (down to as low as 6hz) with fractional amounts of fidelity.
working on a convention to organize your own video files on your own buckets https://github.com/xta/keepsake
my goal is to offload phone videos (to free up device space) and persist them in self controlled storage. the convention makes this significantly more useful than a collection of object paths
Built a small free thing this week: a "Spreadsheet Triage Checklist" — 7 common ways ad-hoc spreadsheets quietly break (stale copies, silent formula errors, no version control, etc.) and the order to fix them in, since fixing them out of order usually wastes the work. Came out of watching non-technical teams patch the same spreadsheet for years instead of ever stepping back. Still figuring out if this is a "checklist" problem or a "just use a database" problem — curious which camp people here fall into.
I've been building a framework for web, ios and android native development at https://github.com/vmsp/flypath.
It's based on the Server-Driven UI philosophy where the backend streams both code and UI into a frontend that just knows how to render what it's told. This is pretty cool because it makes it makes over-the-air updates possible.
It also follows the batteries-included philosophy of Rails. Has an ORM, background and cron jobs (all based on Postgres), Django-style migrations, JSX Emails and pretty great FFI that's built around a simple `"use native"` directive, in the React Server Component fashion).
Working on slk (https://github.com/gammons/slk) which is a TUI Slack client that runs in a terminal. It's super fast, keyboard-driven, and it's been my daily driver for a while now.
NoNews (https://nonews.io) — a signal radar for Chinese-speaking readers (bilingual EN/ZH).It reads official and first-party feeds directly (Federal Reserve, SEC, ECB, DOJ, CFTC, ArXiv, GitHub releases, GDELT), clusters duplicate coverage into a single event card, and measures how far ahead of mainstream coverage each signal lands.Every card links back to the original source; no full-text republication. Lead-time stats are accumulating into a monthly index.Early days — feedback welcome, especially on which sources and boards matter most.
I am working on real estate management system that do have AI agents https://www.aqaris.ae/. I want to automate mundane day-to-day tasks so managers can have more time
Inbound message AI assistant. Triage all incoming LinkedIn messages, link to email chains, handle scheduling and back and forth, drafting replies, etc.
I'm currently in a job search and wanted to automate it for myself and learn the AI stack.
If anyone wants to try it out lmk!
An app that lets you view social media without ads or algorithms.
You add profiles from Instagram, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube and Narro pulls in the posts.
I'm working on Solace¹, a programming language that targets JavaScript, but is not a superset, like Typescript. The idea is, to allow zero-runtime-cost safeguards, like Optional Values and Error Unions (syntactically they look like Zig's), decent pattern matching and Traits. There's still a lot of work to do, though, because some of the approaches I went for, don't hold in all cases (generics are tricky).
I had a bunch of extra Fable credits, so I spent about $10k running autoresearch loops on 200 of the top github repos with frontends to try and speed up the frontend performance. I distilled them down into a leaderboard of the most common wins, and built out an autoresearch loop that takes those learnings and applies them to your repo.
Works with your existing claude/cursor/codex sub in a cute custom TUI.
I just submitted a Show HN for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687032
Chatter, a self hosted almost feature complete alternative to Discord: https://github.com/Sphyrna-029/Chatter
I'm decompiling an obscure 1998 computer game using an LLM agent skill that I'm simultaneously developing from papers and books on reverse-engineering (a subject I've never previously engaged with) with the aim of migrating it (well, at least its assets) to the browser: https://esoteria.pages.dev
Here's the skill: https://github.com/gavmor/x86-cpp-reversing-skill
It's all slop, but it's battle-tested and producing results. It's quite fun and inspiring to see some of these assets like textures and geometry that are improperly decompiled, bit shifted or something like that. produces a lot of abstract, glitchy art.
To make sure that my process and results are reproducible, I've gotten back into maintaining Concourse CI pipelines. They were very useful when we were shipping a fork of k8s for VMware, and now they are a fun way of shipping cyberpunk billboard sprites to Cloudflare buckets.
I got back into Concourse in order to attempt a more rigorous approach to generative AI experimentation as well. Unfortunately, there are just so many odd techniques, configurations, loras, and utilities striking my fancy that my experiment pipelines have exploded into the dozens, and Concourse is not a large enough or a high-level enough organizing principle.
Keel is a productivity app that combines todo lists, pomodoro, and an AI executive coach to let users go through a whole plan > execute > reflect cycle in the app. The AI agent (text or voice) can help with planning and guide reflection, but it generally does not do work for you like other chat bots.
The android app is in beta now and the iOS app is in development.
Working on an open source graph of physics equations, quantities, and their connections to each other, to help learners connect concepts: https://anacoda.github.io/OpenFormulaGraph/
A microkernel os https://github.com/corvad/os
I've been working on a collection of native AI/ML operators for TouchDesigner on macOS. Think of it as a happy marriage between the interface of TouchDesigner but with some of the features you know from ComfyUI.
https://www.patreon.com/MickeyvanOlst/posts/meet-aml-macos-1...
Typically TD for the Mac has always been a bit underserved, by leaning into some of the frameworks that exclusively exist on macOS I'm hoping more people will see it as a viable platform for this kind of stuff.
It’s an AI Private Investigator that does the hard work of data gathering (using Open Source Intelligence) and correlation. Used by over 70k investigators including government agencies.
I've been working on a typed, functional-imperative, full stack programming language with IDE support: https://www.firefly-lang.org/
A new UI library made with zero dependencies (native web components). I just made it public as I actually use it for my personal projects since past year.
The core principle is to help with UI development without bloating a project. It works with vue/nuxt (tested, my projects are done with it), but also react/angular/svelte/etc.
One feedback I got from reddit (I published it this week there) is that AGPLv3 may be a problem for adoption... still not sure if should I use MIT.
I have been working on cost models and coupon ladders for businesses.
If either of those are interesting to you, please reach out!
For example, I am helping some restaurants learn exactly how much each item on the menu costs, what the margins are, and how much profit each dish is bringing in because I integrate with their PoS system.
It's all a part of GetSetReply which is turning into a small suite of tools for SMBs
Because my work life is mostly LLM promoting, I’ve gotten back into hobby robotics, which I think has a low chance of LLMs taking over anytime soon. Designing and building a robot that can build a wooden hardwood deck using the edge-screw method.
Web bluetooth for ios (via safari extension). It's already way better than any 3rd party browser available in appstore.
A few side projects!
- an open source AES67 hardware receiver/decoder - based on my friend Jessie's work [0]. I want speakers to have ethernet ports and to use an open/inexpensive stack. it's hard because physics/timing are brutal (1ms sync is ~not enough), but that's what makes it a great problem.
- an open source embroidery machine - based on my friend Owen's work [1]. Owen found Brother PE-150 machines which are readily available on eBay for ~$100 as they only work with proprietary 90s-era CF cards which nobody has (or sell for more than the machine). he designed a replacement motherboard (!!) and is running a fully open stack. it's wild.
- a ~$20 tiny cute display you can have on the side of your monitor, and display things on - realtime airport view from flightaware? a mini terminal? you can grab a display today [2], all that's missing is a 3d case (email me for firmware/OS code! I'll share it, just haven't had time). friends Frank and Sophie are working on a similar GUD-compatible display as well! [3]
- my friend Antoine has been working on Python bindings to Canonical's dqlite, a distributed sqlite-variant with raft-based failover and transactions (only C and Go clients existed) [4] - this will soon be a structural ("load-bearing"! haha!) part of Disco, a project we've been working on for a few years which lets you run your own PaaS. we're growing and get nice love letters [5] which for an open source project is obviously deeply rewarding
[0] https://jessie.grosen.systems/projects/aes67-receiver
[1] https://owentrueblood.com/blog/2024/12/10/reverse-engineerin...
[2] https://www.waveshare.com/rp2040-touch-lcd-1.69.htm
[3] https://bsky.app/profile/sophie.engineering/post/3muxysxhpck...
I'm working on a p2p streaming/sharing app called bubbleBASED. Its here https://bubblebased.com/ its based! on bubbles! But it uses Webtorrent to stream and share content in context bubbles. You already need peers for a social network—so why not use those same peers to seed the media? like a closed loop and it cuts out AWS because everyone is a peer for everyone else in your bubble. There is an assist from Heroku and Pinata. There is no algo. Its just whatever you post. Also you can add an affiliate link (from cj.com) and it will pop in a platform ad for you so there is a revenue possibility there. The streaming part was intense - I built this because I wanted to see if browser-to-browser streaming could actually work for small, private groups. The broadcaster records via MediaRecorder, chunks every 8 seconds, seeds each chunk via WebTorrent, and viewers assemble them with MSE (or ManagedMediaSource on Safari). There's a server-side "always-on peer" so streams don't die if the original tab closes.
The interesting problems were: MSE on iOS Safari, chunk continuity across peers, and handling rotation metadata that iOS bakes into the video stream. Also, the tracker is a separate bittorrent-tracker instance because the built-in WebTorrent trackers are unreliable for sustained swarms. Also i used a ton of graphql, so normally with a torrent you have to kind of let people find you but i used a graphql subscription to TELL people what the magnet links were called so they can fetch them asap. Lots of shortcuts like that, its been interesting!!
All in one platform for hosting agents
- Minimal setup - Any agent harness - A session is an actor - Opinionated infrastructure - Performance on the critical path
I worked on my AI agent that feels like a unix util. This month I changed the way it writes and edits files
I got laid off at the beginning of last month so put a little time into some personal projects I thought might be fun.
https://dstld.news - I have always wanted a personalized news site so I built one using a few news APIs with AI summaries.
https://hn.wreet.xyz - I'm a big fan of skeleton.dev and wanted a HN frontend with all the fun themes.
Nothing too exciting, just trying to find the joy in making again.
I'm trying to build a tool site that has all the tools you'll ever need. I slowly add some each week.
a replacement for Octopus deploy https://rolloutrhino.com/ (marketing page is mostly a placeholder). Octopus is super expensive for our company and scales poorly if you have lots of small projects. I've got pretty much everything working really well, and the main thing I'm working on is improving the UX for all the workflows I do most often. It is mostly built around what I wanted from the tool, but before I release it I'm looking at supporting various other ways people use the tool. It's been a fun project so far.
Compute is precious, so I’m building a k3s/k8s-based macOS/Linux GitHub Actions runner.
I’m spending like $25/mo at least in GHA minutes.
Then working on securing and tinkering with my homelab. And little utilities that make repeated deterministic functions easier for me and agents.
Just started:
1) bad apple on my kernel (OS)
2) language model + inference engine from scratch
3) sketchdaily.net, but you give it your own pinterest board of references instead of the preselected ones they have
Building https://typequicker.com
It's a personalized & data-driven typing application that targets your weak points
I'm making an online guidance solver for KSA (https://ahwoo.com/app/100000/kitten-space-agency). It will allow you to control a KSA rocket from the command line for a variety of maneuvers (launch, rendezvous, etc). It uses successive convexification to turn the full nonlinear problem into a sequence of convex problems with linear constraints and quadratic objective.
It has proven surprisingly resistant to AI so far - Astra can make a very quick prototype but upon review it had many defects. I have had to guide it very thoroughly to find all the random solver bugs (bad conditioning, formulation, bugs in openscvx which I had originally had the AI port to rust, etc.) preventing well-behaved solves. But I think (hope?) I have turned the corner on these.
This will enable some very interesting further experiments: full mission planning, Falcon-9-style ascent with split control, vehicle swarms, etc.