HACKER Q&A
📣 david927

What Are You Working On? (February 2026)


What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?


  👤 barrell Accepted Answer ✓
Visually I’m working on a new landing page for phrasing. It’s almost done, just need to record a few videos: https://phrasing.app/next

Behind the scenes I’m rebuilding the sync engine to properly support offline mode. Trying to get to instant opens for the app (and of course work offline). It’s probably my 5th sync engine. It’s been really fun to see how much easier, faster, better, etc each new iteration is.

(And the project at large is https://phrasing.app - a language learning app for polyglots. It’s like anki but designed to be enjoyed)


👤 A_D_E_P_T
I'm working to figure out new auxetic geometries for 3D lattices. The arrowhead is cool and simple, and gyroids are very effective, but I'm trying to discover if there's something simple, printable, and maximally effective. Tough problem. There's no general theory for auxetic lattices, so it's a matter of reasoning from the desired mechanism to find patterns that fit, almost like alchemical trial-and-error.

👤 zahlman
> What are you working on?

Myself, mostly. Trying to wrestle with realizing how much time I've not been spending on my supposedly main project[1] and questioning whether it's really worth doing.

> Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

Way too many. Writing todo lists is part of working on myself.

[1]: PAPER, a pure-Python ~(pip/pipx replacement), from scratch with an emphasis on simplicity and elegance. https://github.com/zahlman/paper . There's more locally that I haven't pushed, including factoring some stuff out into a separate project and planning more of the same. But yeah.


👤 christoph123
https://donethat.ai/profile/christoph

An AI based time tracker: reconstructs your day from whatever it sees you doing. Screenshot based but never stores them.

https://donethat.ai/data

The same tech stack is pretty easily adaptable to openclaw tracking. If anybody would like to try, DM

Also looking into AI based security tools for monitoring security of DoneThat. Thinking of using zeropath would love to hear if people tried them / have other suggestions


👤 junaid_97
I'm building a free alternative to SimpleCitizen (YC S16).

It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard.

So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the official USCIS PDF filled.

https://fillvisa.com/demo/

I found out simplecitizen offers a DIY plan for $529 (https://www.simplecitizen.com/pricing/)

So, a free (and local-only) version might be a good alternative


👤 aleda145
https://kavla.dev/

It's an infinite canvas that runs SQL.

I've been working with data my entire career. I feel like we need to alt+tab so much. What if we just put it all on a canvas?

Currently very WIP, but there's a simple titanic demo available!

Built with tldraw and duckdb wasm, running on cloudflare durable objects


👤 christoph123
A substack for 80/20 life advice and behaviour change.

https://euzoia.substack.com

Full project: https://euzoia.org

Tried to be super low-tech: Notion, super.so, Spotify creators, riverside.

Now thinking of building an email-based agent for behaviour change accountability. Would love any pointers to good UX for email-based AI assistants.


👤 ebhn
Working on new code review tooling specifically for reviewing your own branches/commits when you use an "AI Agent" to assist with writing code. It seems all of the tools people are building in this space attempt to automate away the review, but I want better tools for reviewing (and tracking tech debt) in the code I just generated locally. Will publish here soon

👤 sfbapt
https://sfbapt.com/routes.html

Lots of work left to do, but happy to have a working version up. It's an interactive map that currently shows all the routes and stops for SF Muni, BART, Caltrain, samTrans, and VTA. There are many more agencies (official and unofficial) in the bay, so I'll be adding those throughout the next few days as I sort out the data.

Finding the data and cleaning/normalizing it is a real pain, so if anyone knows a good place to find them (and normalize them), please do share


👤 slig
Puzzleship - https://www.puzzleship.com/

It's a daily puzzles website focused on logic puzzles at this moment. I have about 70 subscribers, and it's online since Dec/25.


👤 zarathustra333
afaik a blocker on making useful internal agents is connecting to data sources and then exposing that data to said agent

im building Satori to fix this -https://www.usesatori.sh/

would love feedback!


👤 sakamotosan
VERDURE is still a creative plant-generation sandbox where you grow and sculpt stylized trees.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4069810/VERDURE/


👤 seanwilson
A tool for creating CSS color palettes for web UIs that pass WCAG accessibility standards for color contrast:

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

Unlike most tools based around autogenerating colors, this is more of an editor that lets you fully customise all the tint/shades to your liking and with a focus on accessibility. This is important when you've got existing brand colors to include and want to find accessible color combinations that work together.

Would love feedback in general and especially from designers/devs who have different needs in how they go about creating branded palettes!


👤 jarl-ragnar
Maritime vector charts for use in mapping applications https://marinecharts.io

Current coverage is the US, more countries coming soon.


👤 haidrali
I'm working on tablr.io, a B2B SaaS to help companies convert customer feedback into actionable insights.

👤 maxpert
I am as usual working on Marmot https://github.com/maxpert/marmot

I've got replicas now working with DML proxy. This essentially means I can now have a cluster of primaries, and then spin up replicas on demand and nodes talking to local host will never see their mutation work pretty transparently from readonly-replicas. While PoC works now the snapshot restore is extremely inefficient IMO yet.


👤 atulmy
After 15+ years in web development — now diving into game development with Three.js / React Three Fiber (R3F). Keeping AI usage minimal where possible, but it’s been invaluable for complex geometry and math-heavy problems.

Game idea: DroneCraft is a third-person drone exploration game where players scout the world for parts, craft powerful upgrades, and trade strategically to evolve their build.

Whats coming: Core mechanics are up and running. First playable version planned within a month, alongside open-sourcing the full codebase.


👤 erichi
I'm working on a chrome extension that helps answering "Cover letter / Tell us about the time when... / Why do you want to work at..." questions in job application forms.

You can bookmark a job description (it will be parsed), then paste a question and it generates an answer based on your resume, the job description, and your previously given answers for similar questions in other applications. The generated answer can be refined through a follow-up chat and exported as a PDF. It also works as a simple job application tracker.

Saves me tons of time and effort every day!


👤 enterexit
Been working on TenantSaas, a .NET library to make developing multi-tenant apps safer. Wanted something that prevents background jobs or admin scripts from accidentally running across tenants by refusing to run when tenant context isn’t clear. Comes with contract tests teams can run in CI. Still early, so be gentle.

https://github.com/vladkuz/TenantSaas


👤 mjaniczek
I'm optimizing performance of PBT generation and shrinking in [elm-test](https://github.com/elm-explorations/test/compare/master...ja...) - on its own PBT-heavy test suite I got it down from 1336ms to 891ms by using JS TypedArrays.

I'm also experimenting with coverage-guided PBT input generation in the same library, AFL-style -- right now elm-test only has random input generation.


👤 ramon156
Finally trying out Godot on a real project.

I've been pretty bummer out by Rainbow 6 Siege X announcing they will never support Linux due to a lack of kernel-level anti-cheat support. While I can use NVIDIA shield to play from my Windows pc, id rather play something natively with friends (for context, we usually play 3v3's for funsies.

My goal is not to make an exact clone, but to make a smaller map version for 3v3 that is a bit more quick paced.

For context, it's a bomb defusal game where the main goal is intel and gadgets. You need to make the other side waste their gadgets so it comes down to a gun v gun fight.


👤 felixding
Two things for my document translator https://kintoun.ai :

1. Trying to improve the translation quality by giving LLM more context.

2. Fixing the issue where PowerPoint slides layout may become a bit messy after transition because of different text density between western and CJK languages.


👤 JangoCG
An app that helps remote teams to carry out their retrospectives fast and productive

https://fastretro.app


👤 zainhoda
Working on a web framework that provides some guardrails around what a coding agent can and can’t touch without human approval. Makes it easier to have confidence in 5000 line code changes without having to comb through the code.

https://ont-run.com


👤 JangoCG
An app that helps remote teams carry out their retrospectives fast and productive.

https://fastretro.app


👤 socketcluster
I've been working on a low-code CRUD backend for AI agents to use to build software. To significantly reduce the complexity of deployment, access control, maintenance, devops, etc... Reducing the surface area for hallucinations and bugs when building complex apps.

https://saasufy.com/


👤 bgdam
We're building https://HypeKrew.com/?ref=hn. It is going to be a set of tools for YouTube content creators to better connect with their viewers, based on repeated issues that we've observed when consulting with creators and helping them grow their channels. Right now there's an MVP available, which focuses on

- building an independent line of communication with your audience

- predictive, just in time notifications through push or email delivered when we predict that specific viewer has the time to view videos on YouTube, ensuring you stay on top of their notification stack and don't disappear amongst a flood of notifications.


👤 1on0
Working on Einwurf (“throw-in” in German, https://einwurf.app) minimalist, ad-free football scores for European leagues, experimenting with AI-generated live commentary.

👤 nlowell
I'm thinking all the time about what the "best" way of using local AI agents like Claude / Codex / Gemini is. I'm trying to figure out the best UI/UX. There's so so so much that hasn't been explored yet.

Mainly I'm working on a task dispatch dashboard called Prompter Hawk that is designed to be the best UI for task management with agents. If you've been trying to parallelize by running multiple claude code terminals or codex terminals at once, this tool replaces those terminals and fits them all into one view with an AI task tracking board. It sounds more complicated than it is. It's a harness for Claude / Gemini / GPT models with a GUI that speeds up all your workflows. Rather than using sustained chat mode, all Prompter Hawk tasks are fire-and-forget. You just give the task description and come back when it's done. Parallelism first.

Some example highlight features:

-One dashboard view that shows all your parallel sessions and which tasks each agent has in progress and in their queue. Also shows recently completed tasks and outputs. This is my attempt at the ideal "pilot's cockpit view" for agentic development.

-Tasks are well tracked by the manager: see their status, file changes, and git commits. One click task retry. Get breakdowns on cost per run. Tasks can be set to automatically recur on a given schedule. Everything goes into a persistent local DB so you can easily pull up task data from months ago. Far far better user experience than trying to pull up old chat histories IMO.

-Timeline view and analytics views that give you hard stats on your velocity and how effectively your agents are using and updating your codebase. See unique stats like which of your files your agents read the most and how many daily LOC and commit changes you're doing. See how well you're parallelizing workloads at a simple glance.

-Automatic system diagram generation

-Task suggestion feature. If your agents are idle, they can draft tentative tasks to carry out next, based on the project history and your goals. This makes keeping multiple agents spinning actually much easier than you'd think. You don't need to be a multitasking context-switching god to do this.

I haven't shared it much (not even a Show HN) because the landing page isn't converting well at all yet, though I have some reddit ads doing well. I've had a bunch of free users sign up and a handful of paying users too. Looking for users or just feedback on anything! Sorry for wall of text.

[1] https://prompterhawk.dev/


👤 mindcrime
This weekend I've been going through a bunch of stuff with A2A, building little samples and just getting my head around it. Threw together this repo[1] with a bunch of the stuff I'm doing, if anybody else is interested.

Also, watching a bunch of videos and reading docs on OpenClaw. I had thought I'd do an install of it sometime this weekend, but I don't know if I'll get to that at this point or not.

And lastly, messing with Spring AI[2]. I wanted to get a local build of that going so I can dig into the bowels of it and hack on it a bit. So I got that repo cloned and ran a quick build, and now I plan to start exploring the codebase.

[1]: https://github.com/mindcrime/A2ASandbox

[2]: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-ai


👤 RickHull
I'm working on a poker (NLHE) trainer app that includes a web poker room for multiplayer, with bots available and fake chips. Using Event Sourcing with some CQRS in Elixir and Phoenix. The player view is a projection of House Events, suitable for hand history, for feeding to solvers or LLMs for real time advice or post hoc analysis.

The idea is to get tons of reps in, across varied situations, with excellent advice to build good intuitions and decision making abilities. Or to stop making bad or terrible decisions. Or just play poker for free.

I'd like to monetize with at least the hand history format open sourced. Ping me if you would like to get involved with GTM and the revenue side of things.


👤 Ono-Sendai
Substrata: open-source metaverse: https://substrata.info/

👤 rorylaitila
A couple different projects. I've been cataloging and publishing my vintage ad collection at https://adretro.com. It's starting to get a lot of organic traffic after about a year online, which is cool.

I'm also working on a new strength gains-tracking app that is a lot more intuitive, motivating and friend first. I've been using it with some friends for the last 10 weeks and everyone making is consistent gains. It is my first full PWA, vanillaJs, backend is Lucee & MySQL. Works great on iOS and Android, no one has any complaints. The web stack has come a long way I am probably not going to do a native mobile app for a while. I'll probably make it public in a couple weeks.


👤 dietrichepp
Recently fixed bugs in an audio encoder / decoder (VADPCM) I reverse engineered from the Nintendo 64, and some people are apparently using it to dub Conker’s Bad Fur Day into Spanish.

On-and-off again working on a Mystery Dungeon style game but I have a lot of obligations taking me away from it.

Planning on making demoscene entries this year.


👤 hemmert
Two things at once, contrary to my new year‘s resolution!

1. An app for personalized interactive audiobooks for kids - https://www.vivid.cx

2. A book about the edge of the thinkable - https://www.unthinkable.net


👤 codingclaws
Refactoring Comment Castles [0]. It uses Express, but I previously wasn't using any of my own middleware functions. Now, I'm starting to write some middleware, and it's a nice way to reuse code.

[0] https://www.commentcastles.org


👤 TZubiri
I'm currently unemployed and I started using Codex a couple of weeks ago so lot's of simultaneous projects, some stalled

Pre-codex:

Local card game: there's a very specific card game played in my country, there's online game rooms, but I want to get something like lichess.org or chess.com scale, oriented towards competitive play, with ELO (instead of social aspects), ideally I would get thousands of users and use it as a portfolio piece while making it open source.

cafetren.com.ar: Screen product for coffee shops near train stations with real time train data.

Post-codex:

SilverLetterai.com: Retook a project for an autonomous sales LLM assistant, building a semi-fake store to showcase the product (I can fulfill orders if they come by dropshipping), but I also have a friend and family order which I should do after this. 2 or 3 years late to the party, but there's probably a lot of work in this space for years to come.

Retook Chess Engine development, got unstuck by letting the agent do the boring busywork, I wish I would have done it without, but I don't have the greatest work ethic, hopefully one day I will manually code it.

Finally, like everyone else, I'm not quite 100% content with the coding agents, so I'm trying to build my own. Yet another coding agent thingy. But tbf this is more for myself than as a product. If it gets released it's as-is do what you want with it.


👤 oyom
Secndry - https://secndry.com/

A platform for probers, alerts, playbooks, incidents .etc

Trying to make it as easy as possible to follow SRE procedures


👤 johnbender
FM day job:

Interpretation of SysML activity diagrams as temporal logic for use with state machine specifications.

Module system for state machine with scoping, ownership type system and attendant theorems to carry proofs of LTL properties about individual parts forward after composition.


👤 akavi
A relational querying DSL: https://github.com/akavi/yarrql/

“Compiles” to SQL, but with a different structural paradigm.


👤 treelover
Chipmunk'd versions of songs on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChipmunkEstudio Taking song requests!

👤 albingroen
A open source feedback ingestion platform called Teak

https://www.useteak.com/


👤 jiggawatts
I'm learning about "AI programming" by working on some toy problems, like an automated subtitle translator tool that can take both the existing English subtitles and a centre-weighted mono audio extracted from the video file and feed it to an AI.

My big takeaway lesson from this is that the APIs are clumsy, the frameworks are very rough, and we're still very definitely in the territory of having to roll your own bespoke solution for everything instead of the whole thing "just working". For example:

Large file uploads are very inconsistent between providers.

Automatic context caching isn't.

JSON schemas are a hint, not a constraint with some providers.

Some providers *cough*oogle*cough* don't support all JSON Schema constructs, so you can't safely use their API with arbitrary input types.

If you ask for a whole JSON document back, you'll get timeout errors.

If you stream your results, you have to handle reassembly and parsing yourself, the frameworks don't handle this scenario well yet.

You'd think a JSON list (JSONL) schema would be perfect for this scenario, but they're explicitly not supported by some providers!

You can tell an AI to translate the subtitles to language 'X', and it will.. most of the time. If you provide audio, it'll get confused and think that it is being asked to transcribe it! It'll return new English subtitles sometimes.

Speaking of failures, you also get refusals and other undocumented errors you'll only discover in production. If you're maintaining a history or sliding window of context, you have to carefully maintain snapshots so you can roll back and retry. With most APIs you don't even know if the error was a temporary or permanent condition, of if your retry loop is eating into your budget or not.

Context size management is extra fun now that none of the mainstream models provide their tokenizer to use offline. Sometimes the input will fit into the context, sometimes it won't. You have to back off and retry with various heuristics that are problem-specific.


👤 boredtofears
Helping out with a freelance project I built 15 years ago. It didn’t end on the best of terms, but the relationship has since been repaired (and I’m much better at managing my time now)

It’s been fun to come back to, most of the code I wrote still drives the business (it’s just far outdated).

I was pretty early on in my career when I wrote it, so seeing my mistakes and all the potential areas to improve has been very interesting. It’s like buying back your old high school Camaro that you used to wrench on.