Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

334 points by david927 ↗ HN
What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

860 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 354 ms ] thread
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
Looking forward to seeing this!
Nice! Working in a similar space - will be publishing here also soon. How are you handling finding issues beyond pattern matching where deep code understanding is required?
> 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.

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

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

The form-filling piece is smart and clearly solves a real pain point with XFA PDFs. But the strategic risk here isn't technical, it's liability. Immigration forms are high-stakes documents where a wrong answer can trigger a denial, RFE, or worse. SimpleCitizen's $529 isn't just paying for form filling. It's paying for guided logic ("if you answered X, you probably need to also file Y"), error checking against known USCIS rejection patterns, and a company standing behind the output. A free tool with no guidance layer exposes users to silent errors they won't discover until months later at their interview. The "free alternative" positioning also creates a distribution problem. The people who most need this (first-time filers, non-native English speakers, people who can't afford a lawyer) are the least likely to find a developer's side project on HN or GitHub. SimpleCitizen's real moat isn't the PDF conversion. It's the SEO, the trust signals, and the hand-holding. Competing on price against $529 sounds compelling, but the actual competition is immigration attorneys at $2,000-5,000 and free legal aid clinics. Those are the alternatives your users are actually weighing. One more operational risk worth flagging: USCIS revises forms regularly and without much warning. The I-130 alone has had multiple revisions in the last few years. Each revision means your 1:1 field mapping breaks and users could submit outdated forms, which USCIS will reject. That's a maintenance commitment that scales with every form you add. Might be worth thinking about how sustainable that is before expanding the form library.
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.

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.
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

Somehow i had landed on your page sometime back and was just impressed with the quality of landing page and also the concept. Hope to use it in near time.
Cool looking website! Is that an open source css library or did you style it yourself?
The website is great and the examples (like getting distinct values of a table as a prerequisite investigation) really get the point across.

In my job I always end up with big notebooks of data exploration that get messy fast and are hard to share anything but the final result, having a canvas that embraces the non-linear nature is a great idea.

Love the brutalist style. Are the components all hand-rolled or something off the shelf?
Wow, this seems great for doing interviews with an analyst, or just demoing data generally. Cool product!
Really interesting idea! I've only seen stuff like that in ETL pipelines (which are a pain). This sits somehow between a python notebook and a ETL pipeline.

By the way, I just shared in my company's Slack and looks like there is no opengraph data for it. Not a complain, just pointing out in case you didn't notice/think of it :)

Best of luck!

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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)

This looks really interesting! Is it correct that the trial is paid? I've never seen that before :O
The short intro video is helpful in understanding what Phrasing does. The promised walk-though video would also be helpful. I am interested in software for aiding language learning, but after reading your original landing page I could not understand what exactly Phrasing is or what it does. I'm looking forward to trying this out some time this week with my target language. Nice work!
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.

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!

A tool for creating CSS color palettes for web UIs that pass WCAG accessibility standards for color contrast, where you can fine tweak all the tints/shades quickly using a hue/saturation/lightness curve editing interface:

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 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!

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

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

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.

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.

Secndry - https://secndry.com/

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

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

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.

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