Ask HN: What Are You Working On?

43 points by eisleggje ↗ HN
It's been a while since the last thread, and I am a curious bee.

78 comments

[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 83.1 ms ] thread
A hand written LAMP webapp to replace an MS Access application at work. Only needs to run locally.
https://www.useorganizer.com/ helps you organize stuff primarily but can also double as photo album and private log. Open source and local storage. Not so much working on. It is complete and does what I wanted it to.
https://prismstudio.dev. A GitHub and GitLab PR inbox and review UI. Built it to help me tame GitHub notification fatigue and see which PRs really need my attention.

Next I’m working on making reviewing large AI-generated PRs easier, but haven’t gotten there yet.

https://motionparty.net/ - motion controlled web games, by analyzing the Webcam feed locally. In the vein of eye toys for ps2. Works quite well I think, but some elements need improvement. Want to add more games as well.
Wow, this completely crashes Firefox for me. Don't think I've ever seen that before.

Super cool though! Works fine on Chromium. I liked Pass the Ball, and it was really fun contorting to avoid the red balls in Ball Dash -- if you're looking to add some games, maybe some along the lines of Twister or the Hole In the Wall game show? A whack-a-mole style game could also be interesting. Also, it'd be nice to be able to navigate the menus with mouse.

Wow thanks for the heads up, will have to look into that Firefox issue.

Thank you, much appreciated! :) And great ideas as well! Whack a mole would fit perfectly

A rental managment system for university workshops that rent out equipment. Since I have been doing this for 5 years I know all the realworld edge cases and what I have is already better than most competitors.
I’ve been working on a bottom-to-top rewrite of an app that’s been shipping for the last couple of years. The initial version took over two years to write.

It’s coming along great. I’ve only been working on it since February, and it’s very complete, functionally. I’ve been using an LLM, extensively.

The original server took over seven months to write, but with the LLM, I had it done in about a month. The PHP code is great quality.

It’s not all bunnies and flowers, though. I’m spending the next few days, rewriting a Swift viewcontroller that the LLM wrote. It works, but the code is awful. It looks like it was written by a jargon-addled high schooler on Adderall. I just can’t bear to have that level of junk in my app. I asked it to refactor the code to improve the quality, and reduce the size, and it removed all the documentation and logging; leaving the thread- and delay-riddled garbage behind.

If someone that worked for me had done that, I would have evicted them, with a trebuchet.

I realized that I can't count on the LLM to help me maintain its mess, so I'd better just suck it up, and do it myself.

The good news is, is that I’m so far ahead of schedule (a position that I’ve never been in, in forty years of development), that I can afford to do this.

AI:

- spec driven development workflow: https://github.com/sermakarevich/sddw

- fleet, orchestrator for running many coding agents: https://github.com/sermakarevich/fleet

- chunker, which builds smart chunks of the documents with hierarchical organization: https://github.com/sermakarevich/chunker

- ai knowledge wiki, a collection of ai papers and articles organized in hierarchical Wiki

- hierarchical organization of all passed Kaggle competition solutions (write ups and notebooks) - https://github.com/sermakarevich/kaggle_wiki

- claude code workflows, plugin to build custom claude code workflows based on ssd idea: https://github.com/sermakarevich/ccw

Gnoseed.com - https://gnoseed.com flashcards for learning. I like to learn the topics in a way the aws certification was done. I started with kubernetes topics and slowly adding more (docker atm). It's free to use, no registration. You can check and give me a feedback of you want.
https://zenduxai.com - a tool that helps users generate and launch ad creatives across multiple angles, messages, formats, and aspect ratios in 10 minutes or less.
I'm working toward making a Hacker News simulator in the vein of https://reddit.com/r/subsimulatorgpt2 (but using HN's code instead of a subreddit).

To do that, I'm building sharc, a port of Hacker News that runs on Common Lisp, implementing all the latest features of HN. (That last bit is the hard part.) https://github.com/shawwn/sharc

I just implemented collapsing comments and root/next/prev/context nav links. Also (sitename "https://x.com/jsrailton") now returns "x.com/jsrailton" instead of "x.com". (About to implement HN's "from" endpoint, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/jsrailton)

You can read the entire changelog here: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof...

Anyone working on non-AI things? Human making software for fellow humans?
Personally, a voxel space renderer for the PlayStation (Comanche terrain style rendering).

In theory, it's really not suited for this because (at least back then) this was designed for computers with:

- relatively large amounts of RAM (uncompressed color+heightmap data takes a lot of space),

- fast CPUs with data caches (it's a 2D trapezoidal walk of a top-down projected fustrum with plenty of additions, multiplications and divisions),

- memory-mapped linear framebuffers (for software rendering).

The PlayStation has none of these things: only 2 MiB of main RAM; an in-order scalar 33 MHz MIPS III processor without a FPU or a data cache, where any CPU load from main RAM stalls the pipeline for 5 cycles, multiplications have a 6 to 13 cycles latency and divisions have a 36 cycles latency; and the only way to touch VRAM is to send commands to the 2D GPU.

What it does have is 4 KiB of I-cache (direct-mapped), 1 KiB of scratchpad with no wait states and a fixed-point GTE coprocessor which is mostly geared towards projecting 3D points onto a 2D screen and not general matrix/vector processing. Meaning that if I get my hot loop within 1024 instructions (and no function calls), fit my working set+stack within 1 KiB and can pipeline the GTE for transformations and the CPU for map scanning/GPU submissions, it might just work.

So far I'm getting decent framerates (like 10-15 FPS at 256x240) with just software projection and GPU line rendering. Right now I'm wrestling with the GTE and various ways to trick it into transforming more points than it's supposed to be able to do, by looking at the fixed-hardware math equations for the various instructions and trying to fit my equations into them (doing stuff like putting relative altitude into X/Y vector registers instead of coordinates and massaging the rest of the values to get screen Y coordinates out of it).

Kind of a hardcore topic to pick for my first homebrew ever, but I craved a simpler, low-level optimization challenge as a pipe cleaner, after working on ghidra-delinker-extension for so long.

https://github.com/nanowave-player/nanowave-ui

A tiny RISC-V linux-based (buildroot) portable audio player hardware with Software written in Rust / Slint.

Inspired by the iPod Nano 7g and totally WIP.

Will probably never be finished but it is a neat learning project

A system for instrumenting GPS routes.

A user reports a location bug on their morning commute. You're 2,000 miles away. Instead of flying out to reproduce it, you replay their exact GPS trip on your simulator. Same route. Same speed. Same timing.

Record & replay real GPS routes for iOS.

Video here: https://x.com/LyleMakes/status/2064438713124270233

I have been building tools; VT Code is my latest, and I'm very proud of it.

VT Code: https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode > An open-source coding agent with LLM-native code understanding and robust shell safety. Supports multiple LLM providers with automatic failover and efficient context management. => Recently it just got the 500th tagged release. The project has been started since August 2025, and the coding agent VT Code itself I believe to be stable and ready to use. Thankfully, I got help from the community; recently, we pushed quite a lot of releases, enhancements, and bug fixes.

VT Chat: https://github.com/vinhnx/vtchat > A modern, privacy-first AI chat application with security.

VT.ai: https://github.com/vinhnx/vt.ai > Multimodal AI chat app with dynamic conversation routing.

I've been working on https://favs.blue/ -- lets you see the top posts from any Bluesky user.

I missed favstar.fm so I tried making something similar on an open social network!

https://raizensoft.com - Game development tutorials and resources for code-centric frameworks (libGDX, LWJGL, MonoGame, etc). All articles are written by me and I've been running the site for 10 months to share my passion and technical knowledge. 200+ articles so far and I'm planning to add more.
Leash, a low-dopamine mobile browser replacement:

https://leash.ax

The address bar is so important to me, b/c I want to see the tracking codes, the domain name, is my connection secure?
No links to share but:

- a self-hosted PaaS with CI-driven deployments, managed by terraform (and possibly other IaC in the future) - think Coolify but with IaC or Komodo but easier to run full-stack apps (databases, queues and OTEL support built in)

- a benchmark for AI agents where they have to iteratively build an application - it shows how bad design decisions compound over time

Making rent as an open source developer.

Desperately trying to attract new monthly sponsors and people willing to buy me the occasional pizza with my terrible HTML skills. Is it working?

https://brynet.ca/wallofpizza.html