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

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

85 comments

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I've been working on trying to be more helpful around the house, and trying to spend more time with my kids. I'm trying to give my partner a little bit of relief so that they can pursue their passions as well.
I'm working on an iPhone app called PhotoGather. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photogather/id6738232616

I've got 40k+ photos on my iphone, and wanted a better way to interact with them. The basic idea I had was to virtually stitch all the photos together into a gigapixel image, and navigate that image with pinch and zoom. On import, the app hierarchically groups photos based on date and similarity. The user can go back and edit the groups, change the layout, and adjust the size of photos if they choose.

The interesting I noticed is that in the process of curating and organizing my photos, I stumble across memories and moments that I had completely forgot.

Development Challenge: The app does two interesting things underneath the hood... First, given an arbitrary number of thumbnails with different aspect ratios, it finds the best sized rectangle that completely fits all the photos. This allows me to recursively stitch groups together and always output a rectangular thumbnail for the group. Second, the pinch/zoom UI uses these nested thumbnails directly without slicing/dicing to fixed sized tiles.

How to make data storage on multiple storage devices unbreakable and consistent? The former means for me that back-ups should be automatical and serverless, the latter means that no matter how much of that HDD/SDD devices are connected, I want always to know all metadata of all files I have. I want this software under GPLv3 if to consider GPL still protects me from anything because permissive licenses are no better than WTFPL by any single case.

My first idea is to require the user to have more than one disk for the system needs and the system should know all of the rest data devices user owns. My second idea is to treat different files as having different priority which impose multiple copies. My third idea is to make the software accessible, and the last idea is to make encrypting of all the devices easy and with no ties to any commertial entities. I would like to have a discussion about how to not lose anything digital.

I've been working on a voxel game engine called Bonsai for ~10 years.

Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato. The world generator and editor operate almost entirely on the GPU. I've been writing a graph compiler similar in spirit to compilers that execute LLMs, with some key differences. The SDF 'program' gets jitted into a kind of bytecode and fed through an interpreter in the world gen shader. This way, the world gen and edits can be applied deterministically using one big fused program, and transferred back to CPU land using the async PCIe hardware. I get something on the order of ~99% ALU residency, 95% L2 hit rate and 20-40% vram bandwidth usage.

Compared to doing world gen on the CPU, it's so fast it feels like magic. It's taken me the better part of two years to get this working well.

One neat thing about representing the world as SDFs is they've been thoroughly researched and documented by a guy named Inigo Quilez, and they have a lot of nice mathematical properties. For example, you can do a smooth union of arbitrary SDFs to get nice rounded contours where shapes join.

I'll do some shameless self-promotion and leave some links here for anyone interested in looking at the engine, language code, or some pretty pictures.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

That's so cool, building something consistently for 10 years is no small feat. How did AI helped you, or How did AI impacted your day to day work in recent years ?
Thank you :) One of the nice things about working on a game engine is it's actually a large collection of small projects disguised a big one. That let's my squirrel-brain jump from thing to thing and have enough variety to not get bored.

I just started using AI a few months ago. My smoke-test was "can it write a simple memory allocator". Until recently, every time I tried to get an AI to write an arena or simple buddy-style heap allocator, they just vomited all over themselves. To my surprise, the last time I tried, the AI absolutely crushed it; it unearthed tricks I didn't even know about in one shot. Since then, I've been using AIs to do the boring, rote work that effectively just boils down to me typing in something that's in my head. For that, they're great. I typically sketch out the thing I want it to make, then tell it to fill in the blanks. Sometimes they still go off the rails, but all in all it's a useful tool.

Where I've found they still struggle is making any architectural decisions, or where performance matters.. even a little bit. They often make super braindead decisions when it comes to performance for no discernable reason. They'll course correct when you tell them to, but I've had to keep a close eye on the output and reign it in frequently. Asking an AI to design a system from the API level hasn't ever returned a good result for me.. I always do that work.

All in all, I feel like using AI will probably make me a better programmer in the long run, contrary to popular belief. They accelerate the boring stuff I already know how to do, which leaves me with more time to work on the edge of my skill level where I grow as an engineer. Guess we'll see in 5 years.

I want to make app like action but for repairs, like electronics and cars.

Client posts request and masters respond with their offers.

What you think about that guys?

I wanted to try and build something in a completely saturated market, so I’ve built a handful of movie themed daily games into a hub.

https://smashcut.games

I keep saving blogs and articles but almost never revisit them. So I’m building an Android app designed to help me actually read what I save. You only get one saved article per day. Finish today’s read to unlock the next one. You can also save Twitter, Reddit, etc. posts separately and revisit them anytime.

Right now I’m mainly validating whether people would actually want something like this. If there’s enough interest, I’ll run a small closed beta for Android.

Join the waitlist for beta access: https://forms.gle/XWXmK8HUSmAtfms29

I "accidentally" created one of the fastest modern JavaScript frameworks out there: https://signy.dev/

...according to my own benchmarks (yeah, I know how that sounds).

Next, I'm planning to submit it to independent third party benchmarks, hoping to find out whether my results are accurate... or not :)

I've also just finished a CSS framework: https://iriscss.com/

Now I'm working on a new backend programming language that runs on the Erlang BEAM, along with a few web applications built using this tech stack.

I am building Esara – the AI hiring platform for candidate sourcing and explainable evaluation.

We’ve just incorporated in Berlin together with two great co-founding colleagues. Honestly never felt more excited.

Though it is a B2B tool, check it out: https://esara.ai

My main project is trying not to lose my mind, given all the things I can now create thanks to AI.

Jokes aside (although I'm not entirely joking about my mental health), my main project is https://auradistill.com: First-principles thinking for your AI agents.

It's not just about giving your personal AI agents "memory". It's about encoding memories in a way that can handle ambiguity and contradictions.

That project alone has got me completely hooked on building for and with LLMs.

I've got other projects too, but this is probably the one I've poured the most time and energy into.

https://hatamoto.dev - a complete replacement to Wordpress and its most used plugins built into the system. One go binary, no node , no compilation, Postgres and sandboxes plugins. Built in AI analytics
I’m making a digital real watercolor kit.

I’m a software developer and watercolor painter so my goal is to use real world painting techniques and have the results feel and look real.

Modeling the physics of paper, brush bristles, pigments, water, color mixing, drying in real time using gpu.

Built in rust using wgpu.

Currently looking for iPad beta testers if anyone is interested (supports Apple Pencil or finger).

https://puddlewatercolor.com

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Mostly trying to think about what career to pivot to, since SWE wages are going to get crushed in the next 5-10 years.
I'm working on a TradingView Pine Script compatible Python framework: https://pynecore.org . And a Pine Script compiler for it + a full IDE for Pine Script with syntax highlight, language server, full featured debugger, charting, data downloads: https://pynesys.io . It is 99.771% bit exact on the top 1000 Pine Scripts and 100% trade match. I'm doing it solo.
I'm rebuilding a benchtop CNC milling machine.
For the month of November (and starting in October this year) I like to hold weekly cooking challenges to practice and refine my Thanksgiving day feast. Now about 3 weeks out from the final boss level of cooking, and I'm having a week all about brussel sprouts. Earlier weeks were cauliflower and the classic seasoning blend of sage, rosemary and thyme.