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

I got laid off at the end of April and have been building my own personal dream tool since, it's a skeuomorphic carpentry simulator with an agent MCP. You start with real wood specs and a shop full of miter saws, router tables, table saws and the like. Think of it like Sketchup but no extruding rectangles.It's been really fun to build with. Agents can create parametric procedures so e.g. stick framing becomes a simple function call for the next agent, building a flywheel. There is full agent-human parity in every surface, so there is a human UI for the procedures too.Every operation is yaml, so agents pick it up pretty quickly. Agents can also file feature requests when they reach for a tool that doesn't exist. You can export to 3d printing files, video walk-through, step files, get a BOM and a cut plan, view your project in life-size with AR. There is a notion-like interface for authoring build guides... a lot going on. If you're a woodworker/software engineer you might enjoy it.You can add the MCP to your agent of choice, send a picture, description, sketch or whatever; say "build this with Sawdust"https://sawdust.diy reply:...

I'm (solo) spinning off the internal agent knowledge and observability layer used at Motion (YC W20, series C, ~40 devs). It was born out of a need to lift all devs using heterogeneous models, harnesses, and prompting styles to a higher level of consistency and quality while surfacing the visibility to see what's working and what's not. The knowledge layer is integrated into the code review layer and all of it tied together with telemetry to the document section level to see how each piece of context is affecting code generation.Open source repo (.NET 10 + C# + Postgres): https://github.com/zeeq-ai/zeeq-appDocs and more info: https://zeeq.ai

Launched a suite of media inspection and encoding tools a few months ago, based on FFmpeg. Slowly getting more customers.https://video-commander.comConstantly iterating through refinement and features. It's built on Rust + Tauri with a React frontend, in case anyone is curious.I've created various open-source and commercial tools in the multimedia space over the last 10+ years and wanted to put it all together into something more premium with an IDE-like experience.Most recently I added a /playground area to experiment with the inspection tools via a WASM build, which I thought was a neat way for users to try the app before downloading the full version.Happy to answer any questions!

I have been working on and off on https://www.whichtemple.in- it is a collection of ~ 2700 temples across India, with images sourced from wikipedia- it shows you a random temple each time you visit- it has a map view of temples across IndiaSo this is just the tip of the iceberg. I am trying to build a catalogue of all temples, starting with India, and expanding on to the rest of the world. The focus is on temples originating from Indic religions like Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.I have personally discovered many cool temples that I have never heard of, but I am struggling on how to gamify this. Feedback welcome! reply: Would love to filter this by states so that I can go to the interesting temples in my state first before trying out other places. Would make it more functional.

Lots of fun projects being listed. I'm working on Preloop(https://preloop.dev), a way to run your unmodified Github Actions locally or self-hosted in isolated cross-platform microvms(uses smolvm which uses libkrun vmm).I got frustrated with Github Actions reliability and inability to run or test my workflows locally so i re-wrote the runner and reverse-engineered the control plane so it follows the exact runner protocol the offficial runner does. Each job runs in a microvm that boots in 400ms from a packed image. Also supports a way to pause on every failure so you or your agent can immediately shell at that point, fix and retry(in a new environment) to verify. Also supports the full DAP protocol so you can interactively step/forward/investigate context at each step/job.Try it out: https://github.com/preloopdev/preloop reply: That is an amazing idea. I can imagine this getting popular. It could be used for faster local dev loops and porting GHA to other servers. I imagine for data/compute residency, cost, performance, vm types etc.

My two biggest projects are:https://www.idlequest.net/ - a from-scratch recreation of the 1999 MMORPG classic EverQuest, featuring a real-time MMO server written in Go, a 3D game browser-based client built with Babylon.js, and the clasic UI recreated using React. You can play it both as a regular MMORPG but also in "idle mode" where it basically plays itself. This had up to 70 players online at once a while back which was really cool, though its popularity is in a bit of a lull right now. There are still tons of bugs and stuff that isn't fully implemented (and balance issues) but it's still fun for most people who have nostalgia for it.https://www.newyokosuka.com/ - an unofficial Shenmue MMO experience. Based on the 1999 Sega Dreamcast game Shenmue, it's playable entirely in your browser! It's basic world exploration with forklift shenanigans, some basic dialogue systems, and a basic combat system test, but I'm about to push an update that includes all cutscenes and story progression as well. The story part is taking a bit of time because I'm having to mold it to fit in an MMO context. But it's a fun project to work on and the Shenmue community loves it so far. reply:...

Vibe, my Winamp-like MacOS music player.I use it every day, but had stopped dev on it a few years ago. Fable has gotten me excited to take it off the shelf and add a bunch of features I've been wanting for a while. Working on localization now.https://github.com/cmicali/vibehttps://apps.apple.com/us/app/vibe-music-player/id1582482361

Im working on what i call a spreadsheet data platform. It looks like a spreadsheet but all the components are plugins which means the user can provide (even write their own).- Dont like the limited functions available in formulas, write your own. Yes i know this isnt new, just highlighting a starting example.- Dont like how values are formatted in calls, write your own.- Dont like templates, write your own script that generates the "empty" or not so empty spreadsheet.- Dont like clicking on icons, write your own scripts or plugins that execute in context, which makes snippets to do basic things become very brief, because theres no need to load and save the file with the spreadsheet or even select the range with a query.- Want a terminal, i have one. Everything in a spreadsheet is a file, just like *nix. Read/write a cell, is as simple as reading /cell/A1.txt or /spreadsheet/123/cell/A1, because the environment has smarts like environment values (eg SPREADSHEET_ID) that are used.I have many other ideas which are nearly there.https://github.com/mP1

https://dipstickalerts.com - I've been working on this during my kid's naps.The web app allows car owners in the U.S. to see a list of all the service bulletins the manufacturer has sent out about your car over the years (called Technical Service Bulletins or TSBs). You can subscribe for new bulletins to be sent to your email as well.These service bulletins are not only recalls but also fixes for known issues with the car.I found reading these bulletins super helpful for my own car. There were some symptoms I would have never noticed without reading through these bulletins. For example: the tailgate did not lift up all the way in cold weather. Turns out this was fixed and covered under the extended warranty.The infrastructure is all built on top of Cloudflare workers. I use Gemini Flash Lite to summarize and filter the bulletins.This is my first web app (thank you AI) so any feedback is welcome!

I've been building the most advanced automotive diagnostic app on the marketI used to be a mechanic, and spend a lot of my free time working on project vehicles, motorcycles, tractors, trucks etc. I wanted a tool to track the tasks I needed done, then a way to easily access VIN info for parts search, then I DMV records, and finally built an iphone app to scan the OBD2 diagnostic codes and hook them up to a custom ai diagnostic prompt.It's been a blast to work on, I need to focus on marketing it and get some users that aren't close friends, but it's been serving my purposes this summer so far.I've seen nothing with anywhere close to this depth of diagnostic reporting.https://crewchief.cc https://apps.apple.com/us/app/crewchief-auto/id6760673109

I'm building an AI agent that plays Slay the Spire. It currently reaches A20 Act 3 consistently and occasionally defeats the A20 Heart. It use two search: spare graph search for deck building, and MCTS for combat.Parallelly, I'm working on an attention-based memory retrieval system that achieved SOTA on LongMemEval, LoCoMo, and code retrieval benchmarks. https://github.com/AttemorySystem/attemory/Maybe later I'll build a live-streaming AI agent that plays Slay the Spire while conversing with viewers and remembering everything in chat!

An agent harness that is kind of like airflow for agent tasks.I thought open claw was cool but could never use something so insecure.Each run is in a container. One network bridge out so everything from tool calls to model communication goes over the bridge.Each run has a capability token and the host checks grants for the tools attempting to be called.Core super thin and everything from credentials handling to model communication is a package.Finally got it alpha and have some useful jobs set up like it triggering jobs on an alert channel in slack. Debugging it with tools like GitHub kube and our work mcp and the dropping a comment on every alert with the cause.https://ottoharness.comStill closed source but hoping to change that after some more testing.

The last time somebody made this thread, I posted about https://the-waterline.com/, a site I launched as a side project/eval to see how well Claude can do a decent-sized project (mostly) independently. It pulls public government data about water levels in the western US, updates the website and sends out a newsletter.It started getting some search impressions and clicks, so I decided to launch the next 9 of the top 10 ideas that ChatGPT came up with for this type of site - won't post all of them here, but https://the-dwell.com/ (data on ship and truck dwell times/port congestion) is doing the best thus far from a traffic perspective.First I had it send me a weekly analysis of the GA4/GSC data to see what could be improved about the site, but I've since automated that - each week it reviews traffic and search queries, then updates articles or creates new ones to meet demand. So now in theory I have a full engine to launch these sites and have them self-improve over time. Kinda neat to see all of that being done autonomously.The thing that these sites really need are some backlinks, so I'm thinking through how to get those....

A tmux plugin that makes is better to work with many agents:https://github.com/Ymirke/tmux-agent-switcherYou press ctrl+n and you get a sidebar showing all the tmux tabs you currently have and the statuses of the agents.The sidebar then has a couple different navigation modes based on what floats your boat, toggle by tab:1. Using vim bindings j/k, and supporting number -> j/k to go up or down quickly.2. Using number -> number. Meaning you press the number of session then number of tab.3. Using search, useful if you have a ton of sessions open.I really like what herdr, cmux and others are doing in this space, but I find it hard to get myself away from my core tmux setup, so I made this to not have to change too much of how I work.

Typegres - SQL over RPC safely (safely compose queries over Cap'n Web):At a high level: 1. Define your schema: TS classes model each one of your underlying tables. 2. Encapsulate your schema: Add methods on those classes (encapsulation 101 applied to your database) -- that compile down to SQL. This gives you the equivalent of computed columns and first-class relations 3. Expose your API: explicitly mark members of your classes to expose 4. Use it: Now - and this is the crazy part - the client (e.g., a web browser) can use your data-model directly to query data with SQL-level power (joins, aggregations, etc -- compiling into a single query) over RPC, securely!Real example visuals are better at describing it: https://typegres.com/Recently added SQLite support and live queries; playground shows the live queries: https://typegres.com/play/

A boat game for 5+ age group!I was never much of a game developer, but recently my 5 year old son wanted to play a game so we decided to build one together.It's a boat game, you basically steer a boat in an isometric 2d world, transporting passengers, cargo etc between ports.As we designed it, the ideas just kept on coming. He made or directed a lot of the art inside of the game (even the audio), and we included friends and family as characters within the game.A lot of fun to build - hilarious at times. I used Lua and LÖVE2D, building basically a game engine for an isometric world, so that took significantly more time than expected.If you want to test it [1], please do, but keep in mind it's only in Norwegian, but I am sure most people would be able to figure it out as it's meant for age group 5 and up:[1] https://apps.apple.com/no/app/b%C3%A5tspillet/id6791630382At this point our entire extended family and their kids, grandchildren etc are actually playing this, so it's been super fun.

I got sick of being on Zoom calls and having things lag or glitch, and not knowing if the issue was something I'm responsible for or not. Is it my LAN/Wi-Fi, my ISP path, some broader Internet issue, or Zoom?So, I built a tool to answer that. Major goals have been to keep low energy/cpu usage (so I can run it 24/7), have it adapt to the apps/traffic I'm using (rather than use static monitoring endpoints), and to deliver both at-a-glance answers in the menubar and in-depth detail in the dropdown.It's called Breakdown. It's a free (for typical uses). It's Mac-only for now (but if enough people ask for Windows I'll port it).https://breakdown.live

A Drobpox like app that works with FTP and every other storage protocol along gateways to access your Dropbox over FTP, SFTP, S3:- the desktop client: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive- the web client: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

I'm building an uptime monitoring service, in Elixir, called https://larm.dev. It's a tough field because for some reason people vibe coding apps think this is very easy to do, and there are new apps coming out pretty much every day. I'm still figuring out how to effectively stand out in the noise.I really enjoy working on the app though. The backend is Elixir, with a Phoenix LiveView dashboard. I've got a cluster of 3 nodes running, talking to each other. The probes that check the monitoring targets are tiny go binaries, spread across hosting providers across the world. I've also got synthetic probes now, running in little playwright sandboxes.A lot of the challenges have been around how to distribute work across the probes, with different strategies for the basic TCP/HTTP probes vs the synthetic workers, and how to effectively store large amounts of events (Clickhouse).

The final stretch of getting my game ready for release next week: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2764460/Sandustry/It's an automation game and factory builder with "falling sand" physics. Think Noita meets Factorio.

I'm working on Dictatorship Simulator. A deckbuilder where, instead of directly attacking your enemy, you manipulate a political simulation to do it for you. You start out on the fringe, and slowly work your way up, fighting an increasingly worried and panicky government - as well as your own.https://store.steampowered.com/app/4564800/Dictatorship_Simu...

I'm still working on https://openaltfinder.com; a directory to help people discover open-source projects. Added quite a bit of new features over the last month, including a new weekly newsletter, and a way for people to find beginner friendly issues: https://openaltfinder.com/contributeIt's been tough, for some reason both Google and Bing completely erased my site from their indexes.Another thing I'm working on: https://getpinnd.com - A small social network for map makers.

Working on https://radius.to/ - a Meetup.com alternative of sorts - with fairer organiser pricing for smaller groups.I posted a Show HN [1] here a while back, got tons of great feedback, and have been slowly improving it since, with no real marketing. Another Show HN is probably (definitely) overdue!Current focus is shipping a "Meet people doing X" feature - i.e. "I'm going for a cycle today in Richmond Park - who wants to join" (independent from groups) so I'm excited for that. There are some UI examples of how that will look on the landing page.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

I finished wiring up the backend data merge so user(s) (aka me, really) can record trees as they walk and have those merged into the general city data on my urban tree map app[1]. There's some very cool trees in the neighborhood I'm excited to have recorded.Which leads me to trying to get the processing off github actions (it's all duckdb pipelines), which has led me to improve the orchestration implementation of my 'better sql' [2] to optimize the asset based refresh flow. I'm now wiring that up in a general cloud service to give me the data orchestration platform I've always wanted. Building a multi-tenant cloud experience has been interesting![1]: https://greenmtnboy.github.io/sf_tree_reporting [2]: https://github.com/trilogy-data/pytrilogy

I got laid off recently and finally decided to dedicate some time to learn Rust, I started to work on an an idea I've head for a while, to create a game server to play Thai chess inspired by lichess.org, in fact, I plan to use several of their assets.I'll use Rust for the backend even though it's probably an over kill, but it's the best way to learn for me, doing something with the language. I have some of the front end move logic and board done, I plan to start working on the API soon, after I finish a Rust book I'm reading. Here's some of the code if anybody is interested: https://github.com/thaichess-org.

Had a moment of nostalgia and started building an IRC client for macOS. It’s totally FOSS. And has been fun to customize / add the features I like to see while avoiding the ones I don’t.https://github.com/richstokes/Netsplit

I created a make-your-own-circuit simulator in python to help learn electronics. The best part about this is that it is entirely hosted online and people can just go through the lessons, learn electronics by skipping the maths, and in the process have made their own circuit simulator (which is arguably a pretty cool project on its own) at the end of it.https://spicycircuits.dev/

Two open-source initiatives:1. https://preseason.ai Basically a benchmarking platform that measures how the top LLMs recommend devtools when prompted to build different types of web apps.2. https://widen.dev A native Mac desktop Postgres GUI with text-to-SQL. You can even use the LLM that already comes installed in your MacOS.