Building a map and text-based mobile game where you walk around and graffiti tag things (like Pokemon Go, except you are not looking at a map on your screen). The interface is text room names + descriptions, like an old school MUD, that update as you walk in different directions. They rooms are based partly on what is there in real life, although known points of interest are changed to fit a 'cyberpunk' theme.
The app is built in React Native (almost entirely with AI although I'm fairly particular about some of the features and methods it uses) with a Go backend. Map data comes from PMTiles.
I'm working on a fully offline, client-side train journey planner for UK rail - https://railraptor.com
When booking flights, I use sites like Kiwi and Skyscanner that let you do flexible searches - multiple destinations, custom connections, creative routes, etc. But rail search feels oddly constrained. All the UK train operators offer basically the same experience, and surface the exact same routes. I always suspected there were better or just different options that weren’t being shown. Where is the "Skyscanner for trains"?
After digging through the national rail data feeds, I decided to have a go at building my own route planner that runs completely offline in the browser. This gave me the freedom to implement more complex filters, search to/from multiple stations, and do it without a persistent network connection.
Now I'm finding routes that aren't offered by the standard train operators, connecting at different stations, and finding it's often easier to travel to different stations (some I'd never heard of) that get me closer and faster to where I actually want to go!
It's still a little rough and I'd like to add more features such as fares, VSTP data, and direct-links to book tickets, but wanted to share early and get some initial feedback before investing more time into it. So, thanks in advance - let me know what you think.
I'm beginning to homeschool my kids in computing, and we are pairing up chapters of The Elements of Computing System (the Nand2Tetris book) with games that teach similar skills/kinds of thinking (Human Resource Machine, Comet 64, etc...), but we didn't find anything to supplement the first two chapters (where you build basic chips up to an ALU in HDL). I ended up starting creating a kind of browser based kata for those chapters here:
I'm writing an essay about how I use an ancient text editor, GNU Emacs, along with gptel, Gemini, some local models, yt-dlp, and patreon-dl to help me me study an ancient language, Latin.
I want to show how I liberate poorly aligned, pixelated PDF image scans of century-old Latin textbooks from the Internet Archive and transform them into glorious Org mode documents while preserving important typographic details, nicely formatted tables, and some semantic document metadata. I also want to demonstrate how I use a high-performance XML database engine to quickly perform Latin-to-English lookups against an XML-TEI formatted edition of the 19th century Lewis & Short dictionary, and using a RESTXQ endpoint and some XQuery code to dynamically reformat the entries into Org-mode for display in a pop-up buffer.
I intend demonstrate how I built a transcription pipeline in Emacs Lisp using tools such as yt-dlp and patreon-dl to grab Latin-language audio content from the Internet, transcode the audio with ffmpeg, do Voice Activity Detection and chunking in Python with Silero, load the chunks into Gemini's context window, and send it off for transcription and macronization, gather forced-alignment data using local a local wav2vec2-latin model, and finally add word-level linguistic analysis (POS, morphology, lemmas) using a local Stanza model trained on the Classical corpus.
This all gets saved to an an XML file which is loaded into BaseX along with some metadata. I'll then demonstrate some Emacs Lisp code which pulls it into an Org-mode based transcription buffer and minor-mode for reading and study, where I can play audio of any given Latin word, sentence, or paragraph, thanks to the forced-alignment and linguistic analysis data being stored in hidden text properties when the data was fetched from the database.
Lastly, I'd like to explore how to leverage these tools to automatically create flash cards with audio cues in Org mode using the anki-editor Emacs minor mode for sentence mining.
I'm researching Luddite-style examples from around the world. That is, examples of when people rebel against new technology that they see as harming their livelihoods.
I’ve been building quantum photonics experiments. Repeating the Bell inequality tests that won the 2022 Nobel, quantum erasers, etc.
I just published a fun interactive 3D demo of SPDC, one of the most common and accessible ways to create entangled pairs of photons. I'm hoping to publish a series of articles on other cool learnings about doing quantum photonics in the lab.
I'm not a fan of the TUI form factor for longer running, more ambitious features. Even with a classic "Add an endpoint, tweak the infra, consume in the frontend", plans get awkward to refine in markdown files, especially if everything lives in its own repo.
I wanted something like Plannotator, that could also work for the execution, not just the planning, So I've been working on something that turns Notion into the memory and orchestration layer for agents.
Underneath, it's a plan-implement-review loop, but you get a nice Notion page with a kanban board out of it. You can easily link your existing documentation, collaborate by sharing the page, annotate and comment to steer the planner, and you get versioning out of the box.
Because Notion acts as the memory, you can just open the page after a long weekend and get your agent and yourself back into the full context. You can see what's been done, what's left, or what requires human input just by looking at the board. You can ask it to fetch the comments on the pull request you raised, and it'll fetch, validate the comments, give you a report, and update the plan/board if necessary.
I've been using it exclusively for the last two weeks, I'm quite happy with it. It's been really fun to build the exact tool I wanted.
I believe that AI-powered software development means we need to fundamentally rethink how we preserve code quality.
Model output volumes mean that code review only as a final check before merge is way too late, and far too burdensome. Using AI to review AI-generated code is a band-aid, but not a cure.
That's why I built Caliper (http://getcaliper.dev). It's a system that institutes multiple layers of code quality checks throughout the dev cycle. The lightest-weight checks get executed after every agent turn, and then increasingly more complex checks get run pre-commit and pre-merge.
Early users love it, and the data demonstrates the need - 40% of agent turns produce code that violates a project's own conventions (as defined in CLAUDE.md). Caliper catches those violations immediately and gets the model to make corrections before small issues become costly to unwind.
It's a mostly vibe-coded fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus. I wrote/prompted a scraper to pull in setlist data from Nugs and have been having a lot of fun coming up with cool data analysis stuff to do with their sets.
I've seen them 7 times (chump change compared to some fans) and was starting to get certain intuitions about like, "if I hear song X that probably means they won't play song Y." For example, one of my favorite Lotus tunes, It's All Clear To Me Now, seems to fulfill a similar "function" as another song - Did Fatt.
It was pretty cool to see that intuition bear out in the data (they've only ever been played in the same show one time in over 900 total shows).
I've got a bunch of other "data" features sitting in a PR in my Gitlab, need to get around to reviewing and testing it so I can push out the next update. Also have a few other ideas for it, although I think there's probably a point coming fairly soon where there's not really anything left to do.
I posted it on the main Lotus fan group on Facebook. I have a grand total 8 users. I love those users.
The site is nothing crazy, it will never make money or anything - but it's just been a ton of fun to have something cool to hack around on.
I evolved an rsync based backup script I've been using for almost a decade into https://github.com/nickjj/bmsu. I use this for backing up my life's work to an external drive but also syncing files to my laptop and phone too. It supports easy restoring as well.
No traffic ever leaves your local network and since it uses rsync under the hood the devices being sync'd to don't need to run anything other than SSH.
It's a single file shell script that has no dependencies except rsync. It's literally 1,000+ lines of defensive checks and validations to make sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot with rsync, and at the end the last line of code directly calls rsync. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel by replacing rsync (it's an amazing tool).
Thanks, it's always fun when you're scratching your own itch.
It's also a nice excuse to build in quality of life features that don't take a lot of time because you're using the thing all the time. My favorite one is the color coded rsync command output when DEBUG=1 is set so you can be absolutely sure your config values are producing the expected rsync flags and args.
It lets you create TV channels from digital media such as YouTube, The Internet Archive, TikTok, Twitch, and Dailymotion. It does that by letting you schedule videos against a custom calendar system.
Since filling out even a month of content can be a lot of work, I built some things to make the process easier.
* Advanced scheduler to know when and how long content can be played at any given datetime
* Real time team collaboration
* Channel libraries to organize media
* "Blocks" - Create a dynamic schedule which generate hours of content that mimics real television scheduling. It even carries over your playback history between generations so that playlists continue from where they left off.
* A catalog to find media from official sources on YouTube
* Embeddable as an OBS browser source to restream your owned content
* Repeat content infinitely or temporarily to create 24/7 channels.
If all goes well I am hoping to re-release sometime this month.
An app for supplementing learning in my masters program [1].
I'm currently in enrolled in the MCS Online from UIUC. My first course, Natural Language Processing, has been interesting, but it's a coursera-based course. This means the lectures are pre-recorded and mostly just the professor reading the slides. It's hard for me to stay engaged and really learn the material. So I started with a series of claude prompts that took the lecture slides and created a pre-watch summary, and then helped me drill the concepts after each lecture. I think converted those into a platform where I can upload notes/lecture slides and have it generate quizzes. It starts with recognition(multiple choice) questions, and eventually moves to recall(short answer) once you prove mastery of a topic. It also generates flashcards from failed answers. It extracts topics from the uploaded materials, and tracks mastery over time. Mastery rots if you don't touch the platform/topic for a while.
I'm not sure if I'll every productize it in any way, but I could see a world where it's used by people prepping for the bar, med boards, various continuing education stuff. Right now it's just a fun platform to build on as I explore the current wave of technologies. Building a framework for evaluating different LLMs for best price/accuracy. Adding a RAG pipeline so wrong answers can point back to source material for further review, etc.
I'm looking at moving from backend engineering to a more MLE or agent pipeline role, so this is giving me something more than school projects to build on. While also helping me do better at school.
I'm building my ideal backend for small projects and hobby stuff. It's inspired by PocketBase, but built around Lua scripting instead of built-in endpoints or usage as a Go library.
Like PocketBase, it's made in Go, has an admin panel, and compiles down to one executable. Here, you write your endpoints as Lua scripts with a simple API for interfacing with requests and the built-in SQLite database. It's minimal and sticks close to being a bare wrapper around the underlying tech (HTTP, SQL, simple file routing), but comes with some niceties too, like automatic backups, a staging server, and a code editor inside the admin panel for quick changes.
It comes from wanting a server that pairs well with htmx (and the backend-first approach in general) that's comfy to use like a CMS. It's not exactly a groundbreaking project, and it still has a ways to go, but I think it's shaping up pretty nicely :)
Real challenge to keep it working 24/7. The Android OS, and its modifications are really aggressive, trying to kill everything that runs more than they think it is allowed to.
I built a MacOS-native app [1] to control Positive Grid Spark amps [2], without needing a phone.
Official app is mobile-only and clunky, and the workflow is awkward if you're sitting at a desk. Hardest part has been maintaining compatibility across amp models. Small protocol changes or optimizations I make for one amp can break another. That means I have to do a lot of manual testing before every release. So I'm trying to think of an emulation layer or test harness I can build to make my life easier. Happy to hear suggestions there.
About ~50 people are using it so far, and main feedback has been that it's much faster and more reliable than the official app.
I've worked with data my entire career. We need to alt tab so much. What if we put it all on a canvas? Thats what I'm building with Kavla!
Right now working on a CLI that connects a user's local machine to a canvas via websockets. It's open source here: https://github.com/aleda145/kavla-cli
Next steps I want to do more stuff with agents. I have a feeling that the canvas is an awesome interace to see agents working.
VCamper: use LLMs to spot security fixes before CVE publication
Once a patch for a security vulnerability is public, the patch itself can reveal the vulnerability before the CVE is published. VCamper uses a staged LLM pipeline to analyze a Git commit range and flag likely vulnerability patches, even when they look like routine changes.
It’s still a proof of concept, but on known cases like curl CVE-2025-0725 it got close to the published root cause from the patch alone.
This matters because LLMs could make it much harder to keep security fixes quiet: once the patch is public, the bug may be recoverable almost immediately. Quietly shipping a fix and hoping it stays under the radar may stop being a reliable strategy.
Games. Well, mostly tooling surrounding them it seems. In the last 2 months I've made a pixel art editor for Android, a headless population simulator(still balancing parameters on this one, not enough NPC's turn to crime at present, and I've also run into some weird issues with market prices, in one instance the price of meat rose enough to cause a integer overflow. I could switch to i64, but honestly meat was supposed to cost around 20 moneys, not 2³²
I'm also working on a 2d procedural animation plugin for bevy, a autotiling plugin for bevy (using 16 tile-dual grid, which the default bevy autotiling plug-in didn't support) and ofc my android pixel editor now has a rig editor mode and a tile editor mode that integrates with the plugins.
Making video games is hard! I keep getting side tracked!
It's an LLM-webapp-builder, sure, but different from the rest! I have the LLM write python code when it needs to modify an HTML file for example (it'll use beautifulsoup; then I run the code: it parses the source into a data structure, modifies the data structure, and then outputs the resulting html).
It's also a marketplace where you can publish your llm-powered webapp, and earn $ on the token margins (I charge 2x token rates) when people use your site.
I'm building free immigration software for DIY applicants [1]
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.
I found out SimpleCitizen(YC S16) offers a DIY plan for $529 [2]
So, a free (and local-only) version might be a good alternative
It's still VERY much in development but I'm building a site that allows people to find TTRPG games that are suited to them AND includes a suite of tools for both GMs and players in said games.
Players will be able to showcase characters they're playing or have played and GMs can manage campaigns (scheduling, notes). I'm a D&D player but I'm trying to make it system-agnostic
I’m working on Flowtelic. A workflow driven note-taking system that aims to get you thinking deeper, but also help you work on the most important thing next if you’re stuck. While not essential, it’ll be enhanced with a local first AI approach.
A software for managing BJJ and martial arts academies that it's both easy to use and have everything they need like assistance tracking, payments, communications, etc.
It's called MatGoat[1], and it's going quite well so far. Nowadays I'm working more on the marketing/sales side.
Swiss army knife CLI tool written in Swift using only native Apple frameworks.
The primary goal of this project is to demonstrate how many Apple standard library frameworks can be meaningfully used in a single, actually-useful CLI tool.
I'm building a debate/writing game platform: https:argyu.fun
The mission is to incentivize better thinking. For each game there's an AI judge that scores everyone's answer based on a public rubric (style, cohesion, logic, etc).
Currently uses fake money and ELO score but thought it could be a very interesting competitive game for real stakes.
I've got this new account and a Substack page where I'm writing about, idk... metaphysical stuff? Spirituality, religion, psychedelics, tarot, and so forth. I was inspired largely by the Weird Studies podcast, but there's a bunch of actually interesting writing and media in this space right now.
I deliberately separated it from my public internet persona (which is connected to my real name) in the hopes that I could write about weird, woo-y, or controversial topics without worry. I've got a few articles half baked and have been having fun engaging with a different subset of the Substack crowd than my normal tech focus would show me.
Of course the stats show that the one article I did that touches on AI has done an order of magnitude better than anything else.
Anyway this is just kind of a weird sideline project, a sort of release valve for stuff that wouldn't fit in on my "professional" site, but it's been a fun thing to spend some time on.
Another thing that's cool is that I largely stopped _writing_ a few years back. I always enjoyed writing but of course as a dev most of my stuff had a technical/tutorial bent to it. Writing weird little "what do I think" essays has forced me to exercise a writing muscle I really hadn't stretched for a long time and I've enjoyed it.
There's only a handful of things up now, it's nothing special really. Link in my bio, if you see something you like I would love to hear from you!
I’ve got a decent amount of people on the newsletter so trying to figure out how to best deliver indie games via that channel and in the end get more people playing these awesome games people develop :)
Orange Words. My hobby project, a hacker news search system. It was initially created by hand and now I use AI augmented development. It's a good low risk environment for experimenting.
Building something that finally stops making me the tester for my own AI. You know that moment where the AI finishes writing code and then goes "can you run this and check if it works?" I got tired of that loop. So I built an IDE that just... runs it, clicks through it, finds what broke, and fixes it. You watch.
Not Better Cursor , But what comes after it.
From another submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738827), there was a screenshot of Google Docs/Drive showing a popup saying "You cannot do copy/cut/paste with the mouse" whenever you try to right-click and copy.
Some months ago, I saw that very popup, and finally started working on something I've been wanted to do for a long-time, a spreadsheet application. It's cross-platform (looks and work identical across Windows, macOS and Linux), lightweight, and does what a spreadsheet application should be able to do, in the way you expect it, forever. As an extra benefit, I can finally open some spreadsheets that grown out of control (+100MB and growing) without having to go and make a cup of coffee while the spreadsheet loads.
I don't really have any concrete to share, I guess it'll be a Show HN eventually, but I thought it was funny it was brought up in a similar way in that article as was the motivation for me to build yet another spreadsheet application.
Building a pro transparency writing tool that cryptographically proves a human actually typed what they claim to have written (research papers, news articles, assignments etc) . It captures behavioral signals during composition, makes it very hard to automate or fake the writing process, and lets readers verify authorship authenticity. Think "proof of human work" for the AI generated slop era.
Codify — democratic digital public infrastructure that turns your problems into structured, executable programs.
The idea: describe any problem in plain language (voice or text), and AI codifies it into a structured program with the right people, steps, timeline, and agents to get it done. It's a 5-step wizard: Define Problem → Codify Solution → Setup Program → Execute Program → Verify Outcome.
It runs across 50+ domains — codify.healthcare (EMR backend), codify.education (LMS backend), codify.finance, codify.careers (HRM backend), codify.law, plus 13 city domains (codify.nyc, codify.miami, codify.london, codify.tokyo, etc.). Each domain tailors the AI assessment and program output to that sector.
The platform is Project20x — think of it as the infrastructure layer. If Codify is the verb ("codify your healthcare problem into a care program"), Project20x is the operating system that runs it all: multi-tenant governance, AI agent orchestration, and domain-specific sys-cores for healthcare, education, city services, etc.
Every US federal agency and state-level department has a subdomain — ed.usa.project20x.com (Dept of Education), doj.usa.project20x.com, hhs.usa.project20x.com, etc. — with AI agents representing each agency's mandate. Same structure at the state level.
The political side: Project20x hosts policy management for both parties — dnc.project20x.com and rnc.project20x.com — where legislative intent gets codified into executable governance through a 10-step policy lifecycle. Right now I'm building out the multi-agent environment so agency agents can negotiate with each other, make deals, and send policy proposals up to the HITL (human-in-the-loop) politician for approval. Each elected official has a profile (e.g. https://project20x.com/u/donald-trump) where constituents can engage and where policy proposals land for review.
The name is a nod to structured policy frameworks, but the goal is nonpartisan infrastructure: democratically governed essential services delivered as AI-native social programs.
Stack: Nuxt 2/Vue 2 frontend, Laravel 10 API, Python/LangGraph agent orchestration, Flutter mobile app. Currently live across all domains.
Building a map and text-based mobile game where you walk around and graffiti tag things (like Pokemon Go, except you are not looking at a map on your screen). The interface is text room names + descriptions, like an old school MUD, that update as you walk in different directions. They rooms are based partly on what is there in real life, although known points of interest are changed to fit a 'cyberpunk' theme.
The app is built in React Native (almost entirely with AI although I'm fairly particular about some of the features and methods it uses) with a Go backend. Map data comes from PMTiles.
I'm working on a fully offline, client-side train journey planner for UK rail - https://railraptor.com
When booking flights, I use sites like Kiwi and Skyscanner that let you do flexible searches - multiple destinations, custom connections, creative routes, etc. But rail search feels oddly constrained. All the UK train operators offer basically the same experience, and surface the exact same routes. I always suspected there were better or just different options that weren’t being shown. Where is the "Skyscanner for trains"?
After digging through the national rail data feeds, I decided to have a go at building my own route planner that runs completely offline in the browser. This gave me the freedom to implement more complex filters, search to/from multiple stations, and do it without a persistent network connection.
Now I'm finding routes that aren't offered by the standard train operators, connecting at different stations, and finding it's often easier to travel to different stations (some I'd never heard of) that get me closer and faster to where I actually want to go!
It's still a little rough and I'd like to add more features such as fares, VSTP data, and direct-links to book tickets, but wanted to share early and get some initial feedback before investing more time into it. So, thanks in advance - let me know what you think.
https://statusdude.com/
and a gift for my friend's birthday.
I'm beginning to homeschool my kids in computing, and we are pairing up chapters of The Elements of Computing System (the Nand2Tetris book) with games that teach similar skills/kinds of thinking (Human Resource Machine, Comet 64, etc...), but we didn't find anything to supplement the first two chapters (where you build basic chips up to an ALU in HDL). I ended up starting creating a kind of browser based kata for those chapters here:
https://virissimo.info/build-your-own-alu/
LMK what you think.
Space Trader!
Imagine mixing Magic: The Gathering, StarCraft and Civilization’s hex grid combat.
There’s multiplayer but I haven’t put the server anywhere yet.
Check out the introduction here:
https://github.com/williamcotton/space-trader/blob/main/docs...
Clone the repo:
There’s maybe a couple of other games called Space Trader so if anyone has any suggestions for a new name, I’m all ears!looks cool! i read `faction-identity.md`, i feel like if you come up with a little more lore, a name may come to you
I'm writing an essay about how I use an ancient text editor, GNU Emacs, along with gptel, Gemini, some local models, yt-dlp, and patreon-dl to help me me study an ancient language, Latin.
I want to show how I liberate poorly aligned, pixelated PDF image scans of century-old Latin textbooks from the Internet Archive and transform them into glorious Org mode documents while preserving important typographic details, nicely formatted tables, and some semantic document metadata. I also want to demonstrate how I use a high-performance XML database engine to quickly perform Latin-to-English lookups against an XML-TEI formatted edition of the 19th century Lewis & Short dictionary, and using a RESTXQ endpoint and some XQuery code to dynamically reformat the entries into Org-mode for display in a pop-up buffer.
I intend demonstrate how I built a transcription pipeline in Emacs Lisp using tools such as yt-dlp and patreon-dl to grab Latin-language audio content from the Internet, transcode the audio with ffmpeg, do Voice Activity Detection and chunking in Python with Silero, load the chunks into Gemini's context window, and send it off for transcription and macronization, gather forced-alignment data using local a local wav2vec2-latin model, and finally add word-level linguistic analysis (POS, morphology, lemmas) using a local Stanza model trained on the Classical corpus.
This all gets saved to an an XML file which is loaded into BaseX along with some metadata. I'll then demonstrate some Emacs Lisp code which pulls it into an Org-mode based transcription buffer and minor-mode for reading and study, where I can play audio of any given Latin word, sentence, or paragraph, thanks to the forced-alignment and linguistic analysis data being stored in hidden text properties when the data was fetched from the database.
Lastly, I'd like to explore how to leverage these tools to automatically create flash cards with audio cues in Org mode using the anki-editor Emacs minor mode for sentence mining.
Quaternion graph traversal and control system
https://github.com/VoxleOne/SpinStep
I'm researching Luddite-style examples from around the world. That is, examples of when people rebel against new technology that they see as harming their livelihoods.
I’ve been building quantum photonics experiments. Repeating the Bell inequality tests that won the 2022 Nobel, quantum erasers, etc.
I just published a fun interactive 3D demo of SPDC, one of the most common and accessible ways to create entangled pairs of photons. I'm hoping to publish a series of articles on other cool learnings about doing quantum photonics in the lab.
https://paulg.info/2026/04/10/spdc/
You should collaborate with Huygens Optics. I find his videos thought provoking
https://youtu.be/hYyrgDEJLOA
https://tessellate-digital.github.io/notion-agent-hive/
I'm not a fan of the TUI form factor for longer running, more ambitious features. Even with a classic "Add an endpoint, tweak the infra, consume in the frontend", plans get awkward to refine in markdown files, especially if everything lives in its own repo.
I wanted something like Plannotator, that could also work for the execution, not just the planning, So I've been working on something that turns Notion into the memory and orchestration layer for agents.
Underneath, it's a plan-implement-review loop, but you get a nice Notion page with a kanban board out of it. You can easily link your existing documentation, collaborate by sharing the page, annotate and comment to steer the planner, and you get versioning out of the box.
Because Notion acts as the memory, you can just open the page after a long weekend and get your agent and yourself back into the full context. You can see what's been done, what's left, or what requires human input just by looking at the board. You can ask it to fetch the comments on the pull request you raised, and it'll fetch, validate the comments, give you a report, and update the plan/board if necessary.
I've been using it exclusively for the last two weeks, I'm quite happy with it. It's been really fun to build the exact tool I wanted.
I've got a mobile app.
It allows you to get a wake up call from someone friendly, somewhere out there in the world.
It's got a handful of regular users and it's mostly me making the calls, but it's great fun to wake people up!
No phone number required - these are VoIP calls via the app.
Built it because I think it's cool.
That is such a wholesome and fun idea (but probably gonna be abused if more users). Link?
Also see:
3 days ago, 220 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700460
5 days ago, 51 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679021
8 days ago, 21 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47639039
11 days ago, 22 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47600204
I believe that AI-powered software development means we need to fundamentally rethink how we preserve code quality.
Model output volumes mean that code review only as a final check before merge is way too late, and far too burdensome. Using AI to review AI-generated code is a band-aid, but not a cure.
That's why I built Caliper (http://getcaliper.dev). It's a system that institutes multiple layers of code quality checks throughout the dev cycle. The lightest-weight checks get executed after every agent turn, and then increasingly more complex checks get run pre-commit and pre-merge.
Early users love it, and the data demonstrates the need - 40% of agent turns produce code that violates a project's own conventions (as defined in CLAUDE.md). Caliper catches those violations immediately and gets the model to make corrections before small issues become costly to unwind.
Still very early, and all feedback is welcome! http://getcaliper.dev
I've got a couple of different things going as per usual, but the one that I'm currently most excited about is Lotus Eater:
https://lotuseater.epiccoleman.com/
It's a mostly vibe-coded fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus. I wrote/prompted a scraper to pull in setlist data from Nugs and have been having a lot of fun coming up with cool data analysis stuff to do with their sets.
I've seen them 7 times (chump change compared to some fans) and was starting to get certain intuitions about like, "if I hear song X that probably means they won't play song Y." For example, one of my favorite Lotus tunes, It's All Clear To Me Now, seems to fulfill a similar "function" as another song - Did Fatt.
It was pretty cool to see that intuition bear out in the data (they've only ever been played in the same show one time in over 900 total shows).
I've got a bunch of other "data" features sitting in a PR in my Gitlab, need to get around to reviewing and testing it so I can push out the next update. Also have a few other ideas for it, although I think there's probably a point coming fairly soon where there's not really anything left to do.
I posted it on the main Lotus fan group on Facebook. I have a grand total 8 users. I love those users.
The site is nothing crazy, it will never make money or anything - but it's just been a ton of fun to have something cool to hack around on.
I evolved an rsync based backup script I've been using for almost a decade into https://github.com/nickjj/bmsu. I use this for backing up my life's work to an external drive but also syncing files to my laptop and phone too. It supports easy restoring as well.
No traffic ever leaves your local network and since it uses rsync under the hood the devices being sync'd to don't need to run anything other than SSH.
It's a single file shell script that has no dependencies except rsync. It's literally 1,000+ lines of defensive checks and validations to make sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot with rsync, and at the end the last line of code directly calls rsync. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel by replacing rsync (it's an amazing tool).
Nice work, I like it.
Thanks, it's always fun when you're scratching your own itch.
It's also a nice excuse to build in quality of life features that don't take a lot of time because you're using the thing all the time. My favorite one is the color coded rsync command output when DEBUG=1 is set so you can be absolutely sure your config values are producing the expected rsync flags and args.
I'm working on https://react.tv
It lets you create TV channels from digital media such as YouTube, The Internet Archive, TikTok, Twitch, and Dailymotion. It does that by letting you schedule videos against a custom calendar system.
Since filling out even a month of content can be a lot of work, I built some things to make the process easier.
* Advanced scheduler to know when and how long content can be played at any given datetime
* Real time team collaboration
* Channel libraries to organize media
* "Blocks" - Create a dynamic schedule which generate hours of content that mimics real television scheduling. It even carries over your playback history between generations so that playlists continue from where they left off.
* A catalog to find media from official sources on YouTube
* Embeddable as an OBS browser source to restream your owned content
* Repeat content infinitely or temporarily to create 24/7 channels.
If all goes well I am hoping to re-release sometime this month.
An app for supplementing learning in my masters program [1]. I'm currently in enrolled in the MCS Online from UIUC. My first course, Natural Language Processing, has been interesting, but it's a coursera-based course. This means the lectures are pre-recorded and mostly just the professor reading the slides. It's hard for me to stay engaged and really learn the material. So I started with a series of claude prompts that took the lecture slides and created a pre-watch summary, and then helped me drill the concepts after each lecture. I think converted those into a platform where I can upload notes/lecture slides and have it generate quizzes. It starts with recognition(multiple choice) questions, and eventually moves to recall(short answer) once you prove mastery of a topic. It also generates flashcards from failed answers. It extracts topics from the uploaded materials, and tracks mastery over time. Mastery rots if you don't touch the platform/topic for a while.
I'm not sure if I'll every productize it in any way, but I could see a world where it's used by people prepping for the bar, med boards, various continuing education stuff. Right now it's just a fun platform to build on as I explore the current wave of technologies. Building a framework for evaluating different LLMs for best price/accuracy. Adding a RAG pipeline so wrong answers can point back to source material for further review, etc.
I'm looking at moving from backend engineering to a more MLE or agent pipeline role, so this is giving me something more than school projects to build on. While also helping me do better at school.
[1] https://studyengine.app/
I'm building my ideal backend for small projects and hobby stuff. It's inspired by PocketBase, but built around Lua scripting instead of built-in endpoints or usage as a Go library.
Like PocketBase, it's made in Go, has an admin panel, and compiles down to one executable. Here, you write your endpoints as Lua scripts with a simple API for interfacing with requests and the built-in SQLite database. It's minimal and sticks close to being a bare wrapper around the underlying tech (HTTP, SQL, simple file routing), but comes with some niceties too, like automatic backups, a staging server, and a code editor inside the admin panel for quick changes.
It comes from wanting a server that pairs well with htmx (and the backend-first approach in general) that's comfy to use like a CMS. It's not exactly a groundbreaking project, and it still has a ways to go, but I think it's shaping up pretty nicely :)
link: https://github.com/ksymph/mogo
https://howareu.app/
Real challenge to keep it working 24/7. The Android OS, and its modifications are really aggressive, trying to kill everything that runs more than they think it is allowed to.
I made a whole article about it. I hope it will help others: https://dev.to/stoyan_minchev/i-spent-several-months-buildin...
I built a MacOS-native app [1] to control Positive Grid Spark amps [2], without needing a phone.
Official app is mobile-only and clunky, and the workflow is awkward if you're sitting at a desk. Hardest part has been maintaining compatibility across amp models. Small protocol changes or optimizations I make for one amp can break another. That means I have to do a lot of manual testing before every release. So I'm trying to think of an emulation layer or test harness I can build to make my life easier. Happy to hear suggestions there.
About ~50 people are using it so far, and main feedback has been that it's much faster and more reliable than the official app.
[1] https://tonepilot.app [2] https://www.positivegrid.com/products/spark-2
https://kavla.dev/
I've worked with data my entire career. We need to alt tab so much. What if we put it all on a canvas? Thats what I'm building with Kavla!
Right now working on a CLI that connects a user's local machine to a canvas via websockets. It's open source here: https://github.com/aleda145/kavla-cli
Next steps I want to do more stuff with agents. I have a feeling that the canvas is an awesome interace to see agents working.
Built with tldraw, duckdb and cloudflare
VCamper: use LLMs to spot security fixes before CVE publication
Once a patch for a security vulnerability is public, the patch itself can reveal the vulnerability before the CVE is published. VCamper uses a staged LLM pipeline to analyze a Git commit range and flag likely vulnerability patches, even when they look like routine changes.
It’s still a proof of concept, but on known cases like curl CVE-2025-0725 it got close to the published root cause from the patch alone.
This matters because LLMs could make it much harder to keep security fixes quiet: once the patch is public, the bug may be recoverable almost immediately. Quietly shipping a fix and hoping it stays under the radar may stop being a reliable strategy.
https://github.com/rndhouse/vcamper
I've spent several years developing an ad-free website with a few dozen solitaire/puzzle games:
https://inSolitaire.com
I am currently rewriting+testing the engine and about to add ~400 games to my platform in a few weeks.
Games. Well, mostly tooling surrounding them it seems. In the last 2 months I've made a pixel art editor for Android, a headless population simulator(still balancing parameters on this one, not enough NPC's turn to crime at present, and I've also run into some weird issues with market prices, in one instance the price of meat rose enough to cause a integer overflow. I could switch to i64, but honestly meat was supposed to cost around 20 moneys, not 2³²
I'm also working on a 2d procedural animation plugin for bevy, a autotiling plugin for bevy (using 16 tile-dual grid, which the default bevy autotiling plug-in didn't support) and ofc my android pixel editor now has a rig editor mode and a tile editor mode that integrates with the plugins.
Making video games is hard! I keep getting side tracked!
AST-based code edits from LLMs: https://codeplusequalsai.com
It's an LLM-webapp-builder, sure, but different from the rest! I have the LLM write python code when it needs to modify an HTML file for example (it'll use beautifulsoup; then I run the code: it parses the source into a data structure, modifies the data structure, and then outputs the resulting html).
It's also a marketplace where you can publish your llm-powered webapp, and earn $ on the token margins (I charge 2x token rates) when people use your site.
I'm building free immigration software for DIY applicants [1]
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.
I found out SimpleCitizen(YC S16) offers a DIY plan for $529 [2]
So, a free (and local-only) version might be a good alternative
[1] https://fillvisa.com/demo
[2] https://www.simplecitizen.com/pricing/
https://fablesandfriends.games
It's still VERY much in development but I'm building a site that allows people to find TTRPG games that are suited to them AND includes a suite of tools for both GMs and players in said games.
Players will be able to showcase characters they're playing or have played and GMs can manage campaigns (scheduling, notes). I'm a D&D player but I'm trying to make it system-agnostic
An old school WYSIWYG RAD GUI builder for native applications. Because I don't accept that native app development needs to suck as much as it does.
I made a thing to watch YouTube like it's 2000s cable tv.
I'm working to make it better right now.
https://channelsurfer.tv/
Trove - a really simple web app where I can shove some files without having to really think about configuring anything
https://agjmills.github.io/trove/
Go, docker, bit of alpine js
I’m working on Flowtelic. A workflow driven note-taking system that aims to get you thinking deeper, but also help you work on the most important thing next if you’re stuck. While not essential, it’ll be enhanced with a local first AI approach.
https://www.flowtelic.com
A software for managing BJJ and martial arts academies that it's both easy to use and have everything they need like assistance tracking, payments, communications, etc.
It's called MatGoat[1], and it's going quite well so far. Nowadays I'm working more on the marketing/sales side.
[1] https://matgoat.com/en/
I am working on hugind, I have two goals:
- make it reliable to run LLM inference on company hardware, even when it is poor or outdated
- bring chaotic agentic behavior under control in business contexts
https://github.com/netdur/hugind
I am vibe coding with Opus 4.6: https://github.com/jftuga/swiftswiss
Swiss army knife CLI tool written in Swift using only native Apple frameworks.
The primary goal of this project is to demonstrate how many Apple standard library frameworks can be meaningfully used in a single, actually-useful CLI tool.
brew install jftuga/tap/swiftswiss
Currently working on a way to help folks setup a signal account without requiring a smartphone.
It's in rust with egui, and should help folks to do that without the cli.
Not ready for prime time yet, but available at https://github.com/almet/signal-without-smartphone
I'm building a debate/writing game platform: https:argyu.fun
The mission is to incentivize better thinking. For each game there's an AI judge that scores everyone's answer based on a public rubric (style, cohesion, logic, etc).
Currently uses fake money and ELO score but thought it could be a very interesting competitive game for real stakes.
Any feedback is much appreciated.
I've got this new account and a Substack page where I'm writing about, idk... metaphysical stuff? Spirituality, religion, psychedelics, tarot, and so forth. I was inspired largely by the Weird Studies podcast, but there's a bunch of actually interesting writing and media in this space right now.
I deliberately separated it from my public internet persona (which is connected to my real name) in the hopes that I could write about weird, woo-y, or controversial topics without worry. I've got a few articles half baked and have been having fun engaging with a different subset of the Substack crowd than my normal tech focus would show me.
Of course the stats show that the one article I did that touches on AI has done an order of magnitude better than anything else.
Anyway this is just kind of a weird sideline project, a sort of release valve for stuff that wouldn't fit in on my "professional" site, but it's been a fun thing to spend some time on.
Another thing that's cool is that I largely stopped _writing_ a few years back. I always enjoyed writing but of course as a dev most of my stuff had a technical/tutorial bent to it. Writing weird little "what do I think" essays has forced me to exercise a writing muscle I really hadn't stretched for a long time and I've enjoyed it.
There's only a handful of things up now, it's nothing special really. Link in my bio, if you see something you like I would love to hear from you!
A web app that allows to practice speaking another language by participating in pre made scenarios, so beginners don’t get stuck.
https://fluenly.ai/
Shoggoth.db : a self organizing database to experiment with agents without having to let them roam freely.
Posted a show hn earlier today that didn't got any traction : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738516
I keep on refining https://hnarcade.com
I’ve got a decent amount of people on the newsletter so trying to figure out how to best deliver indie games via that channel and in the end get more people playing these awesome games people develop :)
I’ve been building a toy for exploring elliptic functions, modular forms, and elliptic curves. Sorry mobile support is not there yet.
https://grge.github.io/weierstrass/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superformula
Have you heard of Superformula ? I remember playing with them few years ago.
A 3D cluster visualization of S&P 500 and NASDAQ-100 markets. Created with Svelte and Three.js.
https://cybernetic.dev/cube
https://orangewords.com
Orange Words. My hobby project, a hacker news search system. It was initially created by hand and now I use AI augmented development. It's a good low risk environment for experimenting.
Building something that finally stops making me the tester for my own AI. You know that moment where the AI finishes writing code and then goes "can you run this and check if it works?" I got tired of that loop. So I built an IDE that just... runs it, clicks through it, finds what broke, and fixes it. You watch. Not Better Cursor , But what comes after it.
https://newfeed.io
Turns your project's GitHub release notes into user changelog that your users actually want to read.
https://www.focuslive.app/ It's a virtual co-working tool
https://stella-ops.org Release with confidence .
Deployment tool with security gates.
https://donethat.ai/vibeit
A tool to estimate if you should vibe an automation/app or just buy/delegate/grind instead
Same thing we work on every night, pinky
https://buttplug.io
From another submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738827), there was a screenshot of Google Docs/Drive showing a popup saying "You cannot do copy/cut/paste with the mouse" whenever you try to right-click and copy.
Some months ago, I saw that very popup, and finally started working on something I've been wanted to do for a long-time, a spreadsheet application. It's cross-platform (looks and work identical across Windows, macOS and Linux), lightweight, and does what a spreadsheet application should be able to do, in the way you expect it, forever. As an extra benefit, I can finally open some spreadsheets that grown out of control (+100MB and growing) without having to go and make a cup of coffee while the spreadsheet loads.
I don't really have any concrete to share, I guess it'll be a Show HN eventually, but I thought it was funny it was brought up in a similar way in that article as was the motivation for me to build yet another spreadsheet application.
Building a pro transparency writing tool that cryptographically proves a human actually typed what they claim to have written (research papers, news articles, assignments etc) . It captures behavioral signals during composition, makes it very hard to automate or fake the writing process, and lets readers verify authorship authenticity. Think "proof of human work" for the AI generated slop era.
Codify — democratic digital public infrastructure that turns your problems into structured, executable programs.
The idea: describe any problem in plain language (voice or text), and AI codifies it into a structured program with the right people, steps, timeline, and agents to get it done. It's a 5-step wizard: Define Problem → Codify Solution → Setup Program → Execute Program → Verify Outcome.
It runs across 50+ domains — codify.healthcare (EMR backend), codify.education (LMS backend), codify.finance, codify.careers (HRM backend), codify.law, plus 13 city domains (codify.nyc, codify.miami, codify.london, codify.tokyo, etc.). Each domain tailors the AI assessment and program output to that sector.
The platform is Project20x — think of it as the infrastructure layer. If Codify is the verb ("codify your healthcare problem into a care program"), Project20x is the operating system that runs it all: multi-tenant governance, AI agent orchestration, and domain-specific sys-cores for healthcare, education, city services, etc.
Every US federal agency and state-level department has a subdomain — ed.usa.project20x.com (Dept of Education), doj.usa.project20x.com, hhs.usa.project20x.com, etc. — with AI agents representing each agency's mandate. Same structure at the state level.
The political side: Project20x hosts policy management for both parties — dnc.project20x.com and rnc.project20x.com — where legislative intent gets codified into executable governance through a 10-step policy lifecycle. Right now I'm building out the multi-agent environment so agency agents can negotiate with each other, make deals, and send policy proposals up to the HITL (human-in-the-loop) politician for approval. Each elected official has a profile (e.g. https://project20x.com/u/donald-trump) where constituents can engage and where policy proposals land for review.
The name is a nod to structured policy frameworks, but the goal is nonpartisan infrastructure: democratically governed essential services delivered as AI-native social programs.
Stack: Nuxt 2/Vue 2 frontend, Laravel 10 API, Python/LangGraph agent orchestration, Flutter mobile app. Currently live across all domains.
https://project20x.com | https://codify.healthcare | https://codify.education | https://dnc.project20x.com | https://rnc.project20x.com etc...
a soft-state filesystem cache and cluster control system that doesn't require any external orchestration or micro service infrastructure