I'm working on Trebella [0], a tool to help classical music students structure their practice sessions more effectively. I tried to build something similar ~10 years ago in the form of a more interactive music game, but felt like it wasn't actually that helpful for intermediate and advanced students. So this time I'm doing it in collaboration with actual music teachers and building a tool that actually helps me learn. I'd say 90% of my flute practice is done using it at this point, and I'm in the process of taking on the first arms length users in a closed beta. Please shoot me an email if you are interested in any way!
Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
#132Work: Security engineering focused on securing authnz at hyperscale in our new agentic reality. What interests me? Agentic engineering, vulnerability discovery at massive scale. Vulnerability remediation at massive scale. Bounding agent non-determinism.
Personal: Local models. Agent harnesses. Track cars, turning wrenches.
Had agents build recently:
- Photo catalog app with all 100K photos in my library described by a local 9B parameter model (it is absolutely amazing and my favorite personal project in terms of genuien impact)
- Generic RAG layer (vector embedding + FTS in SQLite with RRF and document ingestiation layers for 1-2GB knowledge bases to power agent context for stuff I am interested in, neuroscience and philosophy is where I spend time on this right now, and basically every AI research paper publicly available to help agents tinker with local models). This is especially useful for local models, but it even helps frontier models because they can freely churn through without a bunch of web calls and such when you are on a topic thread or research.
- Qwen 3.6 35B A3B clean-up proxy, achieving a clean thinking + tool calling A3B that I can leave running for 24+ hours. This particular model gets stuck in long reasoning chains and needs encouragement to get on with it, especially on context tasks. It actually reasons well but then starts second guessing and loops. Built a deterministic framework to inspect its thinking and make it wrap its thinking up if it gets stuck and also to trigger calls to external models and inject solutions to problems when it gets stuck. The agent sees the solution injected from a remote model like it is its own thinking, kind of a subconscious it has no idea about. Metacognition in models, it is wild.
DSV4->GLM->Kimi is the "phone a friend" external brain pathing I built. As far as I know no one has shared all of the bugs I have 'fixed' in my project and gotten local Qwen A3B this reliable.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
#133[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
#134I 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"
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
#135Been going a while, working to shift into a verification layer on existing static scanners rather than a standalone product: https://rsolv.dev takes a highly opinionated TDD approach to _proving_ (or disproving!) scanner-indicated codebase vulnerabilities and writing red tests against the desired secure behavior, so that customers can trust that they're not just making code mutations without cause, and that the shipped fixes actually work, and that there's regression protection in their suite.
Aside from that, I've been getting into building hyper-local services around public data; it feels really rewarding and relatable to invest more locally!
Already up and running: https://hailpass.com/?ref=HAILHN9 (ref code there knocks $10 off the season price) as a "season pass" for latlong/street address level-targeted hail notifications, built specifically for damaging-size hail (not just _any_ hail) on the Colorado front range. Email is free, texts are on the season pass model.
On its way, likely first ship today: https://denverbroomsday.com, same season pass model with same free email/paid-per-season text split on reminders to move your car before street sweeping days in Denver.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
#136I work on 2 things that are the same thing:
1. ghosttyfx — libghostty terminal for JavaFX (https://github.com/vlaaad/ghosttyfx/)
2. trying to integrate ghosttyfx into the Defold editor (https://defold.com/)
Turns out integrating into a bigger IDE is much harder than just implementing a JavaFX view using libghostty...
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
#137Harness evals on private benchmarks. I haven’t found a good way to evaluate harness releases on realistic private tasks
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
#138[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
#139update to my ai first desktop https://apps.apple.com/app/aifcc-ai-first-computer/id6782364...
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
#140The 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.
Looks really fun! Best of luck with the release