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

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651–660 of 1001 posts

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

#651

Marginalia Search as usual. Recently went on an optimization bender that saw the index now become almost completely bottle-necked by CPU in the ranking calculations step. Pretty neat. Faster ranking means better results as queries run on a timeout. Also working on making the search results more relevant by fixing jank. Also working on some more commercial features, like the ability to monitor queries (e.g. for backli…

It is both a great (ai tools) & worst (ai slop) time to be building a web search engine!

> working on some more commercial features, like the ability to monitor queries (e.g. for backlinks or brand mentions) and get an email when there are new results

As an inspiration (presuming you don't already know), see exa.ai who build generic solutions in similar space: https://exa.ai/docs/reference/monitors-api-guide

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

#652
I work full time as a full-stack developer, have a second part-time software development job, and recently started a business named Glitchmodo.

I rebuilt two older projects: AwesomeTools.org, now with more than 200 free browser-based tools, and SuperDadJokes.com, which I originally made for my kids when they were younger. Awesome Tools was recently approved for Google AdSense, so I'm now learning more about SEO, traffic, and monetization.

I'm also building a daily word game for iOS and Android, plus a Roblox game. I'm totally new to game development, so that has been fun and challenging. My kids are excited to be testers for the Roblox game, so that one has me the most motivated.

https://awesometools.org https://superdadjokes.com https://glitchmodo.com

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

#653
In the last few months I have been building an AI assistant that is quite possibly saving my life.

It's an iOS app that uses LLMs to estimate and track nutrients and calories in all the food I eat. It is plugged in to Apple Health so it sees all my activity, sleep, body metrics, etc. I have set some general health goals in the app and it uses this to rate (poor, neutral, good) and advise me on the food I log. A calendar view shows how each day has gone in a traffic light coloring system. I can also log contextual notes to help it make sense of my day, and it has a memory system so each session has continuity.

The assistant can save extracted or inferred nutritional data in a library, like when I give it photos of nutritional labels for foods I eat frequently or I log the same thing repeatedly, for easy reuse later. Also useful for home made meals and recipes.

I've connected it to my workout tracker app Hevy so it can keep tabs on my exercise and also adjust my programs based on me chatting with it in the app about how a workout went. This is really useful for swapping out exercises I struggle with, for example, or to keep a well-balanced program over time.

Recently I added an Apple Watch companion app with a watch face complication so I can keep an easy eye on things like up-to-date calorie deficit.

All built in Swift with Opus on the $20 plan. I realize I can probably use existing AI nutrition tracking apps, and probably also connect Claude to Apple Health, but the joy of building and getting this to be completely tailored to me has been so fun and extremely useful. I've shared it with a few friends, but since I am paying for all the API tokens currently I have not yet tried to get more users onboarded.

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

#654
post #622

https://finbodhi.com - An app for your financial journey. It helps you track, understand, benchmark and plan your finances - with double-entry accounting. You own your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit (we do have your email for subscription tracking and analytics). Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custo…

thanks for letting user see the demo dashboard without asking for email etc. Looks useful

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

#655

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 simp…

Very cool! I was just today thinking I should have an AI help me design a new piece of furniture I've been thinking about, and send it off to a CNC shop.

The MCP server seems to have a bug. The tool list flashes for a second in Claude Desktop, but then immediately states "This connector has no tools available." and the error "Couldn’t reload tools from the server." when I try to refresh it.

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

#656
I have been working on the latest update to my app: Wrote Myself a Letter which I finished after being laid off. The idea is to send a letter to your future self, which I personally find very therapeutic in many ways, but what is important is the app is fully offline, has 0 tracking, ads or subscriptions. It's a once off purchase and own forever, which is something I wish was more common these days. Check it out and, if for any reason you can't afford it just write me and I will send you a key.

Love from Australia:

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/wrote-myself-a-letter/id647826...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeropluson...

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

#657
This month marks 1 year since I first started self-research and building my own coding agent VT Code [0]. I've been learning and experiment with a lot of things to first adapt myself and to learn about AI native/harness engineering. Thankfully, last month VT Code receives highest amount of contributions from the open-source community.

This month I will be focusing and enhance more long-running horizontal for VT Code such as plan mode, better strengthen tools policy structure and improve its harness as new and existing model grows exponentially. And If you are curious and want to fork it feel free, and welcome, let's build!

[0] https://github.com/vinhnx/VTCode

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

#658

Building the GoodReads of fanfiction and web fiction. Currently growing really quickly so dealing with scaling pains :/ https://storywatch.org

Small observation - some of your published blog posts are all future dated...unless its all fictional :-)

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

#659
A CLI and UI tool called "renovate-log-parser" to diagnose issues with Renovate Bot, using its debug log. It's supposed to accelerate this analysis, with several CLI commands (one meant for coding agents to save tokens when they read the log). If you want to try it, it's just one "npx renovate-log-parser" command away.

https://github.com/MShekow/renovate-log-parser

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

#660

Building a modern typing application. https://typequicker.com I believe typing is probably one of the most important skills in 21st century for knowledge workers and yet one of the most neglected. Hoping to change that. Anyone can learn to type fast, without having to think about or look down at the keyboard. We are building the best tool to help people get there quickly

Very slick and smooth. The insights pages need a link to go back to the main page. Bookmarking.
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