Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

I’ve been working on "Next Arc Research" — https://nextarcresearch.com - a wrapper around my curiosity to understand how AI, compute, and capital might change markets by 2030.

It’s not a trading tool or product. More like a weekly, machine-assisted research project. Each cycle I run analyses on 120+ public companies across semiconductors, cloud, biotech, energy, robotics, quantum and crypto. The framing is inspired by Emad Mostaque’s “The Last Economy” thesis — the idea that when intelligence becomes cheap, the physics of value creation start to look very different. I originally built it for myself and retail investors in my family but I figure it could have more general utility so prettied it up a bit.

The system uses large-model reasoning (GPT-5+ though I've also tested Sonnet, Gemini and Grok) combined with structured scoring across technology maturity, risk, competitive positioning, and alignment to AI-era dynamics. The output is static HTML dashboards, PDFs, and CSVs that track month-over-month shifts. I'm adding to it weekly.

Mostly I’m trying to answer questions like:

* Which companies are structurally positioned for outsized upside in The Last Economy?

* How should I deliver the research so that it would have been actionable to someone like me 30 years ago?

* What signals would help folks identify “the next NVIDIA” 5 years earlier?

The inference costs real $$$ so I've set up a Patreon that, hopefully, will allow me to scale coverage and extend the modelling and methodology. There is a free tier and some recent, complete example output on the web site. I'm also happy to gift a free month for folks willing to provide constructive feedback: https://www.patreon.com/NextArcResearch/redeem/CC2A2 - in particular I'm looking for feedback on how to make the research more actionable without drifting into "financial advice".

I don't collect any data but Patreon does for authentication and Cloudflare does to deliver Pages. The Last Economy is here: https://ii.inc/web/the-last-economy

Want to put local history on a map, so when I go somewhere I could ideally just open this webapp and immediately get presented with cool or interesting history that happened close by.

Currently spending time establishing relationships with historical societies, as I really need them to contribute points of interest, and stories. Many of these societies are run on a voluntary basis by 70+ year olds, so it's a long process. Getting some good responses eventually though, so it might actually go somewhere, just a lot slower than I want.

Also still doing https://wheretodrink.beer, but haven't added anything of note since playing on this other project.

And react2shell was a blast

working on https://socdefenders.ai, reddit + HN for cybersecurity

Custom Copilot alternative / extension because I no longer believe it is a good idea to let Big Ai determine how you write code with your new helper. Big Tech f'd up a lot of things the last 25 years as we ceded control of our interfaces to them. I don't want to make the same mistake with my primary work tool.

Also, getting into the guts of how agents work and messing around with the knobs and levers is super interesting and where the real differentiating skills are

Built on ADK, CUE, and Dagger

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_next/lib/agent

(my swiss army knife for dev work, getting a rename soon(tm))

Currently working on Klugli - Educational app for German primary school kids (Grades 1-4).

Parents set up accounts, kids log in with simple codes and work through curriculum-aligned Math and German exercises. Built with Elixir/Phoenix/Ash and LiveView.

The hard part isn't the tech - it's creating content that actually maps to the German school curriculum rather than generic "educational" fluff. Currently grinding through grade 2 math topics.

https://klugli.de