Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What developer tool do you wish existed in 2026?

news.ycombinator.com

21–26 of 26 posts

Re: Ask HN: What developer tool do you wish existed in 2026?

#21

A physical board that translates digitally. Imagine a whiteboard that has sticky notes, writing, little tokens and trinkets and the board also becomes a digital version that you can iterate on. I really like to plan with my hands and in MY memory, but still love the utikity of planning digitally of course.

Love this one! My immediate thought for a build: just a camera with on-device VLMs and LLMs. You could point it at a normal whiteboard (or a wall of sticky notes), and the model could interpret the handwriting, track the tokens, and sync the state digitally in real-time without needing any special "smart" hardware. It feels like a much more flexible approach than an expensive proprietary whiteboard. Would a camera-on…

Yeah, I figured a camera oriented solution would probably be the simplest way to actually implement, especially for copying the writing over.

A loooong time ago I had one of those notebooks (rocketbook I think) that you would take a picture of and the software would detect it and upload a digital version of it, it was clunky though. But the thing I liked about it was the little icons you would color in that would denote what kind of note to save the page as.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tool do you wish existed in 2026?

#23
I could use a sane CI system.

I hate DevOps. I have to do multiple commits to implement something.

I would love to be able to have access to the same env as the CI so that I could prototype the script/job on my own machine before committing to git. Most things are using Docker anyway, so it should be possible.

I hate that I need to write commands in Yaml files, commit (or use the browser) and then look at the result.

Solve this and I would pay for it.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tool do you wish existed in 2026?

#24
post #23

I could use a sane CI system. I hate DevOps. I have to do multiple commits to implement something. I would love to be able to have access to the same env as the CI so that I could prototype the script/job on my own machine before committing to git. Most things are using Docker anyway, so it should be possible. I hate that I need to write commands in Yaml files, commit (or use the browser) and then look at the result.…

Something that would record commands as you go and allow you to rollback during testing the scripts?

This is what I miss whenever I have to do devops...

Re: Ask HN: What developer tool do you wish existed in 2026?

#26
post #23

I could use a sane CI system. I hate DevOps. I have to do multiple commits to implement something. I would love to be able to have access to the same env as the CI so that I could prototype the script/job on my own machine before committing to git. Most things are using Docker anyway, so it should be possible. I hate that I need to write commands in Yaml files, commit (or use the browser) and then look at the result.…

Something that would record commands as you go and allow you to rollback during testing the scripts? This is what I miss whenever I have to do devops...

That could be useful as well.

Perhaps the ability ability to stop at a specific point in the script and being able to modify any commands and execute the step and then continue the script until it fails again.

You know .. debugging interface would be a killer feature that would save so much time developing scripts.

Post reply on HN