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Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

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Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#281

Post by saturn8601 »

jaggederest wrote: post #227
good-idea wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best comment on the thread. Fellow potter & sculptor here, is your work online anywhere?

The overlap between ceramicists and technologists is never zero. Part of my initiative to slowly replace every part of my house and home with things I've made... 1% progress is good, right?

I'm so glad i'm not the only one....well I have dreams and visions of a plan but the most i've done is a half baked Patreon and Substack scraper that only kinda works to capture my sunk cost of subscriptions I never used, a movie theater listing app that allows me to find classic movies that may get buried from the mass advertised slop, a custom sewn jacket that contains pockets for homecooked popcorn and locally grown fruit and well a 3-D printed sauce cup holder for all those sauce cups that I get from fast food restaruants.

Im slowly trying to extricate myself by cooking more from home only from local farmers and what I can grow from home (so far only one cucumber). After all, can you really build everything else if your own body molecules are being replaced by low quality things made by others?

I'll get around to 100% at some point before I die or I wont care anymore since i'll be dead: one of those outcomes is inevitable.

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#282

Post by Jeremy1026 »

I host a couple of services on a box in my network. I built a tunnel that runs on the box and on my VPS to allow me to quickly access those services.

A tool that checks for new movie and tv releases, looks up ratings to see if they are worth adding to my plex server (see above about services I'm running), and then finds the magnet link and downloads them. But will only do so if my VPN is connected.

A tool that allows me to quickly build out paintball fields using my STLs of bunkers that I made, and export the full field layout as a single STL for quick painting, slicing, and printing.

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#283

Post by sevennull »

mimischi wrote: post #105
sevennull wrote: post #99

replaced some paid apps with local - google reader rss replacement and send web to kindle. most ambitious was browser extension to automate booking reservations since captcha and timing were critical. swamp/evaporative cooler controller that monitors rate of change of relative humidity and sends RF signal to cooler to turn water on for x seconds to keep humidity lower than just leaving set to cool all the time. Does…

I’d be curious about that web to kindle one you built. Mind sharing?

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#284

Post by baby_souffle »

Countless little things to clean up data or improve tools I wrote long ago. If you count HomeAssistant things (via MCP) then many many more little qol things, too.

Most recently, though, is a basic python CLI/Flask app that makes it point-click to manipulate the route table and dnsmasq settings on a raspberry pi. eth0 on the pi goes to LAN and put a USB ethernet attached to a switch and you now have a pretty powerful IoT/Untrusted device inspection environment.

One click to change the DHCP settings offered to the device, run a pcap, allow/deny the device access to certain services or NAT them elsewhere as needed. Straight forward DNS adjustments that can be applied per device and now that MITM-Proxy has a python API... it's pretty straight forward to also peep inside of SSL protected things.

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#285

Post by UnknownBanana »

Nothing that I couldn't have done myself, but in a fraction of a time.

- Custom off-brand version of Pangolin

- Dashboard with beautiful UI for parsing traefik logs with database, filters, map and various integrations and statistics

- Samsung SmartThings Volume Control for Soundbar in Windows 11 native style

- Android App with good UI which serves as remote for switching display output modes for PC for movie night / gaming night with various toggles and for remote game streaming

- Many little one-prompt apps which run in background for QoL

- Reverse Engineering with IDA became a walk in a park

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#287

Post by ceejayoz »

slopinthebag wrote: post #241
ceejayoz wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think Steve Jobs was proud of the iPhone, despite others doing most of the actual physical work on it? I'm more than a mere typist; there's a skill to getting a usable, useful app out of an AI.

Steve did a lot more than prompt an AI. There is no skill to using LLMs, you can learn to be effective with them just by using them for a few days.

Steve prompted humans. Quite similarly.

Even babies can learn the technique!

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#288

Post by Brajeshwar »

Quite a few during the early days. Recreating some fun ‘game’, popular during the Flash days. A work breaker/silencer, etc.

Then, I got bored because they seem to be bad beyond certain complexities. But around Christmas last year, things improved a lot, and I’m getting confident building real ones. In the mid of these, I also got an offer to work with the [pre]sales/GTM team of a large company. So, I have been building working prototypes of bits and pieces of boring enterprise business around the world and have been racking in, if not billions, but very close to it in sales pipeline in about two months. (I did that 1B token in a week thing.) I’m sure the business and sales team will be able to convert 20% to 30% of that in the coming months. I also pitch and presented my work directly to customers and they are coming for more. So, it has been fun.

Lastly, I really wanted to scratch an itch I had for a while—build a Static Site Builder. But I ended up buildig it to be a documentation tool for TypeScript and JavaScript. It can be used as an auto-detect and let it build alongside front-end projects, make it a hybrid so you can add human-written documentation too or just build a Jekyll-esque static site.

O’Vellum is a 3-in-1 documentation tool. https://ovellum.oss.oinam.com

The work silencer/breaker is at https://void.oinam.com

The bubble popper that I re-created which my daughter loves https://brajeshwar.com/2025/bubble-wrap/

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#289

Post by jaggederest »

saturn8601 wrote: post #281
jaggederest wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overlap between ceramicists and technologists is never zero. Part of my initiative to slowly replace every part of my house and home with things I've made... 1% progress is good, right?

I'm so glad i'm not the only one....well I have dreams and visions of a plan but the most i've done is a half baked Patreon and Substack scraper that only kinda works to capture my sunk cost of subscriptions I never used, a movie theater listing app that allows me to find classic movies that may get buried from the mass advertised slop, a custom sewn jacket that contains pockets for homecooked popcorn and locally gro…

I'm ahead of you by a ways but your instincts are not wrong :) we have timber and plans to replace the flooring with logged and milled timber, sourcing clay from the property, making tomato sauce of the gods from home grown roma tomatoes. it's a lovely way to spend a half century I think.
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