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

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

#351

Post by tisdadd »

I have been working on the marketing site for an ETL Product that I am ready to launch, and this thread made me realize that I should ask in another thread about recommended MoR/affiliate programs for current day.

This is meant to be something that will help business teams be better able to communicate what they want, while producing ready to deploy tech artifacts that do not rely on AI.

More importantly, I have been working on being a Dad - something we were told would be impossible naturally. Way more fun than being in front of the computer - our little one is nearly six months old now, and sleeping through the night until usually at least 8 AM, starting to roll over and enjoy tummy time more, and bringing smiles everywhere she goes.

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

#352

Post by RealityVoid »

D13Fd wrote: post #294

I have a keyboard I bought in 2020 called the Makerdiary M60 keyboard. It runs Python, and over the years I've coded in various functions. But it was somewhat buggy, and the upstream firmware was never upgraded. I love the hardware because it's the only keyboard I've been able to find that keeps a live Bluetooth connection and lets you toggle back and forth between USB and Bluetooth instantly using only a keyboard sh…

Simultaneous connection sounds super cool. I use it in the same way and reconnecting is annoying. I thought of doing something similar with synergy/mouse without borders but not through the internet, through the keyboard/mouse itself, auto toggling on mouse to the edge of screen. Cool project.

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

#353

Post by singhrac »

mattkevan wrote: post #328

I’m making Stacks, an open source ebook manager and server, as a lightweight alternative to Calibre. Written in Swift, it consists of a SwiftUI browser and a Mac/Linux server and CLI. Shares are automatically discovered via Bonjour/avahi and also published as OPDS feeds. It can import Calibre libraries and has basic support for managing books on Kindles, but I’ve only tested it with a MTP Paperwhite as that’s all I’v…

I’m quite interested in this. Where are you getting metadata and covers from? I found this pretty hard unless you pay for ISBNdb (OpenLibrary has bad covers, and Google Books API doesn’t give you high resolution ones I think).

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

#354

Post by xavigroup »

I left my job as a principal software engineer a few months back and have been working on an agentic harness and https://blackbear.app -- a local first, end-to-end encrypted everything app with file editors for notes, documents, sheets, free-hand canvases, slides, and a whole lot more. Also features a calendar and task system, and a lightweight discovery engine. There's a BYOK agent system (Pax) that works with you across the whole app (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and local Ollama support). Works in a browser, from the CLI, and from native mac and linux apps (mobile on the way). Not exactly sure my end goal yet, but it's been fascinating building these things

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

#355

Post by feliixh »

I just hacked together https://www.firstbranch.ai in a few days, conversational intelligence for congress hearings.

I was talking about healthcare price transparency with a friend. He pointed me to a hearing in congress and I was surprised by how much I learned from one of the witnesses' testimonies so I built a "serendipity engine" for congress hearings.

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

#356

Post by biotinker »

I was laid off in early June (was a staff software eng at Viam writing motion planning software for robots) and have been fiddling with electronics.

Most recently I made a portable AQI meter, since the air quality here in Central Oregon can quickly get bad.

It's a small 3d printed box containing a rpi pico, an 18650 battery, an e-ink display, and a SEN66 sensor.

I hit a button, it turns on, runs the sensor for ~40 seconds to get a good reading, displays on the e-ink, and then turns off. So there's zero power draw when it's off, and the battery lasts for ~1500 readings. Accuracy seems fine, the AQI, temp, and CO2 readings all match my permanently placed sensors inside and outdoors.

Other projects include using some of the old leftover robot scrap to automate irrigation in my apple orchard.

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

#357

Post by xavigroup »

xavigroup wrote: post #354

I left my job as a principal software engineer a few months back and have been working on an agentic harness and https://blackbear.app -- a local first, end-to-end encrypted everything app with file editors for notes, documents, sheets, free-hand canvases, slides, and a whole lot more. Also features a calendar and task system, and a lightweight discovery engine. There's a BYOK agent system (Pax) that works with you a…

Oh, and all the editors support real-time collaboration. There's messaging, voice and video calls, and a lightweight contact management system that I'm still iterating on

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

#358

Post by helloakariq »

taylorfinley wrote: post #133

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…

Nice to see unique applications with Agents. Well done!

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

#359

Post by soontimes »

I'm working on a platform that aggregates a business's operational and financial data and builds a causal model on top, deriving target metrics like FCF or EBITDA. With that model we can forecast different scenarios — what happens if we open a new shop, raise prices, take a loan. We also generate reports: weekly overviews, anomaly detection, deviations from targets. All of this is essentially a harness for an AI agent that customizes the platform for a specific business and integrates its data sources. Large companies have dedicated teams and sophisticated tooling for this; my bet is that small and medium businesses would benefit just as much, and with recent progress in AI it's finally possible to deliver it tailored to each case at very low cost.

My primary target right now is e-commerce due to rich data streams, however if you think your business would benefit from this tool, I would be happy to connect and discuss it.

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

#360

Post by faxmeyourcode »

I built macrosforhumans.com because I had been using cronometer since 2020 on and off and was familiar with tracking macros but always hated the entry. Measurement is something that you have to do regardless but the annoyance of having to suffer through their search/recipe/diary CRUD UI was unbearable. With MFH there is no mobile or web app. it's just a phone number that you text. This reduced the friction for me significantly and I've already lost a few pounds and, after recently turning 30, hopefully a few more with more diet and exercise.

I've been building this for a while but I'm working on getting my first 100 users now which is my first foray into the marketing/sales side of things and any tips would be helpful. Also I didn't realize until later that the name, while I think is pretty cool, might be extremely poor SEO? :-)

I also think that these kinds of post-app apps are a curious idea and will become more popular, although likely (hopefully not) through sms as the communication medium. I am off this week and plan to write some stuff about it but it feels really cool to remove the terrible CRUD UIs entirely from this part of my life. I tell my friends that even if it doesn't take off I'm never shutting it down because I enjoy using it over myfitnesspal/cronometer/macrofactor etc so much.

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