Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)

I am building Chief of Staff (getcos.ai), an AI assistant for startup CEOs specifically (and executives with 100+ emails a day in general), because neither Superhuman nor Lindy were working for me.

What I've noticed personally and with founders I talked to is that communication and email triage takes a large amount of time each day, but mostly only needs a quick decision or rerouting the right kind of information. But all this mental overhead takes away time from the really important strategic tasks that you should be working on as a founder.

That's where Chief of Staff comes in. Like a real chief of staff, it gives you a head start into the day: checks your calendar, your incoming emails and messages, prepares meeting briefs and drafts responses.

But it goes further than your typical smart inbox: by sharing your strategic goals it prioritizes and makes sure you are working on the highest leverage items. It also helps you manage relationships by tracking communication frequency and sentiment, so you don't miss when a key customer goes cold.

Both Superhuman and Lindy fell short in key areas of the UX for me: Superhuman makes email triaging faster, but you're still the one doing most of the work. Lindy is highly customizable, but you'll spend a ton of time building and tweaking workflows. I wanted a batteries-included approach to get started right away by just connecting Gmail, Slack, and Calendar without any additional configuration.

A key UX decision for me was also that I stay fully in control. Chief of Staff reviews, analyzes and prepares, but I am the one hitting send.

I'm testing it with a very small crowd right now, but want to open it up soon. If you feel that this is an issue you want solved for yourself as well, feel free to reach out to me and I'll get you on the list for the private beta.

If you have strong opinions for or against this approach, I wouldn't mind hearing this either :-)

[dead]

I got tired of paying lots of $$$ to form tools, in order to create useful forms and checklists for me, and with my specific requirements:

  - immutability
  - self-hostability and/or EU SaaS option
  - nested data (e.g. nesting a list of sailing legs into a sailing trip form)
  - formulas (today(), date, string, numeric,...) and conditionals (visible/required/enabled if)

My goal will be to create an exceptionally cost effective tool, scaling well with usage and not paywall blocking advanced features. This may sound weird, but I think this is a real challenging and good goal to follow, enabling users more than optimizing for the highest payer. I thought about having a tool for a few $/€ per user per month where others charge 10x.

So I created two nice pieces out of that, which would have been impossible in the past due to time constraints and got massively unlocked through claude code:

  - a frontend/javascript only forms library that supports all the rendering, form schema input, data output, validation and formula/conditional logic
  - a multi-tenant SaaS product, that is a single golang binary and stores in sqlite, easily self-hostable but I can also operate it as a European SaaS (and in other regions) where needed

This is also a test run in terms of tech stacks and trying new things I wanted to try for long time. It's mostly evening or weekend coded due to my regular day job, but made such incredible fun. The AI coding part really provided me the time to work on the product, polishing, UX and worry less about the "work" part of coding. My experience seems to help a lot to gain leverage and increase the fun factor and complete immersion into coding, that I kind of almost lost in the past.

So I was trying:

  - pocketbase
  - really running something bigger with much more data off of sqlite (primarily used it for smaller stuff in the past)
  - real focus on self-host-ability, keeping dependencies minimal and extremely simple (which also helps claude)
  - trying other tools for security scanning, verification, testing, security analysis, WAF,... than I use at work, pretty much playing around with tech as much as I can to see new and different stuff :-)

Not ready to share a repo yet, but if anyone is interested please ping me on hello@devopsicorn.com

Pixel Art Flight Sim https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6jderLN3Aqk

I built my own fun t-shirt brand called devopsicorn, no AI used here, I worked with a graphics designer from Spain: https://devopsicorn.com

Fun project playing around with print in demand and Etsy. Now wondering why Etsy became so popular while being tricky and inflexible to use for the seller :-)