Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026) • Hacker News Board

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

#581

Post by dandaka » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:46 AM UTC

I'm building Kardo (https://kardo.cards/), AI tutor that listens to your calls with a teacher and creates cards for repetition.

I live in Lisbon and I've been learning Portuguese with a tutor since 2022. After every lesson I'd sit down and make flashcards from my notes and screenshots. Spaced repetition works, but making the cards took manual effort each time. Most days I just didn't do it. So I have automated that process.

The flow: you invite the Kardo bot to your call, it records and transcribes (Recall.ai + Deepgram Nova 3), then GPT-4o extracts vocabulary from the transcript and generates cards. You review them with spaced repetition — we use FSRS, which is the best open algorithm I could find. If you already use Anki or Mochi Cards, there's export.

You can also throw in YouTube videos, podcasts, articles, PDFs — not just live lessons.

Tech: built entirely with Claude Code. React + Vite frontend, Bun + Elysia backend, Convex for the database, Railway for hosting.

We got 50 beta users through Telegram, and just landed our first paying customer. Now we're trying to figure out distribution — tutors seem like the obvious channel because one tutor recommends you to all their students, but reaching them with zero marketing budget is the hard part.

Curious if anyone here learns a language with a tutor and what your review workflow looks like.

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

#582

Post by level09 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:48 AM UTC

stk (https://github.com/level09/stk): async Quart + Vue 3 starter i use for everything. auth stack is already wired up (session, 2FA, webauthn, oauth), async sqlalchemy, alembic, no frontend build step. basically the boring part so i can get to the actual product faster.

ziglag (https://github.com/level09/ziglag): self-hosted invoicing for freelancers, built on top of stk. clients, invoices, VAT, PDF, shareable links, MIT. got tired of paying a monthly fee to send a pdf.

idea is to keep chipping away. every subscription that annoys me is fair game. small tools, self-hosted, no accounts, no seats, no upsell. if it's useful for me someone else probably wants it too, so might as well open source it. open to ideas on what to kill next.

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

#583

Post by ricardo_lien » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:48 AM UTC

cmos wrote: post #223

My mother is living alone in her house and we are getting to the point where she might not be able to live alone. I built "Still Kicking", a picture frame that monitors her motion and sends back basic reports and can detect falls and sleep quality to a phone app, to help give her more time at home. It's just an mmWave sensor connected to an ESP32. But it works nicely, and I'm thinking of starting a company making the…

Your verification email is pointing to http://localhost:3000/ lol

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

#584

Post by RobinL » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:52 AM UTC

letterpaths (https://github.com/RobinL/letterpaths), a FOSS typescript library that can power cursive handwriting/educational apps for kids.

The idea is that it provides all the geometry to enables games like these to be built: (These are just rough demos)

https://www.robinlinacre.com/letterpaths/writing_app/snake/

https://www.robinlinacre.com/letter_constellations/

And here is like the admin/demo: https://www.robinlinacre.com/letterpaths/

And, separately, I made an educational country quiz, again FOSS:

https://rupertlinacre.com/country_quiz

https://github.com/RupertLinacre/country_quiz

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

#585

Post by 0dayman » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:56 AM UTC

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

#586

Post by k9294 » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 8:59 AM UTC

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

#587

Post by codencoffee » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 9:04 AM UTC

I am building https://mealdone.com

I love cooking but the daily "what do you want" grind was killing me. Rushing to the store after work hoping for inspiration but leaving with the same five fallback meals. Recipes using half a box of something so you eat the same thing twice or watch leftovers die in the fridge.

The final straw was our newborn's milk protein allergy, turns out milk is in everything. Recipe sites are hostile. Ads reload and jump the page mid-sentence, 20 versions of every dish, comparing the 4.7 star rating version with the 4.8 star one. So you go by thumbnail. Visual clutter everywhere.

I tried the apps. One does swiping, one does shopping lists, one does Sunday budget planning, one has "what's in my fridge" mode. Pick your half-solution.

So I built what I wanted: swipe mode that makes picking dinner fun again, or instant 3 quality suggestions for when I am in the store. Aisle oriented shopping list, budget, personal taste, fridge inventory in one place. UI looks like a restaurant menu — off-white, black text, no glossy photos. I'm working on AI mode now. Not for recipe generation, which are mostly garbage, but for search and substitution.

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

#588

Post by examineip » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

I am building ExamineIP - Free network security toolkit

https://tools.examineip.com

Collection of 15 diagnostic tools (VPN leak test, DNS checker, port scanner, etc.) built after a WiFi security incident. All client-side, no data collection.

Feedback welcome!

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

#589

Post by qn9n » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

https://github.com/allegro-systems/score a full stack Swift web framework with Controllers pattern for the backend and SwiftUI like syntax for frontend code. All renders down to minified HTML, CSS and JS. Includes features for auth, REST, frontend reactivity via signals and more.

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

#590

Post by alexgrozav » Mon, Apr 13, 2026, 9:14 AM UTC

I'm building Styleframe (https://styleframe.dev), a zero-runtime CSS-in-TS Framework written for theming and maintaining Design Systems.

After 4 years of maintaining an Open Source Design System, I needed a better way for theming than Sass and PostCSS. I needed the power of a full-featured programming language. That's how the first version of Styleframe was born.

My vision is for Design Systems to be endlessly configurable and composable, like you would configure any library, with or without AI. Want to change your entire website to look like Linear? Simply install and use the Linear Design System configuration. Want only your buttons and cards to look like Linear, and the rest be the default theme? Use the button and card composable functions from that package.

Styleframe is built as a transpiler-first system. You write your design tokens, selectors, utilities, and recipes in TypeScript, and Styleframe tokenizes everything into an internal representation. From there, the transpiler generates dual outputs:

- CSS output: variables, selectors, utilities, themes, keyframes

- TypeScript output: typed recipe functions with full IDE autocomplete (with an optional Runtime)

This architecture means you can have complete control over customizing how your system is output. You could even use the generated tokens to render documentation for your design system components. The output code can be integrated with any headless UI Components Library, or with your own custom components.

Fun fact: I've reimplemented the entirety of TailwindCSS using Styleframe's utility and modifier tokens. Not only that, but I've also built a scanner which picks up your CSS Classes from your markup. It's basically Tailwind, but 100% configurable (even utility class format can be changed), and is always based on your design tokens.