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

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611–620 of 1001 posts

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

#611

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…

That's pretty cool. I built a barn door on rollers (some suspending it, some rolling on a concrete floor) last year and this would have certainly aided in visualising where I was going with it.

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

#612
I've used Claude Science to retrieve and analyze 20 years of meteo data - wind, precipitation, snow cover, temp - for Pacific Northwest, to figure out how can I better plan mountaineering trips: "If Mount Baker is out due to hazardous weather conditions in the middle of September, what would be the plan B summit with the highest probability of having good weather?"

Done a lot of analysis, sliced and diced data different ways, and then realized I need a website.

Ended up building https://climbable.day - hopefully a helpful resource for fellow Mountaineers from Seattle and around. 500 summits, 20 years of weather data, then went all in and added

- Wildfire smoke map overlays from official sources - Road closures from WSDOT - Information about approaches to most of the summits, sourced from Peak Beggar and Mountaineers - Database of known incidents from AAC - Compare your plan A, plan B, plan C, that type of thing

Site gained traction in the local community, and I have about a couple hundred users that seem to be using it on a weekly basis. It's free, and I intended to keep it such. It's a personal project, not something I plan to make money on. If you're in PNW and find it helpful, I'd be happy to hear what ideas you have. If you're not in Seattle but would like me to extend it to cover your neck of the woods, let me know.

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

#613
I grew up coding MUDs (in college) and every year I try to recreate that glory, so I start a fresh MUD code base from scratch.

This year, I am creating a nodejs MUD, well closer to a MUSH actually.

* Everything is an Entity with Attributes * A player is an Entity with its client property set * There's a handful of built-in commands, but the important ones are @eval and @set-attribute * The soft-code language is ... JavaScript. * It uses the vm module from nodejs[0] to execute stuff. * It has separate clients (so far) for Discord, Slack, and local console. It's easy to add more and will be easier after I do this one refactor.

Each time an soft-code command or function or what have you executes, it creates a new context to isolate the soft-code from the rest of the application and uses Proxy objects to isolate the database Entity from the soft-code Entity. As an example, this is the look command (placed on the global registry object):

      if (!me.location) {
        me.send("You are nowhere.");
      } else {
        me.send("**" + me.location.name + "**");
        const contents = me.location.contents;
        if (!contents?.length) {
          me.send("You see nothing here.");
        } else {
          me.emit("You see:\\n" + contents.map(thing => "* " + thing.name).join("\\n"));
        }
      }

The Proxy manages access to Entities and Attributes (for example, Attributes can only normally be accessed by their owners).

The MUSH outputs markdown for everything, so each client can format it however it likes.

I know the security is not nearly close to perfect, but it's mostly a proof of concept that I will make public one day. I did do a few things, like disable eval and Function and Promise but there's probably plenty of ways to get around it.

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

#616

Not sure if this qualifies, but here goes: I wrote a hard science-fiction novella. It's intended to be scientifically accurate to special and general relativity, with just one tweak that permeates throughout. https://docs.google.com/document/d/19e3HfnK1lNHHBef-5c-KvNdD...

Cooool! Do you have an epub?

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

#619
I’ve been working on something to help our family plan things better. We have two kids now in elementary school and both involved in extra activities. Registration dates, birthdays, game times, etc. are a lot to keep track of. We both have work and personal calendars and never sat down to plan which calendar gets what. Maybe that would’ve been easier! In any case, I built Mavo to try and centralize that stuff and see if I can make it more proactive than just a calendar.

You send it your events via email, online, in-app, or text message even, and it puts it into your calendar for you, letting you know if there’s conflicts and keeping track of who is assigned to what, not just who’s attending or not. My goal is to have it proactively notify you when there’s potential issues like rain, traffic, or something else.

You can connect it to ChatGPT, Claude, or other agent through MCP so you don’t even have to use the built-in AI. And there’s an API, SDK and CLI for those who want to tinker and build custom displays or interactions.

There’s an always-free version to get started and try it out. You can find it at https://mavolife.com

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

#620
I'm working on building a generic desktop controller that you can run from any device. https://github.com/jonocodes/deckd

Originally inspired by the stream deck, but I wanted a more dynamic interface and less hardware restrictions. For example you can use your phone as the controller.

Now it can do a whole lot more. Including mouse, keyboard, media controls. Supports custom buttons types and things like sliders and color pickers. Dynamically switches layout based on foreground app, and can also control which app is in the foreground from the controller itself. Having a lot of fun so there are a bunch more features in the hopper like deeper app integration, and an eink version.

Its a web app/PWA, so no app store needed.

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