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

On my list of build it from scratch has always been to build a programming language. So with the help of AI I was able to get it done!

Why did I build it? At work I've seen two major problems with our ai workflows/ skills libraries. There is a lack of determinism when your whole workflow is a markdown file of 100 steps, and markdown skill libraries lack composability. Meaning we violate things like DRY in the all the md files in the skills library.

I built Margarita to allow for markdown and logical operators to exist together, which means you can bring in determinism through code structures when it makes sense, and fall back to llm dynamic code when that makes sense. As an added bonus allows for composable prompts ala React which solve my other gripe with skills libraries being a mash of text everywhere.

Overall I've been getting pretty luke warm responses from Reddit, so I'll probably just shelve it, but it was a blast to make. Got to build code agents for pretty much every llm provider and built my own harness. I would recommend doing that it's a great learning experience.

https://www.margarita.run https://github.com/Banyango/margarita

Did you take down djournal? It returns a 404 now.

Ive created a Light Gauge Steel framing tool, to design my shed and it growing beyond expected: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DauZYdsUQ1g&feature=youtu.be

First personal little thing was a little mobile friendly website for taking coffee and tea orders. Two pages, one for someone to enter orders, second for listing orders and marking them as done. Was a bit of a gimmick idea I'd had in the back of my head for family lunches to save me running around with a scrap of paper and a pen asking what everyone wanted. Thought it would make a good little exploration of "vibe coding".

Second is a utility that will take a text file export from Wallabag, and use text to speech to convert it to an MP3 file. I then integrated it into a utility that I already wrote for managing articles so if I tag an article with listen it automatically gets converted and gets shunted to the podcast listening app on my phone.

Last was to recreate a little directory listing utility that I've had a 32-bit binary of for ages, but no longer (if ever) have the source code for. I'd always promised myself I would write it once I learned Rust, but decided try using AI as I was getting impatient to have it now. The utility lists all files, including hidden, in a directory, grouped by type. Below is an example listing the directory for the project itself:

    Directories:
    .hg            src            target         tests

    Files:
    .hgignore      AGENTS.md      ARCHITECTURE.md               CONTRIBUTING.md
    Cargo.lock     Cargo.toml     GEMINI.md      README.md      gemini-log.html

Some command-line flags to just list a particular type, such as only directories, or only unsatisfied symbolic links.

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