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

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661–670 of 914 posts

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

#661
Building DesignFlo - https://designflo.ai

Build Enterprise-grade applications with real backends - APIs, databases, auth, and business logic. Secure, scalable, and ready to launch in minutes.

Imagine v0, Lovable, but it actually does real backend that scales. Not prototypes. Real production quality code. The philosophy is simple - Algorithms first, AI second. Opinionated code always.

AI is decent at following instructions, but bad at being consistent, reliable. Fortunately, those problems are solved by algorithms and opinionated architecture.

The codebase generated uses Elixir for backend, Svelte for frontend. It uses best practices and opinionated algorithms to consistently produce reliable code that works the first try, doesn't waste your tokens and generates exactly what you want.

You also get finer controls - drag and drop visual designer and an ERD diagram editor (if you really want to architect the backend yourself). Code export is available as well.

Edit: I got tired of AI models trying to write code that never ends up being production worthy and always required a complete re-write. I wanted to build an interface where users could "vibe code" an entire production grade app where everything end to end is taken care of - including hosting. As an avid startup fanatic myself, I love building Saas products and thought something like this would allow me to go to market faster and test the waters.

Thanks in advance for trying it out!

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

#662
Building Kiiro — training analytics for Apple Watch runners.

Got frustrated with Apple's Fitness app being too basic and third-party apps creating anxiety with made-up "recovery scores." Wanted something in between: proper training load tracking without the daily judgment.

Uses 42-day EWMA for chronic load, 7-day for acute. HR-based rather than rTSS since most people don't know their lactate threshold. Zone breakdowns, route comparisons, the stuff that actually helps you see if your training is working.

Free, no ads: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6749277384

Would love feedback from anyone who trains with an Apple Watch.

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

#664
I've been busy organizing hackathons and promoting the demos developed by our team, all to get OpenAgents known by more people. Yet, there’s been little to show for it. Two months ago, I joined OpenAgents—an open-source project dedicated to building an open and collaborative AI Agent network.https://github.com/openagents-org/openagents

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

#665

As a pathologist and neuro-oncology researcher, to save myself time trying to keep up with scientific literature, I'm working on https://www.summarized.science/ . Based topics of interest (suggestions are more than welcome), the tool queries the scientific literature for each month. Then, by quering some LLMs, it extracts themes and summaries. The tool already saves me time in my day to day life, but still needs a lo…

Nice! I'm a gastroenterologist and I've been thinking about doing something very similar for some time now.

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

#667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAICT, the future of software development looks like a lot of unprofessional software development. Not unlike digital photography and Instagram. Has it killed film-photo divisions of photography companies? Yes. Has it put professional photographers out of business? Hardly, and in fact, the opposite. What the ubiquitous phone camera has done, is expose a lot many more people to the steep challenge of making truly goo…

> " Not unlike digital photography... " The important difference with digital photography is the phone photographer won't use pro lighting, different lenses, reflectors, bounced flash or other gear that contributes to the "pro photography" look. With software, vibe-coders might use AI agents that have all the equivalent "pro photo gear" for professional output. There's a moat around pro-photography protecting it from…

Lifetime costs...

- How much does a top-end "pro" AI account cost? Who can pay that on a sustained basis through a career? (Someone has to pay --- the cost gets loaded onto fully-loaded employee cost. And when it's the business doing it, you can bet that eventually CFOs are going to ask the hard questions.).

- How much does pro photography gear cost? Does every photographer own all the gear? (No. Renting is standard, and in fact, preferred. Nobody wants to buy thousand-dollar marco lens they will use only a few times to lean macro photography and do the occasional pro shoot. A specialist macro photgrapher will, because they can amortize the cost.)

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

#668
post #495

This is something I built over the holidays to support people having a hard time with the short days and early sunsets: https://sunshineoptimist.com . For the past several years I would look up the day lengths and sunset times for my location and identify milestones like “first 5pm sunset”, “1 hour of daylight gained since the winter solstice”, etc. But that manual process also meant I was limited to sharing updates…

Nice! Love the domain. Did you use Claude to design the landing page?

Thanks! I got some initial ideas from Nano Banana, actually, but then spent a while iterating on different layouts myself.

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

#669

I've been working for the past few years building robust, locally owned digital community infrastructure for rural areas. The pilot is being released this month in partnership with the newspaper of record and local radio stations that cover four rural counties in the New York Catskills. It's a modular platform that wraps current workflows, rather than replace them. If the pilot shows promise, we'll move forward with…

What does it exactly mean, digital community infrastructure?

Thank you for asking :)

Here's some of the features it includes:

News & Media: Articles, Newspaper Archive, Videos, Photo Albums, Breaking News, Weather, Aggregated RSS Feeds, Local Radio Stations

Community: Events Calendar, Local Forums, Polls, Local Connections, Private encrypted messages.

Print-to-Digital Ad Integration: Sales tools for small publisher ad sales teams. Ad project workflow including designers. QR Codes link to SEO-friendly, shareable digital companion ads

Marketplace: Local market with listings that contains one or more offers. Cart and checkout with payment processing. Baked in discounts and rewards. Digital ads can link directly to marketplace offers.

AI Automation Tools: Wrap existing workflows rather than replace them. Operational efficiency gains.

Its easy to spin up customized apps for local communities and the stack also includes an API for integration into existing apps.

All of it is hosted on local hardware in the service area.

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

#670
So i split it into two groups of stuff im working on:

Main Projects: 1. cyberbrain ( https://github.com/voodooEntity/cyberbrain ) It is a golang based architecture to write event/data driven applications. It is based on an in-memory directed graph storage ( i also wrote https://github.com/voodooEntity/gits). The point of the system is that instead of writing code where A calls B calls C calls D .... you define single "actions". Each action has a requirement/dependency in form of a data structure. If a structure is mapped to the graph storage, it will automatically create singular payloads for such action executions. The architecture is multithreaded by default, meaning all "jobs" will be automatically parallel processed without the developer having to care about concurrency. Also, since every "thread/worker" also does "scheduling" new "jobs", the system scales very well with alot of worker.

Why? Well it mainly developed this architecture for the next project im listing.

2. Ishikawa : an automated pentesting/recon tool Ishikawa does not try to reinvent well established pentesting/recon tools, instead it utilizes and orchestrates them. The tool consists of actions that either do very simple things like resolveIPFromDomain , or actions which utilize existing tools like nmap, wfuzz, etc.. - collects the info in the central graph and at the end you get a full mapping of your target. Compared to existing solutions it does alot less "useless scans" and just fires actions which make sense based of the already gathered data (we found a https port, we use sslscan to check the cert...).

3. Gits (as mentioned above) a graph in memory threadsafe storage. While i don't plan to many changes on it, it has been developed for cyberbrain so if i need any additions ill do them, also planing to reenable async persistence.

Regarding ishikawa: while im still working on this project, it may be that i will shut it down. I had a rather expensive meeting with a lawyer that basically told me that open sourcing it while beeing a citizen of germany would just open up potentially ALOT of trouble. Right know im not sure what the future will bring - i basically spend 10 years developing it starting with gits, than cyberbrain to finally build the tool i was dreaming of. Just to hide it on my disk.

Sideprojects:

1. go-tachicrypt ( https://github.com/voodooEntity/go-tachicrypt ) It started as a fun project/experiment - a very simple CLI tool which allows to encrypt file(s) / directory(ies) into multiple encrypted files so you can split them over multiple storages or send them via multiple channels. Im planing on hardening it a bit more and giving basic support.

2. ghost_trap ( https://github.com/voodooEntity/ghost_trap ) A very small project i recently put out, nothing to serious but kinda funny and maybe usefull to one or another. It provides - An github action that will inject polymorphic prompt injections to the bottom of your README.md so LLM scrapers may be fend off - An javascript that will inject polymorphic prompt injections into your html so more sophisticated crawlers like google etc which emulate javascript also may be fend off

While working on alot of other stuff, these are i think the most relevant.

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