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

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

#701

Post by hoyd »

rashkov wrote: post #239
hoyd wrote: post #80

I have made a TUI tool for organizing and authoring sermons written by myself. It also has a third mode for reading one or two bible versions in parallel. I love the interface and keep adding features to make it easy to navigate in and something that actually helps me to organize and write sermons. Some features are to have notes at specific places in the bible, summaries, notes, exports to html/pdf, metadata for eac…

Just curious, how do you feel about using AI to help write the sermons?

I would not so much, perhaps look for spelling errors. For me writing the sermon is the goal, diving into the deep and exploring the topic, passage and such. If I preach it, it is kind of a bonus, or a driver to begin with :-)

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

#702

Post by prometheus76 »

melvinroest wrote: post #48

A voice memo app, quite like the actual voice memo app from Apple. The thing is: now I can put my voice memo's on iCloud put Claude Code on it and make my transcripts into structured notes that my app then also displays. So basically a way to just go on an hour long walk with myself, spit everything from the top of my dome stream of consciousness style, and then have Claude structure whatever I said. It's nice to hav…

Relatedly, I have recently started walking and talking, and I just use lightweight gamer headphones that have a mic. I just record it with a generic voice recorder app, then I use a local instantiation of whisper to transcribe it when I get home. I throw the transcript and the recording into a database and then I can search the whole thing, or have AI look for interesting patterns in my thoughts.

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

#704

Post by linsomniac »

I've redesigned my workstation OS using NixOS and Claude Code and it's been a huge success.

I like the ideals of NixOS: reproducible setup from a git repo, ability to boot into a past config if you mess things up. But it's a big job learning and implementing that configuration manually. I've been playing with NixOS for ~2 years and like it but never really got that close to a full workstation setup.

When Ubuntu 26.04 came out I really needed to upgrade my 22.04 workstation and decided I'd really give NixOS a try before going with 26.04.

This time I decided to entirely configure it via Claude Code. I've been entirely running on it for a week and there's nothing I'm missing. I even took a stepping-stone approach where I first installed it on my old laptop, left my current workstation in place (in case the experiment failed), and then did a reinstall of my current workstation. NixOS made setting up the second machine trivial. Now, if my normal workstation were to have a hardware failure, I can just grab my /etc/nixos and rebuild and I'm back in business. Which is important since my workstation is now out of warranty and 6 years old.

One win is that I had been using LunarVim and AstroVim, and liked the "batteries included" approach, but they were hard to upgrade and while I was trying to do as little customization as possible, I still needed to do some and that was tricky in their configs. I used Claude Code to build a neovim setup with just my desired features, and it's now a single ~700 line neovim.nix file with everything in it. It's fully featured including LSPs+TreeSitter, etc.

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

#705

Post by trallnag »

xigoi wrote: post #91
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha yes. It probably should message YOU rather than the person who's birthday it is, so you can send something personal. Also coming up, automated wedding/funeral attendance by your personal humanoid robot designed to look and sound like you.

> It probably should message YOU rather than the person who's birthday it is, so you can send something personal. We already have that. It’s called a calendar app.

In Germany Google stopped syncing contacts with the calendar due to data privacy concerns...

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

#706

Post by ryanchants »

I have a service that runs on my home server and uses the Ubiquiti API to detect when I'm on a zoom call. It then pauses my Sonos network-wide. Unpauses when the call is over. The next step of it is to have it's own podcast library, so I can have my own little talk radio going on in the background all day.

Some point, I want to convert into a little app and open source it, so you can install on your laptop so it's usable by more people. And have it detect more than just zoom.

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

#707

Post by ingvay7 »

sailfast wrote: post #683
ingvay7 wrote: post #674

I shred guitar in the evenings to focus on technique, but a hectic day job means I get almost no time to twiddle knobs on my amp sim chasing the right tone. So I built a tool where I just prompt "Brian May Solo Bohemian Rhapsody" — the LLM fills a small JSON contract and feeds to a script that generates the XML, and I load it straight into the plugin. Two minutes and I feel like I'm tearing it up at Wembley '85 :)...…

This is really cool! Seems like the key to the prompt it seems is the knowledge of how these tones were created in the first place (your system prompts for the 80s) which requires some actual tone knowledge and leaves all the fiddly bits to the LLM. As someone relatively new to guitar this is intimidating, but also a fun rabbit hole. Additional “expert” prompts for different archetypes and genres could be fun.

thanks.Frankly — the system prompt is the sauce. The LLM has encyclopedic knowledge of every amp, cab, and pedal ever made which still blows my mind, but without guardrails it'll confidently tell you to boost mids on a JCM800 (which is how you disappear in a loud mix i've noticed). That era cheat sheet is all the working knowledge over the years of spectacularly failing to get the right tones.

Once someone does that encoding work for a genre, it's reusable forever I think. I'm pretty comfortable with late-80s/early-90s rock well enough to write the specs. But you're right — a "modern metal" prompt, a shoegaze one (which my teenager wants), a funkone,etc - that's the next layer. tone_system.md just needs to be updated. I plan to expand this to more plugins. Contributions welcome.

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

#709

Post by Mystery-Machine »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #583

The funniest thing I've made is a free utility called "Moniker" that contextually renames files based on their contents. Uses local AI models and I was able to snag this great domain name. https://finalfinalreallyfinaluntitleddocumentv3.com/ But hands down the most useful thing I've made is HutchDB, which is a MCP service that you can call from any AI chat or Agent setup to store data for you. Literally from your AI…

I love it! A few questions that made me think: - how do you know that "people use it for all kinds of things"? I just read your privacy policy and I'm concerned about my AI agent possibly leaking some API key to Hutch and then you can read it. - how is this free? You're hosting on Vercel, one of the most expensive hosting providers. What happens when this goes semi-viral? How do I know you won't just pull the plug to cut costs or start charging $500/month? I don't want to sign up, invest my time, and then lose access. - I signed up and now I can't access privacy policy nor terms of service pages, because when I go to https://hutchdb.com/ I get redirected to https://hutchdb.com/dashboard

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

#710

Post by carimura »

this thread is crazy.. hackers are clearly hacking, myself included. A lot of what I've built I've already seen here:

1. home automation, access point management, solar/battery health monitors

2. family week management with schedules, todo's, scripture of the week

3. page-to-pod (browse, click one button, TTS to podcast episode on my phone)

4. daily summary of AI news to a new pod episode on my phone

5. easy theme switching from light to dark on my mac

6. and more....

what does this mean about the future of software? looks like consumer software will be "instant and on demand".

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