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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?

#711

Post by hakunin »

nha1 wrote: post #596
hakunin wrote: post #334

A SQLite based sweeper of all the scans, notes, PDFs and images I have on my filesystem, that stores their paths and allows searching their OCR’ed descriptions and text, as provided by Mistral OCR. I can ask things like “when does my car need maintenance” or “find me that picture my kid drew for Mother’s Day”. I use pi-based bash executable to launch a doc chat like that. https://github.com/maxim/ringbinder

Nice! I did something similar for myself but fully offline. It started because I had to do a tax return and collecting information was a pain point.

Yeah, for me it was all about not letting mail and kids schoolwork pile up. I like to scan ads that local businesses leave in my mailbox, so that I can ask "show me lawn care services near me". A lot of them don't really have any other online presence.

Btw, I tried to keep the Mistral part modular, so that another OCR could be integrated.

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

#712

Post by changadera »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #697

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956, before I was born. AI itself is even older than that (e.g. William Grey Walter's robots, Elmer and Elsie in 1948), but it was called cybernetics back then. I've been doing symbolic AI, on and off, since the 1980s. I assume, though, you mean LLMs. I haven't used them first hand, but I have fairly recently implemented a multi-layer artificial…

> I assume, though, you mean LLMs. I haven't used them first hand

Wow, kudos. Honestly.

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

#713

Post by linkjuice4all »

carimura wrote: post #710

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 sw…

These are all very neat things and I’m very pleased to see the hacker spirit move into AI, but I gotta admit - some of this just comes across as “what did you print with your printer?”

Another recent thread mentioned that AI has helped devs build better “shop jigs.” This seems to be where the rubber is meeting the road for AI-powered development. So maybe more people will be developing custom tooling for their own little problems but you still need reliable, deterministic, interchangeable tools to realize the value of all these shop jigs.

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

#714

Post by carimura »

bnchrch wrote: post #15

Oh man a few things 1. A dashboard that tracks my personal metrics (github, strava, todo completion, flossing) 2. A eink display for that dashboard 3. A realtime node graph that shows a codebase (and/or its diffs) in a way that I can visualize what functions call which, and under what conditions 4. A agent that automatically fills out government forms and creates invoices for my friends brewery based on the delivery…

what did you use for the eink display?

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

#715

Post by [deleted] »

squidsoup wrote: post #180
tboughen wrote: post #142

I’m a UK teacher. I have built a custom GPT that marks essays for the subject I teach in a repeatable and reliable way. It gives actionable feedback to students. I use it, and have given my students access to it too - they use it to help their revision.

UC Berkeley just banned the use of AI for conceptualising, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing student work.

[deleted]

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

#716

Post by hk1337 »

wutwutwat wrote: post #147
hk1337 wrote: post #134

https://github.com/haydenk/overseer - a Go port of foreman https://github.com/haydenk/homestead - another Go project, working on a better uptime dashboard that can also be the main homepage for accessing homelab resources. I also used AI to find and create issues and milestones to for me to get the project to 1.0.0

there are great alternatives to foreman in https://github.com/darthsim/hivemind https://github.com/DarthSim/overmind

Those seem really nice. Neither showed up when I searched for alternatives.

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

#717

Post by michaelbuckbee »

Mystery-Machine wrote: post #709
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…

This is all very fair criticisms. This thread asked: "What are tools you have made for yourself?" and that's genuinely what this is. I wanted it so I made it and then AI makes it so easy to just throw up a marketing page.

I've a a handful of dev friends that have started to use it as well and give their feedback and it's been slowly growing as I've added sharing/invites.

I would absolutely not recommend putting big production data into it currently.

My vision for it was something more like how the #1 use of spreadsheets is actually people making lists and not actually people doing lots of calculations.

Given the uptake today (thanks everybody!) and your feedback (thanks Mystery-Machine) I'm going to work at addressing your concerns.

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

#719

Post by joddystreet »

jmaw wrote: post #679
joddystreet wrote: post #429

- self-hosted POPSQL alternative - https://github.com/p-raj/collab-sqlc - CleanMyMac alternative based on opensource tools - https://github.com/p-raj/open-cleanmymac - Standup meetings to comic generation - https://github.com/p-raj/standup-to-comics - Configurable Pomodoro - https://github.com/p-raj/open-tomato A few more closed source ones that aren't any close to be in a working state.

Do you have any examples that you've generated from standup-to-comics? I didn't see anything in the repo, and would like to see some examples before spending the time to set up myself :)

Good point, will update the repo. Though, the comics generated by the local llms all kinda suck. And, not setting this up for yourself is smart, it kind of fills up the disk pretty fast. All the recordings, local llms, etc.

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

#720

Post by fwn »

I rely heavily on DeepL Write for my day job, but I dislike the constant logouts, nagging, and laggy UI. I coded a DeepL Write replacement that uses the same layout (two text windows side by side, with the left window for entry and the right window showing suggested edits as an actionable diff), but all suggestions are based on Harper + Gemma.

When I want the program to reformulate a sentence or phrase, it sends the sentence to an AI that provides word or phrase suggestions. I've connected this to Tinfoil.sh (not affiliated) via API key.

Now, I have a much more private DeepL Write replacement with a snappy, consistent user experience that costs much less. Unfortunately, the suggestions are not as high quality. It's very much an 80% solution. It was still fun!

Most of the rest concerns scraping. The biggest project is an extraction tool for the German transparency register that I need for work.

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