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

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741–750 of 913 posts

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

#741
I created a home maintenance tracker called HomeLogger

https://github.com/FrancisLaboratories/homelogger

I use Lubelogger to track my car maintenance, but couldn't find a home maintenance tracker I like, so I made my own.

I also made an app to add gas receipts to Lubelogger just by taking a photo of the receipt, and I use it regularly.

https://github.com/FrancisLaboratories/gasreceiptautomation

Work on both is ongoing but I'm open to feedback and ideas

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

#742

I made myself a tool that connects to my cdj3000x and A9 mixer over network and gets all data live from them. So bpm, pitch, song metadata etc. The tool also connects to my recordbox library and runs custom ML algos to classify for pitch, stems, tonality Phrasing, energy etc. Long story short it basically shows me ideas of what will mix in well. It works bizarrely well for me.

This sounds awesome! Is it on GitHub anywhere?

hey! no :-( It's probably vibecoded garbage. Its kinda interesting as this one use software is actually good enough where i have been using it for over 1 month and it does accomplish what i need to do. It made me rethink software quality a little tbh.

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

#743
post #404

I made myself a tool that connects to my cdj3000x and A9 mixer over network and gets all data live from them. So bpm, pitch, song metadata etc. The tool also connects to my recordbox library and runs custom ML algos to classify for pitch, stems, tonality Phrasing, energy etc. Long story short it basically shows me ideas of what will mix in well. It works bizarrely well for me.

if you have all of that info, could you then automate the mix transitions by sending MIDI commands back in? would be fun to play a playlist or radio but where the track transitions are automated, phrase-matched and non-trivial (perhaps lasting for a number of phrases)

Yes! I think so. It was not my usecase as my goal was to actually still be in control of DJing myself. I just wanted good candidates for mixes. But I wanted to still be in the loop to have fun just playing.

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

#744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a write-up on how it works under the hood or is it meant to be more mysterious?

Sure! I wanted to mimic the process of daydreaming on a car ride, where external input and inner monologue can mix. I wasn’t planning on posting it yet, so I’ll have to get you a thorough follow up, but in a nutshell it’s: a continuously running 448-concept space (philosophy, cognition, art, nature, math) that occasionally “crystallizes” a group of 4 concepts via Hebbian learning and stochastic noise. Those concepts…

That's pretty neat. Thanks

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

#745

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…

I’ve got a lukewarm IQ, would you mind explaining and example/use case for this?

No worries, I'm pretty bad at describing the benefit of this project.

Let's say you wanted to use Gemma4B to run your workflow, however that model doesn't always do what you want it to. You could write the Margarita code to do the variable tracking, loops, etc and use the llm call where Gemma is able to work better. It's about finding the sweet spot of code vs llm agentic/tool calling.

Can you write that in js/go/etc? sure, but this lets you write it in a much simpler syntax that's much closer to markdown.

There's a few example on the website: https://www.margarita.run/custom-ralph.html https://www.margarita.run/components.html

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

#746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

You completely ignored every question related to costs/privacy.

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

#747
I have always been interested in computers, building my own, playing pc games, etc. However, I never learned to program. LLMs have given me the ability to bring things to life that would have otherwise been impossible. I have a lot of pent-up software I have wanted for a long time.

https://github.com/frankieg33/fade - A program that minimizes screens inspired by Marco Arment's Quitter https://marco.org/2016/05/02/quitter

https://github.com/mxpv/podsync - a personal video podcast feed through podsync

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spaced-math/id6770719584 - ios application for my kids to learn mental math.

a daily newspaper for my 3 kids with themes around what they are into, jokes, and today in history.

https://github.com/frankieg33/MewgenicsBreedingManager - mod for the game Mewgenics. it had ~600 users which feels amazing.

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

#748

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…

I’d love to give NixOS a try on an old ThinkPad. I’m pretty comfortable with Claude; is it as simple as ask and go, or do you have any suggestions for getting started?

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

#749
I made a bunch of silly projects at first to help me manage daily life. For example, automating saving important emails based on prior history. Extracting text and putting it into csv files, downloading finance reports, reminder scripts, watchdog scripts. All the boring stuff pretty much what was done at first.

Now, i have gotten to point where i am replacing actual useful applications that I need to get stuff done. Plugs here: https://github.com/skittleson/mqtt_broker_esp and https://github.com/skittleson/WyzeBridge.

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

#750
post #733

A tool for backing up Google photos more incrementally than Google takeout: https://github.com/ebrevdo/gphoto-pull A version of the IFTTT linter that I missed after leaving Google: https://github.com/ebrevdo/ifttt-lint

gphoto-pull!! I've been downloading NN x 50G zips every two months like a caveman. Assuming I'm backing up in "Original", this manages to retrieve byte-identical backups?
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