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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?

#782

Post by ddahlen »

I am a researcher studying orbital dynamics of asteroids/comets/dust. I made a very precise visualization tool for the solar system, it shows the motion of all of the known asteroids. When you click on a specific asteroid it will then show the hyper precise orbit for it which matches JPL's orbit calculations (full physics, n-body, relativity, non-spherical planets).

Not mobile friendly

https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/

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

#785

Post by mulhoon »

lgcas wrote: post #772
mulhoon wrote: post #594

I recently built a physics-driven auto-panner based on PONG, so I can also play PONG inside my DAW. https://portwaydsp.com I also built https://plugins.audio - a Dribbble-esque showcase of audio plugins. It's been a dream to be able to work in the audio software space. I've been a musician, designer, coder all my life, and had a few moonlights with building audio plugins over the years. But now with AI at hand, I can…

I'm going to be scrolling that plugin site for hours, really cool. I normally use stuff like linuxdaw.org to find free stuff - but I really like the addition of a cheap filter. Any more plans for it?

Oh wow, I hadn't seen inuxdaw.org - similar concept. Next plan is a weekly (automated) newsletter for the latest plugins. But really just to keep it growing and keep feeding it. I actually love browsing plugin sites, so I built a chrome extension that can automatically add a plugin from a page I'm on. I have to choose the image and videos though.

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

#786

Post by linsomniac »

karl_gluck wrote: post #748
linsomniac wrote: post #704

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?

That's exactly what I did, an old ThinkPad t470s.

I installed NixOS, and then I copied /etc/nixos down to my main workstation where I had claude code working, and used it to modify the configs. I'd then rsync them to the other machine and run the "nixos-rebuild" there.

I don't recall exactly how I did the initial copies, because SSH wasn't set up there. Probably would be best to just ask claude what needs to be done to enable SSH, it's only like a 1 line change.

Some of the first things I asked it to do were:

    - Switch to flakes and tracking the latest software.
    - Switch to using Sway for window manager.
    - Various user account setup things: Configure zsh with atuin and zoxide, enable sudo, allow my SSH key for login, set up some aliases and the software I need.
    - Install claude code (I gave it the "installing" URL) once I got tired of copying back and forth.
    - Set up Home Manager and SOPS and put my secrets in SOPS, set up a variety of my scripts and symlinks.
    - Configure vim to my liking (done entirely in English prose).
Those are the top things that come to mind. Honestly, it went pretty smoothly. The only real issue I had to speak of was that I'm running bleeding edge, and the moment I decided to unplug my desktop monitors from the Ubuntu machine and connect them to NixOS I had it do a package update at the same time. This hit a Gnome+Wayland bug which left me at a black screen. A nice thing about NixOS is you can just reboot and at the grub menu select an older system config, so I did that. Claude tracked down an open bug about it, tried a few mitigations, but eventually I told it to just revert the version of gnome until it was fixed upstream.

It has gone extremely smoothly. Zero regrets. My manual attempts at NixOS always ran me into dark corners that I didn't know how to do (like installing gitbutler-cli, which is not packaged for NixOS yet), and Claude had no trouble figuring out.

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

#787

Post by frankieg33 »

epiccoleman wrote: post #30

All kinds of random stuff really, but to filter it down to only the noteworthy ones: Tuber[0] - this is my favorite, use it multiple times a week. It's just a little CLI wrapper around yt-dlp for my most common use cases - downloading the video, or the audio, or the subs. And then, if you've got the Claude CLI installed, it can also shoot the subs through Claude for a summary. I use it all the time, it's a great litt…

i just lanuched claude to build my own Tuber. i will see how you went about doing it. thanks for sharing.

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

#788

Post by keithnz »

ing33k wrote: post #647
keithnz wrote: post #92

I wrote a tui sql client to replace DataGrip (which is really slow). https://github.com/keithn/sql It's quite customized to what I wanted, I haven't really checked it works with other things.... only thing is, I don't really use it much anymore, I just get claude to do all my querying. Most of the tools I write now are bridges to various SaaS products that have APIs but no CLIs.

how is autocomplete implemented ?

autocomplete isn't "exact", so it does have in its suggestions things that don't exactly always make sense, but it does list things by what is contextually relevant. It has a basic understanding of sql syntax such it will suggest potential keywords next, it introspects things like tablenames so they are available in spots where a tablename would be relevant, and if it has tables it will introspect them to get fieldname, and any named things like x as y will also become suggestions within the context of the query you are working on. This results in mostly correct suggestions. However it generally always has the suggestion you want, it works really well with field names / table names, which mainly what I wanted, and very basic with sql syntax (which I normally don't need any help with other than relevant keyword completion)

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

#790

Post by linsomniac »

linsomniac wrote: post #786
karl_gluck wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's exactly what I did, an old ThinkPad t470s. I installed NixOS, and then I copied /etc/nixos down to my main workstation where I had claude code working, and used it to modify the configs. I'd then rsync them to the other machine and run the "nixos-rebuild" there. I don't recall exactly how I did the initial copies, because SSH wasn't set up there. Probably would be best to just ask claude what needs to be done…

One addition: Flakes is something that I think Claude recommended at the point I switched over to home manager+SOPS. Flake, Home Manager, and SOPS were all things I was somewhat aware of from my previous attempts at NixOS. If you are coming in brand new, I'd probably recommend asking Claude to start with flakes sooner rather than later. Just specifically ask it to use flakes.

Pretty much everything else I did without asking Claude much in the way of NixOS specifics. I just described what I want in general terms.

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