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

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821–830 of 1001 posts

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

#821

https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture It's a lightweight screen recorder for macOS that lives in your menu bar. It's built with SwiftUI and ScreenCaptureKit, uses the native Content Picker to select what you record, and supports ProRes 422/4444, HEVC, and H.264 — including alpha channel and HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. System audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recording…

Do apple silicon chips not have AV1 encoders?

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

#825

I've been working with my wife on Uruky [1] for a couple of months, now. It's a EU-based Kagi [2] alternative (privacy-focused and ad-free search with domain boosting/exclusion rules). We've been using it with friends and family semi-successfully (hashbangs work for edge cases we're still working on). It's really difficult to get bigger indexes other than Mojeek and Marginalia to want to work with us and improve the…

Great one, I've been hoping for a kagi alternative in the EU, will check it out :)

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

#826
I've been working on and off on flagforge.dev

I have always hated how we deal with feature flags; often times as a dev I implement it, but then business decides how the flags are used, which comes back to us having to set them. I want to make this something that can be used by both easily, and priced fairly - looking at how much others charge for a feature flag SaaS is insane.

Currently I'm in heavy testing by myself, as I am quite worried about issues (that's just my personality), but yeah. It started as a normal side project for me to train a bit, then I added a bit of agentic coding to it to also learn it, and now it's here.

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

#827

I'm building a free alternative to SimpleCitizen (YC S16). It's a free USCIS form-filling web-app(no Adobe required). USCIS forms still use XFA PDFs, which don’t let you edit in most browsers. Even with Adobe, fields break, and getting the signature is hard. So I converted the PDF form into modern, browser-friendly web forms - and kept every field 1:1 with the original. You fill the form, submit it, and get the offic…

The form-filling piece is smart and clearly solves a real pain point with XFA PDFs. But the strategic risk here isn't technical, it's liability. Immigration forms are high-stakes documents where a wrong answer can trigger a denial, RFE, or worse. SimpleCitizen's $529 isn't just paying for form filling. It's paying for guided logic ("if you answered X, you probably need to also file Y"), error checking against known USCIS rejection patterns, and a company standing behind the output. A free tool with no guidance layer exposes users to silent errors they won't discover until months later at their interview. The "free alternative" positioning also creates a distribution problem. The people who most need this (first-time filers, non-native English speakers, people who can't afford a lawyer) are the least likely to find a developer's side project on HN or GitHub. SimpleCitizen's real moat isn't the PDF conversion. It's the SEO, the trust signals, and the hand-holding. Competing on price against $529 sounds compelling, but the actual competition is immigration attorneys at $2,000-5,000 and free legal aid clinics. Those are the alternatives your users are actually weighing. One more operational risk worth flagging: USCIS revises forms regularly and without much warning. The I-130 alone has had multiple revisions in the last few years. Each revision means your 1:1 field mapping breaks and users could submit outdated forms, which USCIS will reject. That's a maintenance commitment that scales with every form you add. Might be worth thinking about how sustainable that is before expanding the form library.

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

#828
I’m working on qip, a cli for running fast sandboxed WebAssembly modules.

https://github.com/royalicing/qip

We have LLMs that generate code but that code should be untrusted: perhaps it overflows or tries to read ssh keys. If we aren’t reviewing code closely a major security hole could be on any line.

And since LLMs can generate in whatever language, it makes sense for them to write fast imperative code like C or Zig. We don’t have to pick our favorite scripting language for the ergonomics any more.

So qip tries to solve both problems by running .wasm modules in a sandbox. You can pipe from other cli tools and you can chain multiple modules together. It has conventions for text, raw bytes, and image shaders, with more to come.

I am excited by the capabilities of probabilistic coding agents, but I want to combine them deterministic code and that what these qip modules are. They are pure functions with imperative guts.

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

#829
I’ve been working on nexai.app and tried leaning on Cursor/Claude/etc. for the front‑end. The code they spit out basically works. The UI they spit out basically sucks.

Patterns I keep seeing: - Everything looks like the same beige SaaS dashboard: rounded cards, random gradient, Tailwind presets copy‑pasted until entropy. - Zero hierarchy. Every section screams at the same volume. Nothing feels like it has a “job” on the page. - Design systems are imaginary. You get a Frankenmix of Apple, Material, shadcn, and Dribbble shots in one component tree. - Micro‑interactions are overdone or completely off: bouncy, noisy, and unrelated to what the user is actually trying to do. - When you try to “refine” the design, the model tends to bulldoze the good parts instead of making small, surgical tweaks.

Built out http://automotion.dev to solve this, it turns screenshots into UI animations instantly. Been a game-changer for me and I'm my own user.

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

#830
I'm working on CodeMic, a VS Code extension to record and share coding sessions directly inside your editor.

Think Asciinema, but for full coding sessions with audio, video, and images.

It makes following tutorials and understanding real codebases much more practical than watching a video.

Local first, and open source.

https://CodeMic.io

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