Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026) • Hacker News Board

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

#991

Post by mikodin » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 11:00 PM UTC

Greetings friends! I have been joyfully working on a native iOS app called Sanctum. I really built this for myself and use it multiple times a day (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sanctum-the-voice-journal/id67...)

Sanctum is a voice journal, think Obsidian but for voice notes. I am really honing in on data sovereignty, privacy, 1 click to record and self organization of notes / ideas.

While this isn't anything revolutionary, or technically difficult, I do think I've landed on a form factor and stack that is in my opinion not served by current products. So much so that I just simply had to build it myself. Sanctum was born out of an Obsidian plugin that I built and have been maintaining for about 2 years called Scribe and it's been a wonderful way to really hone in on a more full fledged agentic development process for a full stack experience.

The stack is simple

  - For transcription I am using AssemblyAI - they have solid terms, 24hr retention and no training

  - LLM inference is running inside a TEE using redpill.ai, it's slow af but as private as I could find.

  - For cloud backup I am using full E2E encryption with Backblaze for storage

  - Endpoints and the like are AWS lambdas, DynamoDB for billing storage, Supabase for auth

I (yes, fully me, not AI) have been doing a lot of writing on the process, we are flooded with these sorts of post on HN, but if anyone is interested in reading, check it out! https://www.builtinspace.xyz/blog/begin-with-ethos.

Anyway, something I am most definitely curious on is if people are recording their thoughts, what they are using (either a cobbled together solution or a product) and what value they feel they've been getting from it!

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

#992

Post by henitchobisa » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

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

#993

Post by chamomeal » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

brachkow wrote: post #877

stefap2 wrote: post #664

projects per year in "Ask HN: What are you working on?" year projects avg/month ---- -------- --------- 2008 123 10.2 2009 104 8.7 2010 666 55.5 2011 86 7.2 2012 46 3.8 2013 389 32.4 2014 146 12.2 2015 104 8.7 2016 471 39.2 2017 456 38.0 2018 242 20.2 2019 246 20.5 2020 882 73.5 2021 837 69.8 2022 363 30.2 2023 425 35.4 2024 2122 176.8 2025 6220 518.3 2026 6093 677.0 (Jan-Sep) Top five topics per year (% of that year…

What's interesting (and kind of sad) here is that while AI drastically increased product count, more than 50% are now composed of dev tools and AI Some kind of golden shovels situation. I wish there were more games, personal apps, and open hardware – more fun stuff that became affordable due to AI

If you think about and use AI all the time, you’ll inevitably think of AI projects. Like that website indiehackers is mostly filled with ideas that market to other indiehackers

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

#994

Post by hellojomp » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

https://www.makeartnotapps.com

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

#995

Post by mattbrewsbytes » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

mpolichette wrote: post #882

variodot wrote: post #607

https://shopspec.io/ ShopSpec is a deterministic parametric furniture generator (bookshelves, cabinets, shop carts, leg-and-rail frames, multi-carcass composites) that encodes real woodworking intelligence and outputs shop-ready artifacts. Most recently, introduced the concept of value engineering by sweeping across dimensions to batch evaluate candidates that ranks based on sheet purchases. Also have in beta an MCP…

This is amazing, I may use it for a built-in pantry i'm planning to build. In my use case, I end up with one side at an angle, is there a way to support that?

In a recent project the countertop contractor digitally measured the walls, even ones that look square weren't, not a 90 degree corner to be found! You should build cabinets as squared boxes and level them when installing. The trim work that surrounds it will hide gaps, etc.

Generally if there is space because of odd angled walls there really isn't any advantage to trying to use it. You're talking square inches of drawer/cabinet space, it really doesn't matter as far as usable space is concerned. Its a huge hassle to try and build cabinets that are not square - things like how do you screw/nail parts and not have the screw/nail blow out a finished side? It can be done, but should it?

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

#996

Post by Deegy » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 11:05 PM UTC

io84 wrote: post #972

Simple recommendation app that asks 10+ AI models for the top options for whatever you’re looking for, and it pools the results to give you the overall top three: https://top3.best/ I mainly built it to explore which areas have model consensus and which have diversity of opinion.

I've wanted something like this! Thanks