Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)

If you're in Helsinki, you should come to the next Hacker News meetup on May 18th: https://bit.ly/helsinkihn

https://marketingagents.net - Marketing Automation for Founders who Suck at Marketing. Open Source and Self Hostable

Building this for myself mainly, but hoping others might find it useful. Still very early and building out the bear essentials, but then the hope is to keep reading marketing books and use that to improve the platform.

I'm working on a new open source CAD program for 3d printing based on Signed Distance Functions.

Benefits of SDFs over the standard Boundary Representation (used in Freecad and similar) are that you can do "pattern" operations with domain repetition, which means making N copies of a feature is O(1), vs O(N^2), you can deform objects with domain deformation, which means if you have a closed-form representation of how you want to deform space you can basically directly apply that to your object, procedural surface texturing is easy, CSG operations are easy.

The big drawback is that it is hard to provide any workflow based around "selecting" faces, edges, or vertices, because you don't naturally have any representation for these things, they are emergent from the model's SDF.

I have some blog posts on my progress: https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/sdf-thoughts.html and https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/frep-cad-building-blo...

I am solving the "selecting faces" problem by having the SDF propagate surface ids as well as distances. So the result of the evaluation is not just the distance to the nearest point on the surface, but the id of the specific surface that is nearest.

My next big frontier is reliably providing fillets and chamfers between arbitrary surfaces. I have a handful of partial solutions but nothing complete yet.

The most promising idea is one that o3 came up with called "masked clones", the idea is roughly to make a clone of the 2 surfaces you want to blend, mask them by intersecting with an object that is like a "pipe" along the intersection of the 2 surfaces, apply the blend within the pipe, and then add this "blend pipe" as another child of the lowest common ancestor of the 2 blended surfaces.

And after that I need to work on more standard CAD stuff like constraint solving in the 2d sketch editor.

A simple LLM client, for the simple reason that the one I bought stopped being supported and I could not find any replacement. It's free, right now only for Mac (Windows coming soon when Microsoft finally decides to approve my account). You just need an api key from your favorite LLM provider (right now it supports Gemini, OpenAI, Deepseek, and Anthropic). https://elleelleaime.org

One idea I have had for years is that it would be great if file system would support structured data.

This would combine well with your idea.

So let's say that I change python source code, the "file system" would understand the syntax of python source. Your tool could then use this to derive the sematics of my change, i.e. "added a function foo() with the following signature and body"