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

I am working on a chess analytics tool, specifically a free and open source replacement of Chessbase in this age of LLMs that can run on all platforms. The idea is to lower the barrier of entry to use a chess improvement tool since Chessbase can be intimidating for a causal Chess.com beginner looking to go into serious chess prep. At present, it can do basic queries like H2H score of Magnus Carlsen vs Hikaru Nakamura, the top 10 juniors in the US, Magnus Carlsen's games with the London system opening and involving a queen sacrifice etc. Though getting it to work for advanced multi-step tactical patterns and finding games with certain imbalances in the query using natural language is getting challenging. DuckDB has helped a lot, along with modern LLMs for query generation with schema and some preprocessing of game PGNs and piece hashes. It can also import a user's Chess.com and Lichess games given the usernames and do similar queries as on Master level games.

I also used the tool to generate an Adult Chess improvers FIDE rank list for all federations around the world. Here are the July 2025 rankings though it still needs major improvements in filtering - https://chess-ranking.pages.dev

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Another idea that I have been working on for sometime is connecting my Gmail which is a source of truth for all financial, travel, personal related stuff to a LLM that can do isolated code execution to generate beautiful infographics, charts, etc. on my travels, spending patterns. The idea is to do local processing on my emails while generating the actual queries blindly using a powerful remote LLM by only providing a schema and an emails 'fingerprint' kind of file that gives the LLM a sense of what country, region, interests we might be talking about without actually transmitting personal data. The level of privacy of the 'fingerprint' vs the quality of queries generated is something I have been very confused with.

I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

Which projects have you worked on recently?

We are working on Gossip: the future of media insights (think Meltwater, Brandwatch, etc).

It’s been a journey but getting close to launching our first version to pilot customers in August. We use an enormous amounts of AI tokens every month to extract data not possible with any traditional player in this media monitoring space. Benchmarking competitors, tracking impactful discussions, and receiving actionable brand insights.

If you are currently using one of the big media monitoring companies, I’d love to chat!

https://www.gossipinsights.com/en/top-companies/us/

We're working on Crystal: a real time infrastructure map for energy operations in the Pacific Northwest. Our focus is to inform energy traders, dam operators, and transmission analysts to support a reliable grid.

https://askcrystal.info/dashboard