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

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

#561

Post by olowe »

Revitalising a 20+ year-old GTK mail client with Zig. Talons[1] is my stripped down fork of claws-mail[2] which itself is a fork of Sylpheed[3].

Moving from auto tools to Zig’s build system was a huge quality of life improvement. Most of the work since has been deleting features and tidying up the code to make it easier to reason about. I realise there may not be that much value porting C to Zig the more I work on the project. Instead I see is there’s huge value in the usual stuff: clearly defined functions, preferring stack to heap allocation, minimising global state.

But it’s still quite early days. I’m looking forward to porting the trickier network code to Zig and using its built-in testing.

[1]: https://git.olowe.co/?action=summary&path=talons

[2]: https://claws-mail.org

[3]: https://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/

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

#562

Post by lukebuehler »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #226
lukebuehler wrote: post #63

I’m building AgentOS [1], trying to experiment where agent substrates/sandboxes will head next. It's a deterministic, event-sourced runtime where an “agent world” is replayable from its log, heavy logic runs in sandboxed WASM modules, and every real-world side effect (HTTP, LLM calls, code compilations, etc.) is explicitly capability-gated and recorded as signed receipts. It ensures that upgrades and automations are…

This is definitely interesting, seems like the sort of thing Nix would do well.

Thanks! NixOS is great at building and configuring systems, while AgentOS is about running and governing long-lived, deterministic agent worlds. They share ideas like immutability and declarative state, but they operate at different layers. I would say if NixOS is about reproducibly constructing a system, AgentOS is about reproducibly operating one: tracking decisions, effects, and evolution over time.

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

#563

Post by Curzel »

arthurjj wrote: post #390
Curzel wrote: post #384

A system-agnostic language for magic spells with a compiler capable of producing the magic wand movements, incantation, hand signs or magic circle required to perform the spell

Is this so you can automate the spell casting via robotics?

I know it sounds a lot like 2025, but it's actually to create a dataset of spells for training my wizarding AI :P

(Original comment was not a joke btw, it's part of another thing I will publish eventually)

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

#564

Post by dennis16384 »

I keep working on Routing24 https://routing24.com, a free route optimization tool for businesses.

It's been approx. an year since we are up and running, and we helped 100+ businesses in the US and world-wide to understand the value and savings of automated route planning, and prepared tens thousands of optimized routes for companies operating from 1 to 50 vehicles. All this keeping our operational expenses low and flat, thanks to our local-first route optimization engine working in the browser, and reliance on OpenStreetMap.

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

#565

Post by jasonkester »

I'm working on a oldskool video game:

https://valtima4.com/

It's the Survival Crafting RPG you would have played on your Apple II back in the 80's.

You can think of it as Valheim's gameplay crammed into the tile-based ui of the old Ultima games.

It has a procedurally-generated open world with towns and NPCs to talk to, all the resource gathering, mining, crafting stuff you'd expect in a modern survival game, and some good old fashioned dungeon crawling to boot.

I've been working on it off and on for the last several months. Let me know what you think!

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

#566

Post by rbbydotdev »

A local-first markdown editor and static publisher—offline-ready, Git-aware, with complete self-custody and zero backend dependencies. Can use in browser storage or mount a local directory

You might even say a Obsidian alternative

https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal

https://opaledx.com/docs

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

#567

Post by [deleted] »

Fiveplus wrote: post #542

For the past month, I've been building a distributed, phase-coherent clock synchronization system over standard consumer 2.5GbE copper, bypassing the need for dedicated white rabbit hardware. It started as a way to fix audio drift in my multi-room setup without using large jitter buffers, but it turned into a standalone project where I started learning more about NIC driver latency. I found that if you isolate a spec…

[deleted]

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

#568

Post by [deleted] »

Fiveplus wrote: post #542

For the past month, I've been building a distributed, phase-coherent clock synchronization system over standard consumer 2.5GbE copper, bypassing the need for dedicated white rabbit hardware. It started as a way to fix audio drift in my multi-room setup without using large jitter buffers, but it turned into a standalone project where I started learning more about NIC driver latency. I found that if you isolate a spec…

[deleted]

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

#569

Post by deepakrb »

sevennull wrote: post #344
deepakrb wrote: post #127

Nowhere near as impressive as some of the things here but I’ve been slowly growing out a daily puzzle website https://regularly.co - I built the first few games for my wife, no subscriptions, no pay to play, no sign up needed. Im launching a new word game next week which I’m super excited about. If you do play it and have any feedback do shoot me message!

Like the game. for no place king X the ux would be faster for me if i could draw a line where no kings can go.

Great idea, I’ll add this soon
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