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Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

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Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#2

Post by verdverm »

A custom harness backed by dagger, gives diff, time travel, forking of both files and env. Building a harness is a good learning project. I'm now using other tools to see what they are like. (OpenCode is quite good out of the box)

Currently working on a markdown search and wiki backed by Typesense, also has good web search, fetch, crawl. This will power my personal knowledge base system as an important step towards more leverage and better outcomes.

https://github.com/verdverm/gmd

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#3

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

Ive made some tools after "the advent of AI"

But I dont use "AI" to make them

I use a code generator

I like to use the smallest possible "toolchain", using the least possible resources, to build software tools

Ideally I want the tools to compile quickly on underpowered hardware

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#5

Post by Simulacra »

I've vibe coded multiple helpful apps and websites for recording data. But longer term, I'm building with its help an internal research system to organize, search, compare, analyze, and esp reuse all the large amounts of data my firm produces, with the public materials without constantly starting over in separate ChatGPT or Claude conversations.

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#7

Post by andrewstuart2 »

Claudhd

It's a user daemon that runs on my machine and exposes a unix socket, and then a bunch of hooks in claude, zsh, vim, etc, that report directory and commands I've run and all that, pipes it to claude Haiku for summary, and then stores context in sqlite. It also exposes that data as MCP so I can use claude to say "hey what was I doing yesterday," or any arbitrary time range.

I find that in the age of using AI agents, "Wtf was I working on yesterday" is an even harder thing to remember for me, so this helps me kind of track everything with a database that a) has AI summaries already and b) can be accessed by AI as well as a CLI.

Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

#8

Post by c0nsumer »

Three that have been really beneficial, and all support/build on a hobby / volunteer effort of mapping mountain bike trails:

This one generates maps from OpenStreetMap data + some custom curated info in YAML: https://github.com/c0nsumer/trailmaps.app-map-generator

This one converts a basic chunk of OpenStreetMap data to an SVG so I can mark it up (by hand) in Adobe Illustrator to make specifically-styled print/PDF maps, such as what get installed at trailheads: https://github.com/c0nsumer/osm_to_ai

This one takes GPS recorded rides and builds custom/personal heatmaps serving up the map tiles so I can use them in map editing software: https://github.com/c0nsumer/local-heatmap-tile-server

And all of this has been put together to make the custom, local, specific-use-case maps that are at https://trailmaps.app (which, via local curation, are overall better mobile/online maps than many of the bigger auto-generated systems such as Trailforks, Gaia, RideWithGPS, etc, for visualizing local systems).

It's neat stuff where I understand all the inputs, outputs, and how most of it works, but AI tooling (Claude, mostly) has allowed me to bolt it together much faster than I would have writing it myself.

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