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

https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ – Suite of skills, agents, and tools that make general SOTA models actually good at building and/or auditing iOS/macOS apps. Built for myself initially, I FOSS'd it once I determined how generally helpful it was. It's helped me learn a lot about doing sophisicated things with LLMs in a token-efficient way.

https://charleswiltgen.github.io/TagLib-Wasm/ – Also built for myself initially, I FOSS'd it because there was nothing like Mutagen for TypeScript/JavaScript runtimes. (I don't dislike Python, but think it's a bit of a mess.) This was my first serious project to leverage LLMs for coding.

https://pwascore.com/ – Built because I wanted to quantify how bad Safari was at PWAs. Learned that, objectively, Safari is as bad as PWAs as Firefox (which is to say, not terrible, and not to blame for why PWAs continue to be mostly-irrelevant).

Some things I’ve used AI for the last year or so:

- small club website: https://www.kolibrinkpg.com

- ticketing system with Stripe payments and QR scanning at the door

- Instagram/media ingestion for the club site

- genealogy tool with GEDCOM import

- scripts for downloading/archiving public-domain film material

- playlist/library tooling for DJ use

- music collaboration/sync tool for Ableton projects

- normal work stuff in a much larger existing codebase

I have become a lot more strict about process after being burned a few times. Mostly: make the change small, be clear about what it is supposed to do, check the assumptions before coding, use tests/logging/manual checks as evidence, and don’t merge anything I can’t review and explain myself.

I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister (https://hister.org/ - https://github.com/asciimoo/hister) with the goal to reduce dependence on online search engines and AI answers.

Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface with offline result previews & detailed query language to explore collected content or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.

It can provide a privacy-respecting search experience for serving "recall" type searches where users retrieve previously visited content, but falls short in "discovery" type searches (yet).

A voice memo app, quite like the actual voice memo app from Apple. The thing is: now I can put my voice memo's on iCloud put Claude Code on it and make my transcripts into structured notes that my app then also displays.

So basically a way to just go on an hour long walk with myself, spit everything from the top of my dome stream of consciousness style, and then have Claude structure whatever I said.

It's nice to have something that structures my thoughts by just thinking out loud.

I vibecoded it (it's approaching 20K lines including tests). It works quite well but there are some bugs, so will have to do some actual engineering. But the UX is working quite well.

Built a quant system that reads earnings transcripts for what management is trying not to say. The model is surprisingly bad at this. Turns out management is too.