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

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121–130 of 913 posts

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

#121
I'm building a source code analyzer with AI. It's a TUI that you poin at a local codebase and it generates Mermaid diagrams.

While I was doing it I needed to render those diagrams as ASCII and I was surprised there's no Python library for Mermaid to ASCII. So I wrote one: https://github.com/fasouto/termaid (https://termaid.com/)

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

#122
post #117

Built a tool to help design cs/science inspired jewelry in CAD. I wrote a DSL to describe the jewelry, and had an LLM write the interpreter to generate a CAD file using cadquery (note to self: LLM suck at 3d reasoning). I would not have had the time to do this without AI. Also used AI to design an online store (I'm not a front end dev). It's amazing to see my wife (non-technical background) tweak the web-site using c…

> note to self: LLM suck at 3d reasoning one trick on 3d reasoning: get it to draw all the different orientations, and you pick which one to use it save a lot of time vs trying to tell it to rotate around Y and it actually rotates around X

Thanks. Good idea.

What I often ended up doing is asking it to draw 3 labeled arrows X,Y,Z. So I could tell it to orient along the XY labeled arrows (which are in reality YZ, but whatever).

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

#123
I schedule reminder calls to myself before some important appointments. It keeps calling me until I receive the message which it reads me (I set the message when scheduling the reminder call) and I have to say "message received" which marks the notification as delivered. (I use Twilio to place the call.)

I find a phone call is more likely to get through to me than a reminder or alarm, which I can ignore or forget; an ordinary reminder is not as interactive.

Claude built it all and although there's a script for it, I just set the reminders in an interactive Claude code session in the directory. (Like I'll open a claude code session there and say "using the script in this directory, call me tomorrow at 7 a.m. with the message 'dr's appointment'."

It works well for me.

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

#124
I wrote myself a little CLI app for generating 2FA codes because I got tired of the hassle of opening my phone and typing them in. So now I can just do 'toof nas' and get a code for my Synology account in my system clipboard. It supports nicknames for accounts, in case I'm thinking of "nas", "synology", or the hostname of my nas.

It still needs a bunch of polish, but I use it a few times a week.

https://github.com/delecti/toof

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

#125
post #107

I've been building a tool aimed at better web annotations for teams and AI collaboration at https://viewall.io/ Having worked with web facing teams there are always vastly different methods any individual uses to capture their feedback. If you or anyone you know on Mac that has 100s of screenshots on their desktop, this is aimed at bridging the gap. Clipboards are optimized with context for LLM markdown ingestion and…

"bringing the gap" -> bridging, right?

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

#127
I've made a harness to discipline it and get consistent output regardless of model. Using it daily. Is the opposite of vibe coding, it delivers great planed code with my engineering taste. I had it open sourced for a while then I've closed it. Just a month or two after closing it, I read an article about this "clean room" thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

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

#128
post #90

A few things: Reminder.dev - Quran app and API that includes RAG search to provide a more authenticated source of summarisation. The first thing I dabbled in with AI. Micro.mu - Rebuilt my entire product idea from 10 years ago as a super app for daily digital habits. Something I use everyday for myself. Aslam.org - An islamic knowledge base that uses sources of data as a way to ground AI chat and make notes. Very use…

Micro.mu looks interesting, your description of daily digital habits made me think it was a productivity app, when it really is more of a dashboard for different channels of content on the internet (social, video, chat, etc.) what was your original vision? I am curios. Also I really like the design, its so clean, Ive never seen anything quite like it and yet it seems like such a good aesthetic that should have been o…

Originally I felt there should be an alternative to Google and Facebook. It felt like our lives were being ruled by tech giants even ten years ago..and then all the advertising and algorithms really messed with us. I personally wanted an alternative way to use the web. So it's based around what I'd use on a daily basis. And then the idea of being able to extend it with a native app builder. The big stuff I continue to build with Go but ad-hoc things I can knock out with some JS in the app itself.

Its open source (https://github.com/micro/mu).

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

#130

I've made a harness to discipline it and get consistent output regardless of model. Using it daily. Is the opposite of vibe coding, it delivers great planed code with my engineering taste. I had it open sourced for a while then I've closed it. Just a month or two after closing it, I read an article about this "clean room" thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

I've thought about doing this a couple times but haven't followed through yet. What makes yours different/unique compared to, say, pi?
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