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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?

#681

Post by dbrabyn »

2 tools built solo with Claude Code to scratch 2 itches. One runs on AI, the other doesnt (for now).

Any pro cycling fan will know how fragmented the live race broadcast scene is. You have to check multiple websites, some dodgy, to find the race coverage times and sources. A real PITA. Course du Jour (coursedujour.com) does that for me and tells me daily "which bike races are on TV today, and where can I legally watch them." data collecting is the whole problem: ~30 sources, 5 languages, inconsistent naming, breaking weekly, sites with factual errors, etc. So AI does the upkeep: scrapers are dumb fetchers, and Claude reads the daily "unmatched race" report and opens PRs proposing fixes.

Another thing I hate doing: copying and pasting a new contact’s information into Google Contacts one field at a time: first name, last name, company, jost, email, phone, etc. So I built ContactFile (contactfile.app): privacy-first, no AI, all in-browser, no backend . You paste a messy email signature or LinkedIn blurb, get clean contact fields, one-click file to Google Contacts or download a .vcf. Pure regex + heuristics.

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

#682

Post by jreynar »

I've built a handful of things, most of which mirror commercial / open source products but for which I had particular requirements that were hard to satisfy (like a wine cellar tracker where I wanted recommendations about purchases from an email list). The one that seemed most unique was a fitness / health tracking thing. There are lots of apps for logging data (like Strava), lots of coaching apps (training peaks and others), including AI coaching apps, and tools focused on recovery (whoop), but I couldn't find anything that would help me understand the drivers of my level of fitness. I run, bike, lift weights and do Pilates and wanted to understand where I got the most bang for the buck in terms of cardio and VO2 max. Turned out to be a fairly tricky proposition with a detour through understanding the limitations of measuring your heartrate with an apple watch compared to a chest strap. But I ended up getting a pretty good picture of how best to use limited fitness time in both the summer (when outdoor activities are easy) and winter (when I'm stuck inside more often due to snow, cold weather and gritty roads that making running questionable). I might open source it for other people who are as nerdy about fitness as I am...

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

#683

Post by sailfast »

ingvay7 wrote: post #674

I shred guitar in the evenings to focus on technique, but a hectic day job means I get almost no time to twiddle knobs on my amp sim chasing the right tone. So I built a tool where I just prompt "Brian May Solo Bohemian Rhapsody" — the LLM fills a small JSON contract and feeds to a script that generates the XML, and I load it straight into the plugin. Two minutes and I feel like I'm tearing it up at Wembley '85 :)...…

This is really cool!

Seems like the key to the prompt it seems is the knowledge of how these tones were created in the first place (your system prompts for the 80s) which requires some actual tone knowledge and leaves all the fiddly bits to the LLM.

As someone relatively new to guitar this is intimidating, but also a fun rabbit hole. Additional “expert” prompts for different archetypes and genres could be fun.

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

#684

Post by atonse »

I've built an entire app (and Swift UI companion app) to run my consulting business. It's my chief of staff that I use daily. It checks my emails, keeps an eye on client relationships, finds opportunities, helps me qualify them, etc etc.

While I am using Hermes now (and was using nano claw before), they really aren't doing much and so I'm considering folding the little functionality they do into the app, and I think it'll work better.

Part of the app is also a personal agent that checks my schedule and inserts in things into my calendar like "20 min neighborhood walk between meetings" or "break for lunch" between meetings.

I also built an entire document creation system that I use to build analytics reports or proposals, that generates very polished proposals with data about the company with me having to do very little work. All the numbers add up, the cover pages are beautifully designed and full bleed, and the documents always have perfect formatting.

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

#685

Post by brendoncarroll »

No Nonsense Containers: a simple Linux containerization tool, secure by default, with support for presets.

https://github.com/brendoncarroll/nnc

I use it for running agents locally.

  nnc run /usr/bin/opencode --preset agent
You can make your own presets (which nnc looks for in ~/.config/nnc/presets) or use one from the standard library

https://github.com/brendoncarroll/nnc/tree/master/presets

Presets are written in Jsonnet, and resolve to a list of things to pass through from the parent process into the container. Presets can reference other presets, so you can build up arbitrary rules for passing files and devices into containers, give those rules a name, and reference them later.

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

#686

Post by geedy »

mym1990 wrote: post #664
geedy wrote: post #661

I am building a BRep CAD kernel from scratch. I intend to open source it once fillets work real good. That will take a while, but I've made pretty good progress since I started 10 weeks ago. Medium term goal is to release a GUI application that can be used to import STEP files and just do very high quality fillets in. Would be very useful for many hobbyists, I think.

As someone who is just learning CAD…what makes a fillet “ver high quality”?

"They just work" is a surprisingly important start. FreeCAD improved a lot with it's latest release, but it still has many flaky gaps. Caps / apices are especially hard.

Higher order continuity native to the blend would be a requirement for many, too, and the algorithms only get harder and trickier to verify correct.

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

#687

Post by kodablah »

In-browser AI image/video generation: https://intabai.dev.

And now working on an inference engine specifically geared to low mem situations. Both basically vibe coded. Not broadcasting either project widely as they remain unstable, unpolished side projects.

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

#688

Post by geekster777 »

Made a fun app that generates daily riddles. If you give an llm an answer then ask it for a riddle, it's pretty clever and fun to see what connections it draws: https://riddles.jpn.fyi/

I'm also currently working on an app that lets me hum a tune into my phone and generate guitar tabs. The audio processing is proving to be temperamental at pitch detection, but I'm planning on looking at some autotune libraries to see how they clean up audio for processing. Main problem I have is that I'll come up with a tune in my head, but by the time I sit down with a guitar and find my first target note, I've forgotten most of what I'd hummed.

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

#690

Post by 55555 »

netcoyote wrote: post #360

Tools I’ve built for myself: - sandvault https://www.codeofhonor.com/projects/sandvault/ runs agents in a separate macOS user account, hardened with sandbox-exec. It also supports headless browsing and iOS Simulator from inside the sandbox for testing web and iOS apps. - clodpod https://www.codeofhonor.com/projects/clodpod/ agents run inside a macOS VM. - git-multi-hook https://www.codeofhonor.com/projects/git-multi-…

I grew up playing Warcraft II. Thanks for all of those great times.
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