Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
201–210 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
#202Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
#203Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
#204Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
#205I used to build hardware projects, write code but lately been coasting
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
#206I've noticed that juniors and new hires often fall into an impostor-syndrome trap when reading an unfamiliar codebase or reviewing a senior peer's PR. Documentation helps, but it usually runs into the curse of knowledge: it's written by someone who's spent so much time in the code that they've lost sight of what it's like to be new to it.
I've always liked the rubber-ducking process, and mob programming too, so I'm trying to combine both into a modern AI-enhanced form:
- "Duckies" with distinct personalities (really, skills) that each specialize in a particular kind of problem
- "Teachable moments" (working title): small bubbles that surface something novel, tangential, or foundational as you work
- Skill-level detection and a routing model, so the app doesn't overwhelm or annoy you with explanations you don't need
Each duck also runs on a tiered memory model, rather than one flat context window. There's a core memory, essentially the duck's resume, defining what it's actually skilled at. Above that sits a longer-term memory for company standards and code style, and a separate long-term memory scoped to the project itself. Short-term memory then covers whatever task or feature is currently in flight. The idea is that a duck should reason more like a team member with a real employment history than a chatbot that forgets everything between sessions.
It's called Duckies AI (https://www.duckiesai.com). It’s very rough, working locally, but not in a state I’m ready to ship yet. I'm hoping to ship an alpha soon. Turns out there are a LOT of table-stakes features an IDE needs.
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
#207Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
#208It’s an app to track wins and celebrate yourself
Re: Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
#209Also finally closed the first real customer on it recently!
I want to get through a large chunk of the open issues the next few weeks and then spend some time building agentic capabilities for it. I believe a central place to configure database access for your dev team without having to share passwords and with sensible review policies should also help e.g. if claude needs to access production data to validate a premise.
Still have to figure out the right UX though not sure the agent should have the exact same review requirements that a human does. Maybe it needs to be configurable separately