Bunch of things:
1. Building a local ai news feed to learn what's going on latest in terms of technical discussion, research papers, projects - https://local-ai-signal.vercel.app/
2. Build a second brain by injecting years of my notes using hermes, luna model and obisidian
Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
231–240 of 827 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
#232I'm working on SpecPilot (https://specpilot.dev), a spec-driven development layer that sits in front of Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and the rest. It deliberately doesn't generate code. It scaffolds a .specs/ folder and hands the actual writing off to whatever agent you already use, so the specs become the thing the agent is held to instead of a prompt you retype every session.
Open source, free, no login, nothing to sell. I'm not trying to build a business on this. I just want agents to write better code, and that only happens when they have something firmer than a chat prompt to work against. CLI is here: https://github.com/girishr/SpecPilot
It started as a TypeScript CLI in January. Enough people told me they either didn't want a CLI or didn't know how to use one that I rebuilt the front door as a guided chat: 27 questions, runs fully offline in the browser, outputs the .specs/ tree plus an onboarding prompt for your IDE.
Recently shipped an MCP server so the agent can run the questionnaire itself rather than the human doing it, published to the official MCP registry and Smithery. Next is brownfield: point it at an existing repo and backfill specs from the code. Honest state of things: the Product Hunt launch got 4 votes and around 100 visitors, and I had no event tracking wired up, so I couldn't even tell how many of those generated anything. Fixed since. Usage is small but real, and it's coming through MCP rather than the web app, which I did not expect.
The part I keep circling back to is that spec generation is easy to copy. Spec enforcement is where the value is: checking a diff against the spec and failing loudly. Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who tried SDD on an existing codebase and gave up.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
#233a marketplace for people to safely collect their own AI sessions in their own S3 compat buckets so they can sell them later to dataset buyers.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
#234I'm building https://matgoat.com/en/
A way for BJJ and martial arts academy owners to manage attendance, payments, class schedules, and student progress.
I train BJJ myself and saw how much time instructors lose to admin work, so I wanted something simpler and more focused than the generic gym software out there and have been having a lot of fun building it with feedback from real academies.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
#235I'm building InterviewMe ( https://interviewme.now/ ). It lets employers interview you via AI and is intended as a better way for people to get deep answers about your work history and experience than they could by looking at a simple online resume or LinkedIn. You upload your resume, answer some questions about your background, optionally upload any other documents you have (cover letters, awards, articles, etc) and it ingests all of that and creates a conversational agent people can use to ask questions about your professional experience. Check out my profile to get an idea of how it works: https://interviewme.now/@max and then get your own: It's free!
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
#236I’m building TraceDB[1] because I think observability needs an overhaul. We pay a premium to index millions of near-identical spans, sample away the rare ones that might explain an outage, and still have to piece together what failed, where it started, and how it spread. All the data is largely there, but no one can make sense of it! Observability was hallucinating before AI made it fashionable.
I’m seeing near-100% root-cause accuracy on synthetic test data and am looking to validate that on real production workloads using OpenTelemetry tracing. If you’re open to chatting or experimenting, drop me a line! I’d also love to hear ideas or how we can improve observability.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
#237I've been making a Rust-based XML parser that can be used on its own, or as a drop-in replacement for libxml2 at the C ABI level. Basically, it's not only 2x faster than libxml2, but being written in Rust eliminates a lot of cybersecurity risk. Roughly 70% of CVEs come from memory-safety bugs, a whole class that Rust rules out at compile time. https://supso.org/projects/sup-xml/docs
This is very cool! I was just looking for such a project and ended up using quick-xml since it satisfied my use case (needed to stream certain matches from a big XML file), and I didn't see yours. I love that it is a drop in for libxml2, that must have been a challenging constraint.
I will seriously consider adopting it as long as it supports streaming matches (it seems like it does).
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
#238I’m working on translating the Renaissance — it was mostly written in Latin and 90% of it has never been translated to English. Even big names, like Ficino, Durer, Kircher, Fludd and Drebbel. And that’s Latin— things much more sparse in other classical languages.
https://SourceLibrary.org is a hub that now provides over 20,000 translations of classical texts in dozens of languages (Latin and Greek but also Chinese, Sanskrit, etc). We always provide the original image of the text next to the AI translation (so if you don’t trust it, you can do it again). For a sense of scale, SourceLibrary now hosts more words than English Wikipedia!
You can freely connect to the public MCP for research; that way AI can read books and not hallucinate quotes. In Claude, it also retrieves images directly into the chat.
This is a philanthropic project based at the non-profit “The Embassy of the Free Mind” in Amsterdam, a rare book library devoted to free thought and mysticism. https://embassyofthefreemind.com
SourceLibrary is totally free and open source. If we can raise the money, we hope to translate 100k books before the end of the year.
If you want to dive in, I’d suggest trying our research agent with a rabbithole topic of your choice: https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian/
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
#239Built a small free thing this week: a "Spreadsheet Triage Checklist" — 7 common ways ad-hoc spreadsheets quietly break (stale copies, silent formula errors, no version control, etc.) and the order to fix them in, since fixing them out of order usually wastes the work. Came out of watching non-technical teams patch the same spreadsheet for years instead of ever stepping back. Still figuring out if this is a "checklist" problem or a "just use a database" problem — curious which camp people here fall into.
Re: Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
#240I've been working on a voxel game engine called Bonsai for ~10 years. Probably the most interesting thing about it at the moment is the editor. The world, and most things in it, are represented as collections of SDFs. More accurately, they're density fields, but, potato-tomato. Bonsai has undergone a large rewrite over the last couple years that's nearing completion. A world edit is defined as a bunch of SDF paramete…
this looks amazing