I don't do a ton of programming on my own time to be honest. But I did make some recipes with Calibre. Seeing Gemini basically jsut take the HTML from some news Web sites and come up with recipes really opened my eyes to how good that stuff had gotten.
Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
401–410 of 913 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
#402Gemini has been indispensable for helping me move from Windows to Linux. I'm reasonably proficient, but moving to a brand-new OS brought so many random questions and weird edge cases that I never would have had the confidence, patience, or time to tackle it alone, even with pretty strong Google fu. It's been so nice to have instant access to answers for my specific problems, without judgment or having to wait on a reply.
At the same time, I moved from Chrome back to Firefox, and Gemini was great at finding equivalents for my most-used extensions -- and, when none existed, to write my own. It's also been really useful for customization/"ricing".
More recently, I got into Quod Libet as a primary music library manager, and both Gemini and Claude have been fantastic at helping me build custom plugins that make it do exactly what I want it to. Scripts to automagically download tracks with metadata and synced lyrics, a lyrics sidebar that highlights lines as you listen and lets you click to jump to a specific line, a bookmark button that lets you mark your favorite section of a track for easy browsing later. Next chance I get is something that enables lyrics search across the entire library (a feature I was already able to build for the Stremio desktop player -- it's so cool to be able to search for a line in a TV episode or movie and jump straight to it).
Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
#403I built a language and runtime that combines agentic calls/prompts with strict checks (running tests, compiling, git commit).
I then used it to build other tools -- a personal time tracker and a Wesnoth-like game (both not yet published). Basically, I maintain a Markdown file with a queue of tasks, and I run a Jaiph workflow in a loop that automatically picks up tasks one by one and develops them with no human intervention.
Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
#404I made myself a tool that connects to my cdj3000x and A9 mixer over network and gets all data live from them. So bpm, pitch, song metadata etc. The tool also connects to my recordbox library and runs custom ML algos to classify for pitch, stems, tonality Phrasing, energy etc. Long story short it basically shows me ideas of what will mix in well. It works bizarrely well for me.
if you have all of that info, could you then automate the mix transitions by sending MIDI commands back in? would be fun to play a playlist or radio but where the track transitions are automated, phrase-matched and non-trivial (perhaps lasting for a number of phrases)
Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
#405i created a “simcity for logs” to generate synthetic test logs and simulated data sets https://logsim2.vercel.app/
Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
#406I built an RSS feed reader for Claude, https://clawfeeds.com/ it does very be little: 1. check the feeds, and 2. Turn the output into easy to parse markdown
Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
#407An on device iOS ad blocking podcast client
Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
#408I made the following tools
1. Comprehensive tool for auto expense logging and management, expense trend analysis, budget allocation, expense divider during group spend, report generator etc 2. DashCam app for simultaneously detecting threat and recording video. 3. Stock market portfolio management. A comprehensive tool which takes stock market investments as input, analysis the investments, provides a complete analysis, trends, suggestions etc 4. Fitness app. Records calories gained/burned,physical activities, all health parameters like Bp, Spo2, Blood sugar, Heartrate, Weight, Allergies and other synptoms. Analysis the health trends and provide suggestions regarding food, exercise and other health related anamolies. 5. AI learning app series ((13 apps to help learning AI from scratch) 6. Private chat app using Bluetooth communication 7.My own versions of Doc scanner, phone tracker apps 8. Health app which analyse tongue, eyes, and any symptoms to suggest the possible health issue and the remedy 9. JEE preparation CBT app 10. Electronic circuit builder and simulator app. (All basic circuits using AC/DC power, resistor, capacitor, transistor, diode, led, zener diode, switch etc can be created and run, it supports multimeter and CRO tools to measure different current/voltage and watch the waveforms)
Lot other things are in pipeline and will post once i complete them.
Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
#409I made myself a silly ai-chungus it works as a series of containers that communicate over mqtt. I have an ollama shim for other services to talk to a model on my other machine, telegram shim that acts as a ui, a study component that will give me a random subject for me to study over the course of a week and I give a proper implementation (let’s say a ring buffer) and it reviews the code I wrote. It has some minor gen…
This is great, you should do a write up. With photos! Can you explain the study thing in more detail? Or give an example of how you use it?
Sure so there’s a command in telegram you do /study and you can either tell it a subject or it’ll randomly generate one. I did /study ring buffers last time. So then opencode / GLM 5.1 or whatever write an entire site for me explaining the concepts, tradeoffs between things like infinite read write pointers, memory mirroring, how to tell if the writer looped the reader when the pointers are not monotonically increasing and instead get modulo’d, and bit masking with powers of 2 etc etc. then it wrote a ring buffer with various features in pseudo code so I can’t cheat. I also got papers to read from ACM and such. So I pickled it all over a week and came back with an Odin implementation, submitted to the site running on docker, and the ai reviewed it for me, telling me mistakes I made or areas where code isn’t really professional or I missed something. It’s genuinely super helpful. And the idea is whatever the AI tells me isn’t my only source of info so for example if the ai says infinitely increasing pointers will overflow but for example if I’m using Python, Python integers are basically bounded by memory and practically on most systems “infinite” so shut up AI I can do that or if it gives wrong info about something I’m getting published journals or websites as reading material that (hopefully lol) isn’t hallucinated. But really it’s the classic college style learn it then do a lab type of loop. Except it’s topics I’m genuinely interested in in the moment so the energy flows perfectly into it. My only wish would be to have it be cooperative working actively with others for the more accurate college experience bouncing ideas off other people seeing where we’re all confused or just me etc
Re: Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
#410I've been reading Finnegans Wake and not making much sense of it so I wrote a data pipeline to scour the web for interpretation books / guides (which I also can't be bothered actually reading) and coupled it with an prompt to image pipeline. It's now a readable albeit silly picture book to go along with an audio book... I call it finnegans slop.