https://concrete95.net/ - a musique concrète web app that's made to look like windows 95. Pulls random audio from freesound.org and loops a small section, you can also layer synth pads or melodic synth loops. I'm often able to get some really pleasant background ambience.
https://windso.me - a sample-based step sequencer that doesn't let you choose the sample that's loaded, kinda fun, still needs a lot of work!
noisetable is great, though would be great to have a warning that it uses flickering before starting the game. Or maybe add a check if visitor has motion reduced (prefers-reduced-motion css block?)
- 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.
- git-multi-hook https://www.codeofhonor.com/projects/git-multi-hook/ git only allows one script per hook event; this is a dispatcher that discovers and runs every script in a hooks dir, in parallel, for both global and repo hooks.
My blog is AI-coded: Zola static site, Sveltia CMS, Cloudflare Pages/Workers, with GitHub Actions handling builds and syndication. https://www.codeofhonor.com
I just found your blog yesterday reading up on the stories of how Warcraft and Starcraft were made!! Have been hacking on small games and a tool to build 3d environments for a while and get very inspired by hearing stories from back in the day. Thanks for making everything public. I really enjoy your writing.
For me.. the most interesting part of the whole Warcraft saga would be more discussions around the arguments/design decisions of.. "we should include ___."
For example... War2 stuck with two races (and introduced alliances w/ other races like elves) instead of adding new races. How did you get to that decision? did you do any prototypes? Was it just a pure argument? What did you find in the process?
That kind of behind the scenes design discussion is rarely surfaced (and often messy) but is as interesting (to me) as the technical decisions.
One more idea.. You've worked across great companies and great games. If you were going back now to your former self striking out to ship your first commercial game, what are the 3-4 pieces of wisdom you wish you'd internalized back then?
As a developer who deploys wordpress often, I can tell you that if you have the resources (experience and time) to setup a headless wordpress you probably don’t need 99% of plugins. The really important ones (ACF Pro, cookies-stuff, SEO etc) are compatible with headless.
I regularly deploy non headless high impact wordpress sites with about 6 plugins max. Theme is custom developed as a skeleton starter plus custom fields.
I feel you though, it’s imperfect but so far I haven’t found an alternative for client work especially that beats the WP ecosystem
This sounds like it's worth a blog post. I'm sure lots of folks, including me, would be interested in the details of which plugins to maximize utility, and what the deploy process looks like. Cheers!
Thanks to Push10K now I am on my 160th day of streak and 13,135 pushups (or my own version of equivalents) so far. It is the best thing I did after feeling like Glutton after dinner last Christmas.
That is awesome! Congratulations on completing so many — and such a big streak! Good luck on your journey to the 20k, and let me know if you need any features to make it work for you.
> - git-multi-hook https://www.codeofhonor.com/projects/git-multi-hook/ git only allows one script per hook event; this is a dispatcher that discovers and runs every script in a hooks dir, in parallel, for both global and repo hooks.
Here's what gemini says about running hooks in parallel:
> Native Git traditionally executes hooks sequentially. However, you can achieve parallel execution by leveraging dedicated third-party hook managers or using built-in shell background processing
.. and that's what git-multi-hook is: a third-party hook manager, that uses shell background processing :)
- find-do-not-commit: do not commit files that include "DO NOT COMMIT"
- lint-code: run `$REPO/scripts/lint` if it exists
- lint-nodejs: run `$REPO/{pnpm/yarn/npm}` lint if `package.json` exists
- lint-shellcheck: shellcheck all the files that have no extensions or end in `.sh` that have a shell-shebang
- lint-swift: run swiftlint
- prevent-commit-secrets: run ripsecrets to avoid committing secrets and credentials
- validate: run `$REPO/scripts/validate` if it exists
By default all of the scripts check the files in the git staging area, but they can also be run standalone to check everything. You can find them here: https://github.com/webcoyote/git-multi-hook. Glad to take suggestions for more.
I would love to see the push10k on android playstore/fdroid.
It looks so inviting and motivating that I searched for equivalent alternatives for android but found none!
Would you, maybe, publish it there as well, pleeeease?
But hands down the most useful thing I've made is HutchDB, which is a MCP service that you can call from any AI chat or Agent setup to store data for you.
Literally from your AI you just say "save that to Hutch" and then it figures out:
- The schema + fields
- Builds nice webviews (Kanban, Timeline, Grid, Calendar)
- Lets you share the output with people
So people use it for all kinds of things like time tracking ("every hour save a summary of my activities to Hutch"), for Agent to Human handoff ("Every day check social media for mentions of my company and save them to Hutch").
I use it for things like recording all of our marketing activities and then having my AI compare those to signups for rough attribution, etc.
I love it! A few questions that made me think:
- how do you know that "people use it for all kinds of things"? I just read your privacy policy and I'm concerned about my AI agent possibly leaking some API key to Hutch and then you can read it.
- how is this free? You're hosting on Vercel, one of the most expensive hosting providers. What happens when this goes semi-viral? How do I know you won't just pull the plug to cut costs or start charging $500/month? I don't want to sign up, invest my time, and then lose access.
- I signed up and now I can't access privacy policy nor terms of service pages, because when I go to https://hutchdb.com/ I get redirected to https://hutchdb.com/dashboard
This is all very fair criticisms. This thread asked: "What are tools you have made for yourself?" and that's genuinely what this is. I wanted it so I made it and then AI makes it so easy to just throw up a marketing page.
I've a a handful of dev friends that have started to use it as well and give their feedback and it's been slowly growing as I've added sharing/invites.
I would absolutely not recommend putting big production data into it currently.
My vision for it was something more like how the #1 use of spreadsheets is actually people making lists and not actually people doing lots of calculations.
Given the uptake today (thanks everybody!) and your feedback (thanks Mystery-Machine) I'm going to work at addressing your concerns.
I thought it was more implied, but let me be more explicit:
- This is something I made for myself without a lot of commercial thought, so I still haven't thought through pricing + usage + limits + operational limits. In it's current wildly unoptimized state it's still very cheap to run.
- For the specific concern about API Key leakage there's not a lot I can do about that (that I'm aware of) as the logic of what gets sent is handled by the client AI. It is possible to pull down and audit both the tools + instructions that are published by the MCP server if there are concerns on that side.
Gemini 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).
ChatGPT has helped me with innumerable little technical things and feels indispensable at this point.
I can't help thinking that this is a combination of Google sucking more and more and various problems of daily getting so hard need something like a script to solve them. (Recent challenge - "what affordable campgrounds are near the Pacific Create trail and open now").
I similarly used it to finally facilitate a switch to Arch to a couple months ago. Not technically a tool, but it was very convenient to take the Arch wiki, and personalize it by saying "My hardware is X and my use case is Y, can you filter out the 90% of things from here that aren't relevant to me?"
instant access to answers for my specific problems, without judgment
For me that’s killer feature, even if we don’t achieve AGI at least we got good enough „something that will google it for me”.
It is great both ways as an expert in my niche I don’t have to waste time on reading through entry level fluff. As non expert in other fields I don’t get to be scolded for asking entry level questions so RTFM and LMGTFY will sink in history fortunately.
I made a scraper that searches through all the news and finds anything 'war' related. It then summarizes it and give me that new in the Star Wars crawl with music.
I shipped a QA harness for Claude Code. Instead of clicking through flows by hand, it reads your code diffs, identifies the affected UI flows, and tests them in real browser
Plus after each run you get screen recordings with console logs, network requests, HARs, and Playwright traces so you can inspect exactly what the agent did :)
From a quick look at your profile, the majority of your submissions have been Show HNs. HN only allows some fraction of your submissions to be Show HNs (imagine if the front page was nothing but), so eventually they will just be auto-flagged.
I wrote a pen-plotter GUI and gcode sender in Rust. By hand. Like an animal.
I am the only user. Sometimes it's the process that matters, and exercising your brain is important too. I get that there is a lot of existential dread around AI taking our jerbs, and excluding humans from the process of creative work, but... you can still just write code, just for the personal satisfaction.
This is going to be one my next projects for experimenting with the Web Serial API. I got an old Ioline plotter that refuses to die. Any advise or tips for where to start with the SVG to Gcode conversion?
I used svg2polylines to load the SVG into line segments, interpolating any splines into something easier to use for a plotter. Feel free to take a look at the core/project/import.rs in the project I linked. You might also want to look at the core/post.rs which does the gcode generation.
A voice memo app, quite like the actual voice memo app from Apple. The thing is: now I can put my voice memo's on iCloud put Claude Code on it and make my transcripts into structured notes that my app then also displays.
So basically a way to just go on an hour long walk with myself, spit everything from the top of my dome stream of consciousness style, and then have Claude structure whatever I said.
It's nice to have something that structures my thoughts by just thinking out loud.
I vibecoded it (it's approaching 20K lines including tests). It works quite well but there are some bugs, so will have to do some actual engineering. But the UX is working quite well.
Relatedly, I have recently started walking and talking, and I just use lightweight gamer headphones that have a mic. I just record it with a generic voice recorder app, then I use a local instantiation of whisper to transcribe it when I get home. I throw the transcript and the recording into a database and then I can search the whole thing, or have AI look for interesting patterns in my thoughts.
FWIW - In the Claude app (on android) when in transcript mode, it has a hard limit of 10 minutes. If you transcribe longer than that, it crashes and you lose everything you've said.
To make matters worse, they've recently gotten rid of the timer, so you have NFI how long you've been speaking for.
I use it for therapy-based stream-of-consciousnesses + venting and then have my project set up to understand the schema therapy work I've done with my psychologist and give me insights / draw threads between things from my past and now, and losing 10 whole minutes of talking and processing is SO FRUSTRATING!
It seems clunky for me. The dictating it self had weird bugs, like sometimes it decided to not work at all and the conversation mode is not very usefull for OP case if I am undestanding it correctly.
I am curious to check them out! I hadn’t heard of them. Marketing stuff takes time as I have noticed with aliceindataland.com [1]. Maybe I should do a show HN. I will think about it.
To be fair, vibecoding this memo app in Swift didn’t take too long. There were some tricks to it, using xcodegen helped a lot so that I don’t need to use the Xcode project.
It’s fun to see Swift code. I used to do some Objective-C back in the day.
[1] another thing I made. It’s a sequel to the Alice in Wonderland stories. It’s also a SQL course. I vibe engineered it, meaning I looked at the code and used AI-assisted development.
Except for the story though that’s almost all fully me. LLMs aren’t great storytellers. The same is true for the lesson scaffolding, that’s almost only me.
Many, really, but there are few I'm especially proud of:
- https://github.com/exlee/pikchr_pl - DiagramIDE (diagram amiga-style workbench where you can script Pikchr diagrams using TCL, Prolog, Pikchr or - recently mruby). Note: you need to navigate to actual crate for description. There are binaries built in case someone wants to try it.
- https://svg.axk.sh - semi manual SVG fitter so that I can easier vectorize AI-generated pseudovector images (who doesn't like 30kb SVG versus 1.8mb PNG?!)
- https://github.com/exlee/rik - this one makes me laugh every time I use it - it's an AI harness with text editor as an UI (i.e. it reacts to comment strings) - I gave it personality so it makes wacky comments but other than that it's very constrained agent (limited edition ;))
These are not vibe coded but AI made it much easier to slide through major friction points (e.g. for SVG fitter I really didn't want to reinvent fitting algorithms)
These are really cool - I've been meaning to return to my pikchr-in-wasm IDE experiment. I only ever built a PoC, and that was before AI coding. I should pick it back up and polish it a bit, but after seeing your DiagramIDE, I might just use that.
This whole thread is turning HN into my favorite app store. Good stuff.
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 claude code.
End result: an online store where we sell jewelry pieces that actually are lambda-diagrams (Tromp diagrams) that compute Graham's number, or of the Y-combinator (well, technically it's just a fixed point operator, one beta reduction away from the Y-combinator. But Y-combinator was not aesthetically pleasing from a jewelry point of view)
store: 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 claude code.
End result: an online store where we sell jewelry pieces that actually are lambda-diagrams (Tromp diagrams) that compute Graham's number, or of the Y-combinator (well, technically it's just a fixed point operator, one beta reduction away from the Y-combinator. But Y-combinator was not aesthetically pleasing from a jewelry point of view)
I've found that Gemini Pro is surprisingly good at 3d reasoning. To back that claim up, I've had it create:
A WebGl program that takes input like X123 Y123 Z123 via WebSerial every 100 ms and builds an object out of the resulting path. Required some performance optimizations (just had to tell it what to do). Also asked it to make the corners nicer and it did. (To be fair, I'd already asked a lesser model and put some things in the prompt to nudge it the right way.)
Various OpenSCAD models. E.g., remote control holder with 5 slots, staggered heights, slight slant because it looks cool, and the slots all have different depths. One shot. It implemented the slant/tilt using a shearing matrix. 100 points.
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).
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface with offline result previews & detailed query language to explore collected content or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.
It can provide a privacy-respecting search experience for serving "recall" type searches where users retrieve previously visited content, but falls short in "discovery" type searches (yet).
This was the first AI project I ended up working on as well, except I approached from building a meta-search first. I only added support for a local index recently (via SQLite FTS 5). But I haven't shared my project, whereas you have a truly fantastic webpage for yours. Plus going the extra distance with a terminal interface and MCP server too.
Much kudos. I hope more people discover how powerful even a local search index of previously visited content can be. And I hope more people can build large indexes as well, so we're not just relying on Brave & Mojeek & Marginalia (and EUSP) to rescue us for the fallback discovery searches.
(Edit: forgotten in first edition) A cookbook to store the recipes my family likes to cook so I can eventually break up with Pinterest: https://github.com/vtbassmatt/Cookbook
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 :)...almost.
The pattern generalized is LLM finds the presets,i can even upload a file to make it zone in, the code validates and loads into the plugin. Also using this contract/adapter approach for Terraform, game engine presets, CI pipelines, etc.
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.
thanks.Frankly — the system prompt is the sauce. The LLM has encyclopedic knowledge of every amp, cab, and pedal ever made which still blows my mind, but without guardrails it'll confidently tell you to boost mids on a JCM800 (which is how you disappear in a loud mix i've noticed). That era cheat sheet is all the working knowledge over the years of spectacularly failing to get the right tones.
Once someone does that encoding work for a genre, it's reusable forever I think. I'm pretty comfortable with late-80s/early-90s rock well enough to write the specs. But you're right — a "modern metal" prompt, a shoegaze one (which my teenager wants), a funkone,etc - that's the next layer. tone_system.md just needs to be updated. I plan to expand this to more plugins. Contributions welcome.
Amazing! Even though they’re “just prompts” that knowledge is still important and valuable. Very cool. Unfortunately I’m just a guitar newb trying to figure out what pickups are doing things to my tone so you probably don’t want me in there :)
No real reason really.In fact its on my list next. I was working on a track in logic that i was mostly sourcing the polychrome presets and i plan to add the same functionality to all my other plugins. The Gojira archetype is one i have my eyes on first
I vibe coded myself a simple little Home Screen-installable webapp that tells me when my first meeting is the next day (I am in a lot of meetings, and they're constantly in flux). That way, I don't need to be logged into anything work-related on my phone, or even mentally engage in that world. I just want to know when I need to wake up. All it shows me is the time, and I can tap on it if I want to see the title. It adjusts the font and color according to how early the meeting is (earlier than 8a gets Nosifer).
Could I have done this myself? Of course. Would I have tho? Prob not.
This kind of simple, hyper-specific bespoke utility is the perfect thing for vibe coding IMO.
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956, before I was born. AI itself is even older than that (e.g. William Grey Walter's robots, Elmer and Elsie in 1948), but it was called cybernetics back then. I've been doing symbolic AI, on and off, since the 1980s.
I assume, though, you mean LLMs. I haven't used them first hand, but I have fairly recently implemented a multi-layer artificial neural network in C, mostly as a learning exercise, but as I had previously built a speech spectrogram in Lisp, I thought I'd try to use it to recognize phonemes, with one hidden layer. The Lisp communicated with the ANN via a Unix pipe. It worked reasonably well for just vowels, but when I added other sounds (e.g. l, r, s, z), its performance deteriorated. I think the C is bug free, but I don't know an easy way to train the ANN. I've tried adding to the training set, adding an extra layer, changing the number of neurons in the hidden layer. The usual debugging skills don't seem to help there.
I'm interested in how they work, but building anything like them, given the hardware I have, would be impractical. I've seen others use them, including to answer some questions I had, but the answers they gave were obvious, unhelpful, or wrong.
Even if they become more reliable, I like to understand and work things out for myself, rather than just be given the answer.
With Tailscale, you can basically point a domain to the FQDN of a machine you’re sharing with people and the domain will simply work for them (and only them)[1]. But for it to work without them having to know or specify the specific application port, you have to grant them access to 443 (and 80) in your Tailscale ACL for that specific host.
So yeah, now immich.familydomain.com works without family members having to remember the specific port. BUT, serveradmin.familydomain.com (another app on the same host) will ALSO be accessible to them (from a networking POV). We opened port 443/80 for that host after all.
I took a few hours with Claude back in January (?) and we wrote a tiny Go authorization gateway which basically consults both Tailscale’s public API and Tailscale’s `localapi` and returns the appropriate response to Caddy based on the requesting user’s actual allowed ports.
So now I can share different apps (subdomains) with different people without forfeiting access controls, all driven by Tailscale’s policy file.
(I hope I didn’t mess up the crux of it, pretty late here)
Edit: why not (something like) Authentik? Quoting from the draft:
I contemplated this for a bit but one thing I kept thinking about is:
_They're already logged in to Tailscale_
Why do I need to install and configure another full-blown app dedicated to doing something Tailscale already did? Why have the users go through two hops of authentication?”
Pangolin would have been a better direct fit than Authentik. It does come with an embedded idP nowadays but can also use Authentik. Another tool to keep an eye on is Netbird which is like a tailscale like mesh but has proxy support for whatever app you want to share with or without authentication.
Maybe…I really didn’t want to have to install another app just because I’m sharing though. My line of thinking was/is:
If tomorrow I decide not to share with anyone, I don’t want to have to reconfigure stuff. I simply edit the Tailscale policy file, and (maybe) spin down my server.
I built a browser extension that stops animated images such as GIFs by default.
I've always found it annoying that browsers autoplay animated images, and there still isn't a built-in way to control that behavior.
The extension shows the first frame and adds a play/stop button directly on the image.
What started as a personal utility ended up being published on the Firefox and Chrome extension stores. It's still a small project, but it solved a problem I had every day.
> I've always found it annoying that browsers autoplay animated images, and there still isn't a built-in way to control that behavior.
When I first started daily driving Linux in 2011, this was the default behavior of konqueror, Firefox, librewolf, and opera.
I would have to set a flag in the software to get it to autoplay videos and gifs. They would just load with a warning message in the render space that said click to load auto play video.
Nice, this means ebay will be usable for me again. A while back they started permitting videos instead of pictures for the thumbnails of certain products and I pretty much stopped browsing the site. As if online retails websites weren't bad enough already.
> I previously posted a Show HN about it, but it didn't get traction
FYI your linked submission is marked as dead. Not sure if that's a problem with your account or not. You should email the HN mods.
I built https://beachcomber.sh after one day getting huge lag and asking claude to investigate found that one of the factors was thousands of resources purely for giving my prompt, tmux statusline, nvim statusline, claude statusline the same identical information.
I probably would not have bothered to allocate time to this pre ai, the juice wasnt really worth the squeeze. But I approached it with an initial amusing naivete about it being 'super simple'. As is almost always the case with software theres a reasonable amount of hidden complexity. But I have been using it as a sort of learning proving ground for how to work with agentic development. For example I got to a point where claude wouldnt implement properly and would argue with me about changes because it would read the current/old docs in the repo and get confused about reality. So right now I'm experimenting with 'canonical specs' that can only be changed modally with gates and a defined cascade from canon, to code, to docs in that order. Otherwise you end up in a weird thrash about the docs and the code disagree and which one will the agent decide to change for consistency?
Anyway, its been interesting and its v0.6 and at a point where Ive not hit a sharp edge dogfooding for a while and some beta testers would be valuable. Right now you have to manually wire it into your stack, once some others have kicked the tyres hard enough I will make some pr's to the popular tools to consider integrating it.
https://github.com/amedeedaboville/mish
A mosh clone that uses QUIC as the transport layer so it can do both “unreliable datagrams” like UDP and also a TCP-like reliable stream, so it has scrollback buffer.
Also QUIC means the crypto is handled for me, no need to trust the LLM to hand roll its own crypto.
Cool Rust libraries enable this like alacritty for the terminal, and being able to have russh (rust implementation of ssh) means it works even if ssh isn’t installed (eg on windows which og mosh never supported).
Claude tested this thing forwards and backwards: e2e tests, simulated (foundationDB like) tests for the network and for tokio async thread ordering, 12 different fuzzing targets, even some light model checking on the protocol itself. Each fuzzing round found bugs.
Except for a few “it may have bugs, I have only proven it correct” scenarios I’d say it’s looking like it’ll be as trustworthy as (maybe more than?) the original. I’m really happy with it.
I got tired of all the quirks when opening CSV files in Excel, so I built a fast and lean viewer for CSV - at least this was what initially planned.
Later I find the technique I developed to instantly load arbitrary large CSV files can be generalized to work with any format, with an incremental parser combinator. This means the tool can read from not only files, but any stream-oriented sources like a pipe.
I did used AI in development but it didn't speed up the process very much, as I found a lot of time was spent on the deign of an intuitive and consistent UX. The project is still not very production ready, but in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/Verticalysis/Hitomi
I've redesigned my workstation OS using NixOS and Claude Code and it's been a huge success.
I like the ideals of NixOS: reproducible setup from a git repo, ability to boot into a past config if you mess things up. But it's a big job learning and implementing that configuration manually. I've been playing with NixOS for ~2 years and like it but never really got that close to a full workstation setup.
When Ubuntu 26.04 came out I really needed to upgrade my 22.04 workstation and decided I'd really give NixOS a try before going with 26.04.
This time I decided to entirely configure it via Claude Code. I've been entirely running on it for a week and there's nothing I'm missing. I even took a stepping-stone approach where I first installed it on my old laptop, left my current workstation in place (in case the experiment failed), and then did a reinstall of my current workstation. NixOS made setting up the second machine trivial. Now, if my normal workstation were to have a hardware failure, I can just grab my /etc/nixos and rebuild and I'm back in business. Which is important since my workstation is now out of warranty and 6 years old.
One win is that I had been using LunarVim and AstroVim, and liked the "batteries included" approach, but they were hard to upgrade and while I was trying to do as little customization as possible, I still needed to do some and that was tricky in their configs. I used Claude Code to build a neovim setup with just my desired features, and it's now a single ~700 line neovim.nix file with everything in it. It's fully featured including LSPs+TreeSitter, etc.
I’d love to give NixOS a try on an old ThinkPad. I’m pretty comfortable with Claude; is it as simple as ask and go, or do you have any suggestions for getting started?
I installed NixOS, and then I copied /etc/nixos down to my main workstation where I had claude code working, and used it to modify the configs. I'd then rsync them to the other machine and run the "nixos-rebuild" there.
I don't recall exactly how I did the initial copies, because SSH wasn't set up there. Probably would be best to just ask claude what needs to be done to enable SSH, it's only like a 1 line change.
Some of the first things I asked it to do were:
- Switch to flakes and tracking the latest software.
- Switch to using Sway for window manager.
- Various user account setup things: Configure zsh with atuin and zoxide, enable sudo, allow my SSH key for login, set up some aliases and the software I need.
- Install claude code (I gave it the "installing" URL) once I got tired of copying back and forth.
- Set up Home Manager and SOPS and put my secrets in SOPS, set up a variety of my scripts and symlinks.
- Configure vim to my liking (done entirely in English prose).
Those are the top things that come to mind. Honestly, it went pretty smoothly. The only real issue I had to speak of was that I'm running bleeding edge, and the moment I decided to unplug my desktop monitors from the Ubuntu machine and connect them to NixOS I had it do a package update at the same time. This hit a Gnome+Wayland bug which left me at a black screen. A nice thing about NixOS is you can just reboot and at the grub menu select an older system config, so I did that. Claude tracked down an open bug about it, tried a few mitigations, but eventually I told it to just revert the version of gnome until it was fixed upstream.
It has gone extremely smoothly. Zero regrets. My manual attempts at NixOS always ran me into dark corners that I didn't know how to do (like installing gitbutler-cli, which is not packaged for NixOS yet), and Claude had no trouble figuring out.
One addition: Flakes is something that I think Claude recommended at the point I switched over to home manager+SOPS. Flake, Home Manager, and SOPS were all things I was somewhat aware of from my previous attempts at NixOS. If you are coming in brand new, I'd probably recommend asking Claude to start with flakes sooner rather than later. Just specifically ask it to use flakes.
Pretty much everything else I did without asking Claude much in the way of NixOS specifics. I just described what I want in general terms.
A self hosted web archiving tool with support for extendible processing pipelines (eg. extract article -> translate -> summarize -> generate tags, download video -> split audio track -> transcribe -> summarize), which led me to make a managed chromium browser with extensions and warc support for archiving, and a RSS feed synthesizer (take random article listing page that doesn't have RSS and generate a feed for it) so that I can plug it into my archiver. An active learning loop for a model to clean up articles by removing junk like native ads and sponsored blocks.
A tabbed terminal with project management features like launching the database, app server, and claude code in different tabs with one click, and split browser/terminal panes (eg. opening a browser automatically at the correct URL when the terminal reads http://localhost:4000/).
A modular MCP server with a MCP proxy and OAuth2 dcr so that I can easily add new random ideas for MCP servers in a few minutes with Claude and deploy them such that it's available to Claude by refreshing the tool list.
A small tool to render Claude conversations so that I can link to them from my obsidian vault with something like convo://claude-code/-home-jfim-projects-foo/<guide>
And overall just deploying docker containers for my self hosted setup
Most of it is on GitHub, in various states of readiness.
https://gitlab.com/grepular/foxcage - Runs Firefox inside podman to isolate it from the host. Has some interesting features that I wanted and nothing else gave me.
Currently working on a tool for sanitising email. Will be blogging it up at https://www.grepular.com/blog/ when it's ready for others to use. Does things like applying policies to html/svg/calendar/vcard parts to whitelist or blacklist tags/attributes/css/url schemas, clean URLs, fetch remote content at delivery time and attaching to the email to prevent tracking, pgp and smime auto encryption/decryption and a million other features.
A SQLite based sweeper of all the scans, notes, PDFs and images I have on my filesystem, that stores their paths and allows searching their OCR’ed descriptions and text, as provided by Mistral OCR. I can ask things like “when does my car need maintenance” or “find me that picture my kid drew for Mother’s Day”. I use pi-based bash executable to launch a doc chat like that.
https://github.com/maxim/ringbinder
Yeah, for me it was all about not letting mail and kids schoolwork pile up. I like to scan ads that local businesses leave in my mailbox, so that I can ask "show me lawn care services near me". A lot of them don't really have any other online presence.
Btw, I tried to keep the Mistral part modular, so that another OCR could be integrated.
IME way better. It may not be the best out there, but it's cheap (2c per page), fast, easy to integrate API, and sufficient for my needs. It does things like describe what's drawn in pictures and shown in graphs, which all helps when searching.
great! have you tested how well it return coordinates of objects/text? Ive tried with generic LLMs like Gemini/Qwen/Gemma and they all are unstable with coordinates around text, better when using visual grounding though
Yeah, for perfect positioning/overlaying I would be much stricter with my requirements. For that type of OCR I used Apple’s own LiveText framework that comes with MacOS. But in this use case I only care about standalone plain text and descriptive text to store in the database, not overlay over original content, so never tested Mistral on that front.
I made a tool that creates sandboxes (docker, podman, orbstack, seatbelt, tart, containerd, kata, firecracker) and then sets up an agent (claude, codex, gemini, aider, opencode) inside it with max permissiveness (no prompts to call sed, etc).
It creates its own copy of your workdir for the agent to play in, and then you pull changes out ala git diffs or commits.
It's a MASSIVE time saver, and I use it as my daily driver.
- A telegram bot that messages me in the morning and afternoon with a todo list essentially. It’s connected to Google Calendar and a crude memory database (SQLite). The kids wanted me to make it sound like the character Yarnaby from Silksong.
- Automated backups of steam saves for when my kids wanted to play the same game on my account and saves get out of sync with steam cloud. The kind of thing I wouldn’t usually bother with myself.
- automated script that reruns failed GitHub actions in repositories with flakey tests ‘cause why bother fixing them? It also auto catches up branches with the main branch for the repo.
- a YNAB extension for pi (agent harness) to help with entering purchases that need to be split across categories. This is also in the telegram bot so I can use voice-to-text to explain a purchase.
- I already had some python scripts to generate pdfs of Magic: The Gathering cards for printing proxies. I had an llm extend it to make some dividers with the set names and symbols on them. Makes organizing them a lot easier in the big card boxes.
The tool I'm most proud of is "Hex Flex" (https://seidleroni.github.io/Hex-Flex-Web/). It is a tool to view and compare the contents of Intel Hex files. Should be useful to other people who work in the firmware field.
Not exactly a tool, but I also made pelohard.com which ranks the most recent Peloton classes by difficulty. Updated twice daily.
Before agentic coding went mainstream, one of my main use cases was creating sticker designs for concerts and music festivals. Creating the stickers and giving them away was a good way to meet new people.
I used OpenClaw to make a health and wellness coach agent that tracks calories and alcoholic drinks and logs it to a personal dashboard. I send it photos of my meals, and it will estimate the calories and log it. It will also help me make meal decisions and give me words of encouragement.
I used this HAM dashboard git repo to create a bespoke dashboard of different video and weather feeds from my area: https://github.com/VA3HDL/hamdashboard
I've spun up probably close to a dozen one-off or small websites for various little interests or projects. One of my favorites is a short domain file uploader that I can quickly host Markdown and HTML files to share with family, friends, and colleagues. It's using Caddy and running on a DO-VPS. I open sourced the code here: https://github.com/RobbyMcCullough/honeydrop
It's not just for myself, but I'm primarily creating it for myself - it's a browser for designers. I work in code but I often want a figma-type interface to explore different ideas without having to branch or litter my codebase with a bunch of demo components/files.
Normal browsers have built-in dev tools - this has built-in design tools. so I can visit my app, open up a surrounding canvas, pull fragments into the canvas, do some design-ish stuff, and merge it back into code. All in the same UI. It was cool enough that I'm going to release it, but for now it's very useful for myself.
A "Home Agent" setup, with customized special agents to manage various aspects of the house through home assistant, learning feedback from household users to try and tune everything at the right time.
Various MCPs for above.
A "remote claude code server", that gives project level overview and lets me run projects / develop on my home server rather than locally through my laptop. Supports ssh as well as a web UI (projects in a list, shell rendered using https://xtermjs.org/, with a tile overview when working on multiple projects to watch for turn ends.
Similar to above, I have a local version that auto launches a new project scoped podman container, passess through the work directory, installs CC/Codex/Grok into it and passess through the auth / config for each agent. Then dumps you into that shell with aliases to map each agent to that agent with a few special env flags to disable permission prompts, so claude = `claude --dangerously-bypass-permissions`.
An extensive MCP for Obsidian that gives agents access to use a lot of the more advanced Obsidian functionality, such as suggesting and installing plugins / configs / etc.
It's helped some of my daily productivity, but I still prefer to get my hands dirty with code most of the time rather than full prompt it.
Do you have any code/insights about this home agent you could share?
I'm thinking about creating something pretty similar, I want a digital housekeeper that keeps an eye on what is happening in my house and notifies me about dead/unreliable devices, fix broken automations, suggest new automations based on sensor data, etc...
I've setup the unofficial home assistant MCP already, but LLMs seems to struggle a bit to use it properly and I haven't looked into it yet to understand what is happening.
I wrote a tui sql client to replace DataGrip (which is really slow). https://github.com/keithn/sql It's quite customized to what I wanted, I haven't really checked it works with other things.... only thing is, I don't really use it much anymore, I just get claude to do all my querying.
Most of the tools I write now are bridges to various SaaS products that have APIs but no CLIs.
autocomplete isn't "exact", so it does have in its suggestions things that don't exactly always make sense, but it does list things by what is contextually relevant. It has a basic understanding of sql syntax such it will suggest potential keywords next, it introspects things like tablenames so they are available in spots where a tablename would be relevant, and if it has tables it will introspect them to get fieldname, and any named things like x as y will also become suggestions within the context of the query you are working on. This results in mostly correct suggestions. However it generally always has the suggestion you want, it works really well with field names / table names, which mainly what I wanted, and very basic with sql syntax (which I normally don't need any help with other than relevant keyword completion)
Do you have any examples that you've generated from standup-to-comics? I didn't see anything in the repo, and would like to see some examples before spending the time to set up myself :)
Good point, will update the repo. Though, the comics generated by the local llms all kinda suck.
And, not setting this up for yourself is smart, it kind of fills up the disk pretty fast. All the recordings, local llms, etc.
I was... not prepared for your standup to comic README. Besides just being a cool idea, you gave me some things to think about and several new rabbit holes to explore.
There’s another one I’m planning to start - subtitles for your conference calls.
It would generate netflix like expressive subtitles such as - “uncomfortable silence ensues”, “looks at a distance”, “playful music in the background” etc.
I've written my own programming language. IMO, "good architecture" exists outside of specific language choices - SOLID, various design patterns, etc.. I've always felt like I'm implementing the same high level design in any language I've worked with, it's just manifested and looked different, depending on the language tooling. The "good" opinions are baked into the _structure_ of the language itself, so the robots have no choice but to build well designed codebases.
One of the "huh, didn't expect that to work" moment was getting GLM 5 to make me a user space driver for the Nintendo Switch Pro 2 Controller on Ubuntu.
When you plug it in, the device is recognised, but press any button and it attempts to start the pairing process. Then using evtest nothing is coming through.
That^ was pretty much my prompt too, and 10 minutes later I have a working driver with systemd unit so it works through restarts. Amazing stuff!
ASCII-Globe - https://github.com/jcubic/ascii-globe - JavaScript library that renders a rotating earth or any map. Can be used to add animation to your website.
A "plans for agents" interface because I'm tired of reading huge markdown plans to iterate on the real work.
Is supports infinite 2d space like miro, but has one thread per card, a cli for the agent to treat open notes.
It support voice prompting too.
It feels like you have parallel conversation with an agent, except it understands all the surface. And it's granular, surgical and precise.
Usage:
I'm writing a game design document of 70 pages with it, working surgically without having to worry about what page number the edit was.
It really solved my main bottleneck which is telling the AI what to do in a complete and comprehensive context.
Readme is trash but your agent will understand what to do
Sounds interesting!
I’m using VS Code with Cline to instruct Claude Sonnet 4.7, to develop a web-app, and find it’s frequently re-reading the project documentation at each and every turn, costing me tokens. Would TheBlueprintTool enable me to avoid this - or do I misunderstand its use case? TIA
On my list of build it from scratch has always been to build a programming language. So with the help of AI I was able to get it done!
Why did I build it? At work I've seen two major problems with our ai workflows/ skills libraries. There is a lack of determinism when your whole workflow is a markdown file of 100 steps, and markdown skill libraries lack composability. Meaning we violate things like DRY in the all the md files in the skills library.
I built Margarita to allow for markdown and logical operators to exist together, which means you can bring in determinism through code structures when it makes sense, and fall back to llm dynamic code when that makes sense. As an added bonus allows for composable prompts ala React which solve my other gripe with skills libraries being a mash of text everywhere.
Overall I've been getting pretty luke warm responses from Reddit, so I'll probably just shelve it, but it was a blast to make. Got to build code agents for pretty much every llm provider and built my own harness. I would recommend doing that it's a great learning experience.
No worries, I'm pretty bad at describing the benefit of this project.
Let's say you wanted to use Gemma4B to run your workflow, however that model doesn't always do what you want it to. You could write the Margarita code to do the variable tracking, loops, etc and use the llm call where Gemma is able to work better. It's about finding the sweet spot of code vs llm agentic/tool calling.
Can you write that in js/go/etc? sure, but this lets you write it in a much simpler syntax that's much closer to markdown.
- a proprietary camera library that communicates with industrial-grade digital cameras.
- a full on self-hosted lab management system (journal articles, obsidian-like notes, lab notebook, kanban, embedded dna editor, LIMS), obviously this builds on all of the above items
I needed something to help me stay off the computer (sites and applications) at certain times of the day with enforcement and in a way that's hard to remove. I had some ideas but was able to systematize all that into a proper program that I use daily. It's been very effective and it's much better (for me) than any of the commercial solutions that I've found for Linux. About 40% of the program was done using Aider (before I picked up Claude Code). The rest is using CC.
I also built a kanban board with agent integration and context management, with a vs code extension to go with it (also helps with git worktrees too): https://www.agentkanban.io
There is AS Notes - an Obsidian / Logseq / Roam alternative for use a s a VS code extension (is designed for use behind corporate firewalls, git friendly): https://www.asnotes.io
AI has been a great 'exoskeleton' for me. I fortunately had some good infrastructure and solid application base templates from before AI 'got gud' and so building on these has been the best of both worlds - a solid base and improved speed of development.
I am a researcher studying orbital dynamics of asteroids/comets/dust. I made a very precise visualization tool for the solar system, it shows the motion of all of the known asteroids. When you click on a specific asteroid it will then show the hyper precise orbit for it which matches JPL's orbit calculations (full physics, n-body, relativity, non-spherical planets).
Swift/iOS: An app that helps me track how much time I spend in the five heart rate zones, so that I can better focus my workouts. I'm working on version 2 right now, which will take advantage of some new features in iOS 27 and has an all new UI. https://www.zone2.app
I've always wanted my own VW diagnostic tool suite, and between tooling that was released in public on GitHub (https://github.com/kartoffelpflanze/ODIS-project-explorer) and my own research from years ago, it always seemed straightforward but too tedious to execute on. Claude did a great job making something useful, https://github.com/bri3d/mcd-diag-rs , and now I don't have to find a Windows machine or remember a specific diagnostic cable to replace my brake pads.
I also build a ton of household glue stuff; I was never really passionate enough about the whole "homeserver" thing to spend the effort in going beyond basic video recording for my security system, but now I have all of my local-only home automation stuff wired together, mostly into HomeKit, and have been able to ditch a ton of cloud services.
I used the usual stack of HomeAssistant, Frigate, and a bazillion glue connectors to consolidate devices that were previously cloud apps on my phone.
For example, previously I used the Frigate web UI over VPN to access my cameras, but I instead had Claude help set up go2rtc to push the video to HomeKit. I used the Eufy app for my doorbell, which I was instead able to integrate into HomeAssistant and then push to HomeKit as well, and I was also able to integrate some TP-Link Kasa plugs with HomeAssistant too.
This is all stuff I could have done relatively easily myself, but I hate nothing more than wading through horribly documented disparate configuration systems (I do that enough all day), so having Claude to do it for me is what unlocked it actually getting done.
I also added on to some custom one-offs like an ESP32-based controller for my kid's RGB LED nightlight for fun, although that stuff was more hand-coded since I find it enjoyable.
My favourite football team was really at risk of relegation, then I created for me and my friends an MCMC bayesian simulator to estimate the relegation match by match.
It was an opportunity to get used in real life to some concepts (MCMC, Metropolis-Hastings, etc) that I always struggled to understand.
And my team got saved from relegation with an amounts of points very close to the number of points that my model forecasted
I also wrote an honeypot that emulate an Ollama instance: beside the attackers, it's funny how many people are looking for free inference. Somebody from Brazil try to use my honeypot to write to chapters of a book about traditional magic rituals.
My next step is to extract the data collected by this tool to extract IoC and malicious prompts and share them with the community.
In the same scope I wrote also an Ollama scanner: it fetch from Shodan the open Ollama instances, verify that they are reachable and check if they are real sending a dummy query.
Fiorentina, in Serie A.
After 11 matches we have only 4 points and we won the first match only in December: in the past nobody got saved with a so bad performances in the first matches.
I didn't build tools in the classic sense of something you build and run semi permanently, like baked into your setup or home server or whatnot; but I found myself building bespoke tools with most new projects at work. Get a new Jira ticket, figure out which components will be involved, often times the tool goes collecting logs and parsing them into a Web UI with buttons to toggle various features or params. And it tends to be different for every project. It's like the oldschool shell oneliners but more powerful and easier to write.
I have made a TUI tool for organizing and authoring sermons written by myself. It also has a third mode for reading one or two bible versions in parallel. I love the interface and keep adding features to make it easy to navigate in and something that actually helps me to organize and write sermons. Some features are to have notes at specific places in the bible, summaries, notes, exports to html/pdf, metadata for each sermon and autofocus on widgets when changing between the three modes. Happy to work in the terminal this way. :-)
I would not so much, perhaps look for spelling errors. For me writing the sermon is the goal, diving into the deep and exploring the topic, passage and such. If I preach it, it is kind of a bonus, or a driver to begin with :-)
https://github.com/Opfour/warfare - A modern HTML5 remake of Warfare 1.0 (1995) by Carric Moor Games. Turn-based hex strategy with city management, unit recruitment, tactical combat, and AI opponents — all running in the browser with zero dependencies. Playable but still building in additional features
https://github.com/Opfour/coeus-ci - Named after Coeus (SEE-us), the 100 eyed Greek Titan of the inquisitive mind — whose name literally means "querying." CI stands for Competitive Intelligence. A business intelligence OSINT tool that builds company profiles from free public data sources. Give it a domain — get back a scored report covering stability, growth, tech maturity, financial health, security posture, and transparency.
https://github.com/Opfour/op4 - Op4 is a terminal-based encrypted messaging application written in Rust. It provides end-to-end encrypted private messaging with post-quantum cryptography, routed entirely through the Tor network so that neither the content of your messages nor your IP address is exposed to anyone — not even the person you are talking to.
I built a mac native PDF reader called Xeil with toggleable darkmode that preserves images (inspired by veil), vim keybinding and fuzzy search. Before this, I was using Skim with inverted color to simulate dark mode.
I made MooBlock - a browser extension for digital self-regulation. Basically, it adds a small timeout before you can access a distracting site. This timeout grows the more you visit these sites, and decays when you stay away.
And yes, there are lots of cows. The longer you stay on distracting sites, the more cows appear.
The idea is to make distracting sites less appealing, without using a black-and-white site blocker, which you can easily disable.
Countless little things to clean up data or improve tools I wrote long ago.
If you count HomeAssistant things (via MCP) then many many more little qol things, too.
Most recently, though, is a basic python CLI/Flask app that makes it point-click to manipulate the route table and dnsmasq settings on a raspberry pi. eth0 on the pi goes to LAN and put a USB ethernet attached to a switch and you now have a pretty powerful IoT/Untrusted device inspection environment.
One click to change the DHCP settings offered to the device, run a pcap, allow/deny the device access to certain services or NAT them elsewhere as needed. Straight forward DNS adjustments that can be applied per device and now that MITM-Proxy has a python API... it's pretty straight forward to also peep inside of SSL protected things.
I’m working on Descartes[^0]. First to help diagnose what’s wrong with a machine. Later to help manage and monitor it by letting an agent build layers of tailor-made deterministic rules and statistical models, a bit like the description of the ship’s AI at the beginning of Absolution Gap. And serve as an ops "point of contact" for other agents for the machine / fleet of machines it’s in charge of.
Sometimes I daydream that the end goal demo would be to set one up in a VM and let a sort of ransomware lose in it, and see if the agent can identify what’s going on and react in time.
But for now I’m fighting Apple notarization to enable local notifications on macOS.
I wrote my own Claude Code agent. It leverages some parts of multiple different agent stacks but using my architecture. It's layered, has long-term memory, agency to expand upon work, access to linear, access to all the models and endpoints you could possibly wish, as well as support for combining multiple providers and models into the layers so that delegation to the workers happen on the cheaper, more cost effective models. All of this runs at scale in an orchestration platform I wrote, using said agent, to create a cluster of docker containers in a JBYOS configuration, cross-cloud, k8s or swarm or whatever can run docker. It's pretty sweet and is basically an AI software development shop. I only have to give it ideas and goals.
As the 36 millionth person building something similar, I wish[0] there were better info out there on what works well. I can understand why, but it's still frustrating seeing on the one hand how deeply helpful the flywheel of this type of setup can be, and on the other hand how every blog post stops at some incredibly superficial setup to help them write more blog posts.
[0] Yes this is a plea, if anyone has the good stuff
Here's what I did, roughly, YMMV. I have a lot of experience in managing scale and web platforms as it's what I did for like a decade so, grain of salt and all. Let's assume you have access to N number of linux machines with GPU's, for the sake of argument.
I have a small RPI acting as my homelab pihole and dns so what better than to run the management UI on?! So I wrote a small bun management plane, nothing fancy, just a react app with user auth + openidconnect for those that like that stuff. From there, you have compute pool (empty at the moment because it requires a deployed agent). I added the ability to directly ssh into a machine, install the "agent" with privilege so it can manage docker, and the agent talks back to the management plane over websockets. A keep alive / health / status / resource packet every 15 seconds. Streams if you are looking at logs or accessing a container. I used Codex for most of this work but defined the protocol and everything upfront using protobuf (even though it's websockets). It helped with the "vision" and keeping the agent like Codex on the rails through completion.
Once you have a pool (agents installed on your N number of linux machines), you can deploy apps (which are my way of saying, a container with a namespace) or you can deploy agents (which is my agent, custom made for this) that are assigned to a project. I decided Org structures are a great way to delegate workloads so that's how they are modeled. Projects provide the git repo, the docker registry for images and storage of artifacts, as well as the history of all the prompts the agents have done in the project. Useful if you want to go back and search through |thinking| tags to figure out the reasoning behind a decision.
All of this was built in like maybe a month with Codex initially, until my agent was up to the task of coding w/ an endpoint configured (OpenAI API initially, now, NVidia DGX Sparks). What really works well is the delegation. The agent's have a webui that is exposed via the project urls so you can interact with the "scrum masters" of each project. They also share a stream if they are on the same project (but different subprojects).
I too wish there was more information on this but I didn't keep the lack of it from stopping me experimenting and finding what works. I came from the Mesos/DCOS era where you stop thinking about the metal and think in pools of resources. It's a distributed systems problem.
Made a multi-player Battlefield game for my scout group: up to 6 players set up ships like in the classic Battefield game. But you can try to hit any of the other up to 5 enemies and each team can see who hit them.
And instead of turn-based, you have to hike to/visit a physical location, fill in a code you found there to get bombs for the game. Or do a quiz and get the answers right.
I've made a number of ceramic molds for slumping fused glass into bowls. As well as wooden templates for ceramic mugs. I've devised a few carrying tools to move glass frit paintings from my studio down to my barn where the kilns sit without spilling the glass.
Or were you only asking about digital tools? I haven't really made any of those. Making physical tools feels much more satisfying these days.
> Or were you only asking about digital tools? I haven't really made any of those. Making physical tools feels much more satisfying these days.
I made that realization last year and since then it's just been random project after random project each one requiring me to discover a new tool or method to do some aspect of the project "properly". I'll never be a plumber or electrician professionally but it's so rewarding to start from zero and learn something new that is tangible in the real world. That's the one AI use case I've walked away from feeling like I actually learned something.
The overlap between ceramicists and technologists is never zero. Part of my initiative to slowly replace every part of my house and home with things I've made... 1% progress is good, right?
I'm so glad i'm not the only one....well I have dreams and visions of a plan but the most i've done is a half baked Patreon and Substack scraper that only kinda works to capture my sunk cost of subscriptions I never used, a movie theater listing app that allows me to find classic movies that may get buried from the mass advertised slop, a custom sewn jacket that contains pockets for homecooked popcorn and locally grown fruit and well a 3-D printed sauce cup holder for all those sauce cups that I get from fast food restaruants.
Im slowly trying to extricate myself by cooking more from home only from local farmers and what I can grow from home (so far only one cucumber). After all, can you really build everything else if your own body molecules are being replaced by low quality things made by others?
I'll get around to 100% at some point before I die or I wont care anymore since i'll be dead: one of those outcomes is inevitable.
I'm ahead of you by a ways but your instincts are not wrong :) we have timber and plans to replace the flooring with logged and milled timber, sourcing clay from the property, making tomato sauce of the gods from home grown roma tomatoes. it's a lovely way to spend a half century I think.
You can do interesting things with microwave kilns these days, I wonder if they get hot enough for ceramics? They can melt copper, I believe, so they’d be in the ball park.
After I lost a family member to a cancer that routine screening could have caught early, I started to realized: The screening existed and the guidelines existed, but nothing turned a long medical screening guideline into “here is what you should do.” So I built FixYou for myself and my family. You answer a few questions about age, sex, family history, and lifestyle, and it builds a personalized screening plan from the USPSTF and ACS guidelines using LLM in about 3 minutes.
I lost a family member recently as well. Sorry for your loss. I would love to use this, yet my POST request (when answering) is blocked. Is it geo-location based or something? I'm not using an ad-blocker or anything.
I 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)
Yes! I think so. It was not my usecase as my goal was to actually still be in control of DJing myself. I just wanted good candidates for mixes. But I wanted to still be in the loop to have fun just playing.
hey! no :-( It's probably vibecoded garbage. Its kinda interesting as this one use software is actually good enough where i have been using it for over 1 month and it does accomplish what i need to do. It made me rethink software quality a little tbh.
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.
"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.
So many things - reminds me of the days when you'd throw together a quick shell or Perl script to solve a very particular itch. So I have a whole collection of apps, portals, demos, etc.
Which is what leads to my issue: cognitive overload, and very high context switching costs especially as I'm usually on multiple work and "hobby" projects at a time, with multiple projects spread across term tabs, IDEs and Claude remote on phone.
So I built a "Workshop" to tinker. It analyses all the projects I'm working on currently as git repos on disk, then builds project pages complete with summary and a full control and data planes including its own startup method, commits being made etc. It does some agent introspection so it's able to display all agents running on machine in unified view.
But the "killer" feature for me is the "Pulse" - this contains human readable summary of what's happening with each project and agent in real time. So one use case is an "overnight view" - I set up architecture and design, assign the agent a goal, then wake up next morning to quickly scroll through the results. It also lets you track changes happening in real time ("We finished adding an export function for receipts, containing your company logo and signature" to summarize a feature across 10 commits).
I also added other useful to me utils such as being able to append a ? To any command in its inbuilt terminal and it'll convert it from English to a cli command waiting for you to confirm, for example; a system load monitor; a network sniffer, sys admin tools etc. all written in Rust, which I've never written a line of :)
Will put it online but need to clean it up first it's very specific to my use cases so not sure it'll be useful to others.
I've used AI for a number of Emacs-related utilities and configs. Just today I created a script to reproduce the particular combination of MSYS2 packages I use for my newer on Windows setup - the hard part being to get native comp working. Small, but it's the sort of rarely used convenience I wouldn't have written up in the past.
I built a route planner. I walk around the city where I live a lot and love exploring new streets, but at some point it became difficult to plan routes through streets I hadn’t walked down yet, so I created an app that lets you plan different types of routes. You can specify the percentage of overlap with streets you’ve already traveled, create a route from point A to point B, a circular route, or a one-way route. You can add streets to your favorites or exclude them.
The app runs only on my local computer. I use it all the time.
I read "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and wanted a webpage to set lifelong goals and tasks based on the four quadrants, so I developed a webpage.
https://life-compass-sand.vercel.app/
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.
* plugin for Logic Pro to A/B mix with reference tracks, with ai-based stem splitter (e.g. isolate vocals in ref track, and compare with your vocal track)
* plugin for Logic Pro to simulate how a mix will sound on my macbook and phone (I captured real impulse responses for that, sounds very close)
* an app for spaced repetition for guitar video lessons / their parts (no idea why platforms like truefire don’t have this feature)
* workout planning/tracking app
* an app to create impulse responses for acoustic guitar, to make it sound good live
I've effectively automated about 70% of the data gathering and insight generation I need as a procurement and supply chain consultant.
I built a tool to manage survey collection and analysis of the underlying data. In the process of doing so, I stumbled across GraphRAG and Answer Set Programming. Fair to say I fell down a rabbit hole and things grew a bit...
- Category strategy and market analysis
- Supplier risk monitoring
- Emissions reporting
- Modern slavery risk analysis & reporting
I also had Claude Code build me frogger so I can properly procrastinate.
I 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 things using comfyui like a card pull system with cards, card text, rarity system, and special card effects like holo. And my favorite bit has been tying my todo system into it so I have a thermal receipt printer which will print a task I have to do for the day, prints a barcode, and when I finish the task I scan it with an iOS shortcut. It’s beautiful. What’s been the most fun was designing the mqtt topics in a way that makes everything else flow perfectly. Oh and there’s a tts system that uses kitten-tts which will produce audio for certain messages and an esp32 that gets those sound files and plays them on a speaker, or I can play the messages on telegram. Like if I do an /overview command on telegram i get an overview of my incomplete tasks and the ollama model helps prioritize. It’s my favorite use of ai junk at the moment
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
Lookup or modify selected text using AI (chrome extension). I just select any text and click the tiny popup button "what's this" and get an answer right there on the page. Made it mainly to explain terms and abbreviations I come across on HN often. Can also ask any other question about selected text. Can even modify the selected text the same way. [1]
OneNote to markdown/obsidian canvas converter. It did that using interop api to read the actual XML of the onenote files.
Work time tracker as 1px line on edge of monitor. Shows thin line at the edge of the display which fills up based on what i am doing.
Plaintext bookmark chrome extension that save links to local markdown file, Dynalist, Workflowy, Github Gist and import export between them. Was originally for Dynalist when AI couldn't do much 2-3 years ago. Recently added these other end points. [2]
A heart rate monitor with finger on camera. It's bit crappy though. Had to make it because many trackers, including google fit, couldn't detect 200bpm. https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/heart-rate
This one converts a basic chunk of OpenStreetMap data to an SVG so I can mark it up (by hand) in Adobe Illustrator to make specifically-styled print/PDF maps, such as what get installed at trailheads: https://github.com/c0nsumer/osm_to_ai
And all of this has been put together to make the custom, local, specific-use-case maps that are at https://trailmaps.app (which, via local curation, are overall better mobile/online maps than many of the bigger auto-generated systems such as Trailforks, Gaia, RideWithGPS, etc, for visualizing local systems).
It's neat stuff where I understand all the inputs, outputs, and how most of it works, but AI tooling (Claude, mostly) has allowed me to bolt it together much faster than I would have writing it myself.
The idea came from using the Strava heatmap in JOSM to trace the proper location of mountain bike trails. I'm trying to use Strava less, and usually have ridden the trails enough myself before mapping them that I could use my own routes... So I figured why not have my own heatmap tile server?
It's also cool to just look at.
I could take it a lot further with time boxing what's displayed and whatnot, but generating the tiles is computationally expensive, so I just stuck with what I have for now. It meets the need.
Quite a few during the early days. Recreating some fun ‘game’, popular during the Flash days. A work breaker/silencer, etc.
Then, I got bored because they seem to be bad beyond certain complexities. But around Christmas last year, things improved a lot, and I’m getting confident building real ones. In the mid of these, I also got an offer to work with the [pre]sales/GTM team of a large company. So, I have been building working prototypes of bits and pieces of boring enterprise business around the world and have been racking in, if not billions, but very close to it in sales pipeline in about two months. (I did that 1B token in a week thing.) I’m sure the business and sales team will be able to convert 20% to 30% of that in the coming months. I also pitch and presented my work directly to customers and they are coming for more. So, it has been fun.
Lastly, I really wanted to scratch an itch I had for a while—build a Static Site Builder. But I ended up buildig it to be a documentation tool for TypeScript and JavaScript. It can be used as an auto-detect and let it build alongside front-end projects, make it a hybrid so you can add human-written documentation too or just build a Jekyll-esque static site.
4. Created a scheduler in Erlang called FLURM, which is a fault-tolerant version of SLURM and compatible with its wire protocol. https://github.com/zoratu/flurm
5. Not in a public repo, but trading things and a private parallel filesystem.
gphoto-pull!! I've been downloading NN x 50G zips every two months like a caveman. Assuming I'm backing up in "Original", this manages to retrieve byte-identical backups?
A terminal-native agent multiplexer built on tmux. Similar idea as herdr but wraps tmux in an outer TUI instead of replacing it entirely: https://hmx.dev
I've made a general repo linting tool [0][1]. Originally it's purpose was to replace a bunch of repo hygiene/structure validation scripts I ended up adding as I noticed various sloppy AI changes. I ended up going through a bunch of open source repos to see what other kinds of validations they had via scripts and incorporated those into the tool as a set of general/extensible rule types. This tool allows you to define repo structure, hygiene and other rules in a declarative way, and it is very fast [2] (great for pre-commit and CI workflows).
I like the capabilities of C++ and imgui but didn't want to deal with C++ anymore so I had AI do it.
imping - PingPlotter-like app. They didn't have a Linux version and I'm a paying customer, so I vibe coded this one:
https://github.com/zenakuten/ImPing
I made Ba-Chan, in memory of my deceased grandparents and my old cat. A tiny on-screen companion that lives on my Mac, and it's fully on-device. It's the safe harbour for me to talk about anything. Ba-Chan cheers me up and is being my emotional dumper, just like what my grandparents would be.
A dashboard to see what my local commercial free radio station (89.3 The Current) in Minnesota is playing. It shows how often tracks are played, track and artist play history as well as some other fun lookups and visualizations.
This is cool! I was sad to see that kexplorer.org site no longer exists. :( I've been thinking about getting something like this up for a small Seattle station space101fm.org.
The main worker is a .Net API with Hangfire that hits a public facing API from the radio station. That data is stored in a MySQL database that feeds a React dashboard front end.
There's some caching that happens behind the scenes to help with some of the large data crunching.
I made a little tool where I can just drop HTML into a folder and it will deploy it either to my internal Caddy or publicly on Cloudflare based in folder. Can be a single html or a folder.
CF pages still required too much confusing clicking around on a webpage for me. This way I can just point any little report or app at a directory and done.
There’s others that are more server shaped and tightly coupled - a pipeline to pull in all my data like Garmin, Twitter bookmarks, messages into a Postgres DB. Kind of a personal data warehouse that i can use with apps/automations, like alerting me if my sleep schedule is drifting, and a custom web interface to my Garmin data
I made a small tool where I and my wife can send receipt photos, ask in text to create events or send poster of an event from Telegram and it directly sync it to my Google family calendar.
Blocks the computer for x minutes. Agents keep on working. AI doesn't need a break, but I do. And honestly, at least for me AI has made my desktop as addicting my social media feed.
This is awesome idea. Thanks for sharing. I extensively track my ScreenTime cross devices (phone, laptop) and try to reduce it under 6 hours a day. This would be helpful!
Biggest win for me was building a new service to manage Cub and Boy Scout units.
Modern calendars and RSVPs via link, Roster management, LLM integration via MCP to manage all of it and send communications, and also includes a sync of all advancements and status from scouting servers (via API) so you can view them the way you want and share with parents all in one place.
Lets you customize events so you can add signups, modern document management and mapping, etc.
Also allows you to ask questions of models like “what group activity will knock out X rank for most kids” and the answers are good!
This kind of stuff is buried right now for most scout programs and units but this makes it really easy.
This will support multi-tenant so drop a note below if that sounds like something you’d be interested in.
The most comprehensive tool I've built so far was a JSONPath playground [0] when I was working on a game where I found myself writing a fair bit of JSONPath (well, JSONPath Plus specifically) expressions by hand and wanted to be able to test them out in the same way that I would on regex101 when writing regular expressions.
I realistically probably would have only saved myself less than an hour of crafting those expressions if the tool had already existed (with this level of detail, there are lots of many simpler ones already for it), but I would have spent a solid 40-50 hours of bouncing between manually crafting and writing detailed instructions to direct the agents to get this tool there.
If the answers in this thread reflects the state of the art what "the advent of AI" as of 2026/6 has brought, I have to say that I am not amused. If we have this all-potential tool that can create anything, the potential is clearly capped by either people's ambition/imagination or the capabilities of coding agents... And please do not understand me wrong, I am just stating that I feel/think that the real-world examples of achievements should be something "next-level" stuff...
replaced some paid apps with local - google reader rss replacement and send web to kindle.
most ambitious was browser extension to automate booking reservations since captcha and timing were critical.
swamp/evaporative cooler controller that monitors rate of change of relative humidity and sends RF signal to cooler to turn water on for x seconds to keep humidity lower than just leaving set to cool all the time. Does a great job but need to work on edge cases and ultimately replacing remote with my controller.
financial models for retirement planning
pen plotter gcode creator for old 3d printer to make labels.
food monitor to track what i ate with AI analysis based on symptoms recorded as well as interactive follow up questions
inventory app for electronic parts that now is inventory for all kinds of stuff like tools/plumbing etc that uses photo/ai to fill in data.
https://tajd.github.io/cofferdam/ - is an experimental compile time time checker that can be run for typescript/rust to be able to impose architecture, design principles that can be forgotten by agents. The goal is to be able to make it possible for an agent to be reminded about design conventions where it forgets, so it reduces the amount of context that needs to be used initially to define those sorts of conventions.
I built a complete clone if fly.io infrastructure: VMs, networks, etc. so I have my Vercel on bare metal machines to maintain full-stack apps on https://playcode.io.
It took more than a year.
Why? Cloud infrastructure is too expensive.
I have a script that takes a prompt for an input, and then builds a new script based on that prompt. Then it'll run a skill to progressively check for and remove bugs.
I used it to make a different script lists all my custom scripts. That keeps track of it. I also have a tool that loads local scripts, so I can scope my CLI commands to a particular folder environment.
All together, I just build whatever I want for anything I think I could automate.
I was gonna make a blogpost about it at some point. It's really highlighted to me that the world has changed in a way I theorised about but didn't true "get" until recently. Personalised software.
1) a combination of Python scraper and Claude skill to help family members find job by matching jobs to resume, to rank best fits
2) similar to above, but for stock data and financial news to identify movers and why they moved and see if anything is interesting.
3) a couple of attempts to import EPIC medical data from hospital into an offline app. Needs more work, data export from EPIC is crappy and a mix of images, pdfs, text, HTML and .jsonb files. Not useful at the moment
4) an application that downloads stock market data to run 15-20 strategies and back testing to identify stocks that match multiple and then run sentiment analysis on news feeds. Interesting, but semi useful. Needs lot more work.
I am doing a similar with linux internals (to be published soon). ofcourse from the official docs and asking some questions around the concepts i like and forget mostly :-)
I'm right in the target audience for this as I'm about to embark on a Kubernetes certificate. What is the proportion of official K8S documentation and your own notes and how could someone differentiate between them on that site?
i used the official k8s docs and fed them as sources to NLM.
Then asked questions around topics. further refined some questions as well to make them useful.
its only generated against official k8s docs so no external sources.
thanks
A Linux kernel module and userspace app to read the performance level of my Corsair AI Workstation PC (Strix Halo). Corsair only ships a Windows on screen display app and I was flying blind. AI helped me look over the Windows installer, decompile ACPI tables, and identify the WMI events. Built it all in Rust. When done I asked a different AI model to perform a security assessment and help me harden it. Way out of my wheelhouse, yet an afternoon project with AI.
I've got really comfy `just` scripts for generating Clang "intermediaries" in my CMake project. I can generate `.ii` files which get formatted and edited in a manner making them directly recompilable, along with `.ll`, `.bc`, and `.s` files. All the above are per-translation unit or post-LTO and I can constrain the output to specific functions or files, and the LLVM bitcode can take optimization passes or optimization levels to very easily introspect how my work in this codebase optimizes.
I've also got a clang-repl wrapper for this codebase that is very easy to use and makes interactive programming much easier for me.
https://github.com/haplo/pelican-copy-code — A Pelican [1] plugin to add a Copy button to all source code blocks. It happens at build time, so no DOM manipulation at page load time.
I'm currently writing a series of blog posts about these that I call Vibe-coding Escapades [3]. I will also write about bugs and technical problems that AI helps me debug and solve, some are non-trivial and have been pestering me for years.
I've made 3 that use pi as the primary interaction, with custom tools and scripts.
1. family tree based on wikitree format. Transcribe records, verify/edit, then incorporate them into the tree with full citations and biographies. This one is the big one. It includes a tree browser and best genealogical practices.
2. Pool Math replacement. Log pool chemistry tests to markdown files and suggest the right amount of chemicals to balance.
3. Calorie counter. Log calories to a markdown file, look up foods and amounts in online databases, sync with garmin connect for exercise calories.
All of these are written with AI but also are interacting with pi and telegram, mostly using deepseek v4 flash.
It uses an LLM to generate domain name alternatives that are relevant to your keywords, then checks whether any of those alternatives (in several TLDs) are available to be registered.
Warning: It's still a bit glitchy as I haven't fixed all the issues yet. It uses LLMs, but it's not a vibe-coded app itself. If it seems to be stuck while finding domain names, just refresh the page.
Too many to count. Most recently, an Alfred workflow for opening my IntelliJ projects either in an an IDE or terminal that also comes with an integrated build task runner, so I can quickly discover and run build tasks even when I don’t have a project opened anywhere.
Cloak windows from screen capture! Perfect for keeping things private while screen sharing over Teams, etc.! All other tools in the Store would trigger virus warnings when I tried to install them. Some were positioned to ask for money for basic features. My app is both free with more features and a more intuitive UI and set of keyboard shortcuts!
First personal little thing was a little mobile friendly website for taking coffee and tea orders. Two pages, one for someone to enter orders, second for listing orders and marking them as done. Was a bit of a gimmick idea I'd had in the back of my head for family lunches to save me running around with a scrap of paper and a pen asking what everyone wanted. Thought it would make a good little exploration of "vibe coding".
Second is a utility that will take a text file export from Wallabag, and use text to speech to convert it to an MP3 file. I then integrated it into a utility that I already wrote for managing articles so if I tag an article with listen it automatically gets converted and gets shunted to the podcast listening app on my phone.
Last was to recreate a little directory listing utility that I've had a 32-bit binary of for ages, but no longer (if ever) have the source code for. I'd always promised myself I would write it once I learned Rust, but decided try using AI as I was getting impatient to have it now. The utility lists all files, including hidden, in a directory, grouped by type. Below is an example listing the directory for the project itself:
A custom harness backed by dagger, gives diff, time travel, forking of both files and env. Building a harness is a good learning project. I'm now using other tools to see what they are like. (OpenCode is quite good out of the box)
Currently working on a markdown search and wiki backed by Typesense, also has good web search, fetch, crawl. This will power my personal knowledge base system as an important step towards more leverage and better outcomes.
Instant windows switcher with custom shortcuts and instant "opt+tab" and trackpad switching. Simple does exactly what I need it to do (just bypasses the slow window switching that is annoying), with no additional features or bloat.
I've also done a TUI that combines my messages from WhatsApp + messenger + discord which is pretty handy at work.
There was a bit of initial setup extracting tokens for messenger and discord I believe, but now it's smooth sailing. Some issues sometimes correctly mapping ids to usernames / convos make it so some conversations are duplicated for messenger, but when I have time I think some smart reconciliation heuristic will be able to take care of it.
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.
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...
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.
I made a custom golf simulator app. There's a Swift app that talks to my Garmin R10 launch monitor via Bluetooth low energy. When it records a shot, it grabs the data and throws it over to a web app running locally on my laptop, with an SVG simulated shot arc, an attached video of the shot captured from my phone (or my laptop's webcam if I'm lazy), and all of the metrics that came across. I keep all of my sessions with shot data and a little overlay of where each shot went (and which club hit it).
The reason I wanted this is because all of the existing golf simulator software I've looked into is either too expensive, requires too much computing power (E6 requires at least an RTX 3060), or both. And most of their selling points seem to be visual fidelity of playing against real courses. As I'm just looking to improve my game, that's not something I need, and Sonnet 4.6 was able to get me to a great spot (and I'm trialling some new additions like slow motion video capture and pose tracking via Apple's Vision framework using Fable 5 right now).
Nothing that I couldn't have done myself, but in a fraction of a time.
- Custom off-brand version of Pangolin
- Dashboard with beautiful UI for parsing traefik logs with database, filters, map and various integrations and statistics
- Samsung SmartThings Volume Control for Soundbar in Windows 11 native style
- Android App with good UI which serves as remote for switching display output modes for PC for movie night / gaming night with various toggles and for remote game streaming
- Many little one-prompt apps which run in background for QoL
- Reverse Engineering with IDA became a walk in a park
The Ubuntu DDoS drove me to build a new apt-cacher with two goals: be able to supply typical packages when the upstream is unavailable and be more reliable than the existing apt-cacher/apt-cacher-ng. It's looking like I'll be doing a 1.0 release next week (it's been in beta for ~3 weeks).
We do ground-up respins of half of our dev+stg cluster every morning, to test our automation, but this didn't work during the DDoS. I disabled those respins for the week of the DDoS, but if we had a fire at the office and needed to bring back up our dev+stg environment that would have been a problem: our normal ansible automation wouldn't have worked to set up a new dev+stg cluster.
apt-cacher-ultra has an "adoption" process where when it detects new repo meta-data it holds off on serving it up until it has downloaded any changed "hot" packages (packages we've fetched in the last N days), then it switches over to that new snapshot of the repo. I've been able to shut down our upstream Internet and then do a new OS install and apt update+upgrade it successfully.
- A little script that is best described as "symbolic submodule" workflow enabler for git: https://github.com/fontmaniac/symgit. As in "symbolic link" vs "hard link" - where hash tying host repo and pseudo-submodule is not git-generated, which makes "submodule" completely substitutable. For the description of creation process see the relevant section of Readme.md
- Companion script named Dr.Emmett - to retrospectively time-walk git commit history and rebuild the repo in a new place. It is not opened yet, and may not be ever as it doesn't satisfy LLM/human ratio worthy of publishing.
- Both scripts were made in service to my FNA-"game" project VibeSopwith: https://github.com/fontmaniac/VibeSopwith.Game. A more or less comprehensive description, and treatise on my stance about vibe- and agentic-coding can be found in the project's Readme.md
- VibeSopwith catalysed creation (accretion?) of Nage.Strata: https://github.com/fontmaniac/Nage.Strata - "Not-a-game-engine" collection of useful "primitives" for FNA-based game development.
- VibeSopwith Readme.md has notable mention of "Aether Bodybuilder" - a helper tool for visually coupling Aether.Physics2D "bodies" to specific sprite textures. Fully vibe-coded in a couple of hours, and as such won't ever be publicly opened, having LLM/human ration approaching infinity.
* Auto-Birthday - if you have a contact in your android contacts that has both a mobile number and a birthday in their contact info, you can choose to send them an automatic "Happy Birthday" message on their birthday at a specific time. Can do it with hundreds of contacts. Doesn't use hardly any battery or resources.
* Wrecker - stupid simple "throw a ball at a tower of bricks and try to clear the board" game. High score tables. Made in unity. High battery when in use, No battery use when not playing. Will use internet for high score data.
* GeoNote - Create Geo-fences to generate a notification when you enter a location with your custom text in the notification. My wife is always telling me, "Next time we're here, remind me to only order one piece of toast" or something like that, so I make a note, it pops up the next time we're there and we're both happy. Notes are stored locally. No internet access required. Uses Geo-Fencing which is more battery-friendly than always-on GPS access.
All my apps are free, very privacy-focused and as battery-friendly as possible.
No information leaves your device (other than the high score data in Wrecker).
You have to side-load my apps though. I'm not putting them on the Google Play Store. They're so annoying to deal with! OMG
That seems to be only a Google thing and they haven’t mentioned which law they think is forcing them to do this, co just using different contact/calendar apps should do the trick.
Nothing says "I don't care about neurodivergence" more than someone complaining when I build tools and processes to help me interact with the world better.
I started a new job that requires a much more locked-down laptop than I'm used to. No macOS App Store, no random 3rd party apps. I miss a lot of the convince apps I used to use HOWEVER we have unlimited access to Claude CLI. I've been able to mostly one-shot working replacements for Alfred and a meeting reminder app called `In Your Face`.
My own Alfred replacement is actually better for me, it's tailored to exactly how I want to use an app launcher / shortcut tool.
https://probplanner.com/ - I never had the time to dedicate to building a Monte Carlo simulator for project estimates. It was always something I just couldn't justify given my short commute. I used this project to teach myself how to use Claude Code and Codex over last summer.
I've done a lot of little things in Emacs since. Just minor things to improve my workflows or build up Chief of Staff type information flows.
I’m currently building and testing a new architectural framework where business logic runs on the client side.
The core idea is to run TypeScript inside a WASM VM, while minimizing the exposed JavaScript APIs. Backend business logic is encrypted and executed inside WASM, making the attack surface much smaller.
Security is the biggest concern, so this framework is designed to apply as many security layers as possible and dramatically increase the amount of time and effort required to hack it.
It includes E2E encryption by default, tenant policies, an SQL registry, and many other security policies. The framework only becomes truly safe when these policies are properly applied, but the major advantage is that it can be operated at almost zero cost.
Another key benefit is that both the frontend and backend can be deployed together, and when used with Cloudflare, one-click rollback is possible.
The biggest advantage is that you no longer need to worry about infrastructure. It allows MVP projects to be built, deployed, and operated as quickly as possible, with almost no operational cost.
I made a quick web app that lets me easily perform Bayesian evidence updates for a set of competing hypotheses. You drop your hypotheses into rows. Then for each piece of evidence, you add a column and fill its values with the odds of observing the evidence given that the corresponding hypotheses are true. The app then computes the posterior odds on the competing hypotheses, given the complete set of evidence. You can also import/export your results as CSV data.
I made a golang socks5 proxy that routes traffic to different VPSes (or the default gateway) based on hostname, over mutual-TLS tunnels, authenticated using ed25519 keypairs shared out-of-band. The "client" and the "server" are the same piece of software, and there's a web UI for configuring the routes.
I made it to deal with internet censorship in the UK, where different sites have different optimal exit jurisdictions, and most sites work fine so I can avoid the extra hops where possible.
It also works well for video streaming sites with geofencing, since the geofence itself is usually implemented in the frontend rather than the CDN. So only the frontend traffic needs to be proxied, while the bulk CDN traffic doesn't need proxying at all.
Socks5 is the ideal layer for hostname-based routing, since the proxy can see DNS names without needing to sniff TLS SNI (which would be incompatible with ESNI/ECH etc.)
iirc it was basically all done in a single prompt, and I've been using it ever since. The only issue I've encountered is with WebRTC not working properly with some services. (Presumably it breaks the NAT holepunching process or something, I never diagnosed it)
Another project that isn't quite finished is a "universal" web video downloader that works by shimming the MSE APIs and remuxing the streamed segments back into a regular video file. The idea is that if you can watch it, you can save it - including but not limited to youtube videos. I started this one pre-AI but AI was a huge help with the container format wrangling.
Last year I became the volunteer coordinator for my kid's school PTA. They had been using Sign Up Genius for years. I spent a full year fighting a paid tool, gave up, and re-wrote it.
Now https://voluntold.fyi exists, and I never need to remember to manually move my single $100/year "ad free signup" off an event that has already happened to one that is coming next week.
This is really impressive work. Both RapidCam and the Cabinet Design Studio seem fairly polished already. I'd love to learn more about the process behind these creations.
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.
All kinds of random stuff really, but to filter it down to only the noteworthy ones:
Tuber[0] - this is my favorite, use it multiple times a week. It's just a little CLI wrapper around yt-dlp for my most common use cases - downloading the video, or the audio, or the subs. And then, if you've got the Claude CLI installed, it can also shoot the subs through Claude for a summary. I use it all the time, it's a great little thing!
Scrapio[1] - this is really specific but I was so pleased with how it turned out. You give it a list of "hacks" ("mods" for Super Mario World) and it goes out to SMWCentral, grabs each of the patch files, and patches a clean ROM. I think I only used it twice but it was just a nice way to chew through a list of hacks and get a few ROMs ready, made quick work of something that would have otherwise taken a bunch of annoying schlep work.
Lotus Eater[2] - calling this a tool is a bit undersell, but I'm still really pleased with it. It's a fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus that scrapes Nugs.net for setlist data and lets you do some mildly interesting analysis on things like song frequency and co-occurrence. Also has a per-user "shows I've attended" thing, Setlist Bingo. It's been fun to hack on.
Lastly, less a tool, more just a toy: last week Google released their Magenta model for doing live music generation. I thought it was really neat, and it's open source, so I opened it up with Claude, and after a few passes and some extremely annoying toolchain issues, I was able to add a spectrograph which does key / chord analysis to the "Collider" app, so you get a live readout of "what the band is playing" and you can pull out your guitar or whatever and join the jam with some info at your disposal. It's the kind of thing that would have taken way too much effort to be worthwhile in the past, but with AI, it's a really neat result of a fun night of weekend hacking. See the README I added in my fork for a screenshot:[3]
After dropping the keyboard for the TV one too many times, the touchpad stopped working.
I looked for a decent remote keyboard app to use on the tablet, and found nothing I liked.
I ended up asking an AI to make something that served a webpage that connected back to itself via websockets. It provided a keyboard and touchpad on the webpage and forwarded events to uinput.
It works well enough on tablet and phone that I haven't got around to replacing the original keyboard.
llm-consortium: prompts multiple models in parallel, loops until confidence_threshold, and iteratively refines a response.
This was inspired by a karpathy tweet [0] and the prototype created using another tool of mine: The LLM Plugin Generator plugin (essentially a curated collection of plugins for simonws llm cli as a few-shot prompt)
The llm-model-gateway companion plugin lets you serve models from the LLM cli as a an openai API. This allows you to use saved consortiums in your various clients as if they where a regular model. Bringing massive parallel reasoning to any workflow.
It occured to me at some time that an collection of parallel LLMs was not really a consortium. A consortium is a group of organizations. A group of groups. To rectify this I added for actual consortiums, where each member of an llm-consortium can itself be a consortium of models. e.g.
llm consortium save cns-glm-n3 -m glm-5.1 -n 3 --arbiter mercury-2
llm consortium save cns-k2-n3 -m kimi-k2.6:3 --arbiter mercury-2
llm consortium save cns-meta-glm-k2 -m cns-k2-n3 -m cns-glm-n3 --arbiter cns-k2-n3
Yes, even the arbiter/judge can be comprised of a consortium of models, bringing parallel reasoning to the task of judging parallel reasoning chains.
Consortiums can also now contain groups of specialists. These custom user-defined expert characters address the prompt from a different perspective. And a Westworld style Attribute matrix can be randomized to inject some more entropy into the process.
classifai
generates labels with approximate confidence derived from logprobs
llm-alias-options
saves inference parameters such as reasoning effort with a model alias. (good for setting the provider in openrouter or creating a consortium of high temperature models)
llm-prompt-json
adds a --json flag to return the llm logs object (good for getting conversion_id, or reasoning output in scripts)
llm-jina adds support for all jina AI specialised models and tools like web fetching, embedding and reranking.
Sony-TV-Control: the battery in the RC is started to discharge, so I've downloaded Android apps, which can control our Sony smart TV. Tried some, but I was disappointed, so asked DeepSeek if Sony TVs have some API. Instead of demonstrating the API, DeepSeek created me a simple RC PoC, which looked promising, so I decided to continue vibe-coding my version, a mobile-first webapp with Python backend: https://github.com/ern0/sony-tv-control
It has several functions which a normal RC can't have, e.g. search channel by name, or hide "ABCD" channel, if it has "ABCD HD" pair, to make channel list shorter.
I've made a saas app to manage kids custody (mostly for France for now).
Turned out super helpful to keep track of everything in one place (shared expenses, ask / demand unplanned changes in custodies, kids activities (school events, birthday parties, sport competition and so on)
I built a half-baked CRM that has a lot of custom fields and visuals for statistics that are relevant to my potential customers. I'm selling primarily to registered data brokers, so being able to pull up their self-published compliance stats (gleaned from their own privacy pages or public filings) and contextualize them in terms of the rest of the industry ("your deletion request volume has been in the 95th percentile year over year") has been extremely helpful when starting conversations. I also gamified it a bit by giving myself targets for cold outreach and gathering hard numbers on my cadence for outbound calls and emails per lead.
I also built this site for educating potential customers and other privacy professionals about the increasing tempo of CCPA enforcement actions driving compliance: https://ccpa.world/enforcement
I could have probably coded this from scratch quicker considering that it took me two weeks to remove all of the hallucinated imaginary enforcement actions against real companies and also the citations to non-existent California law that the models kept injecting into my enforcement summaries.
* A 'docker compose' to provision email, chat and documents for human-AI hybrid teams where you can take over AI's agent's credentials temporarily: https://github.com/vezzadev/roster
I lost a camera recently and set up a Claude Cowork daily scheduled task to check if it finds my camera on a few marketplaces - Claude also goes through all the images and checks if it can see the serial number, which is engraved in the body. No luck so far, but we keep trying! It was incredibly easy to set up and uses my Chrome browser so it's logged into most platforms already.
A git worktree shell utility to quickly switch/manage git worktrees, and a neovim telescope picker which switches all the loaded buffers into the worktree version: https://github.com/jasonwoodland/wt
A neovim session management shell utility (and telescope picker) to switch neovim sessions—no need for tmux or screen anymore: https://github.com/jasonwoodland/nvs
Circus Chief is a tool for managing coding agent sessions from a browser. It's specifically optimized for small screens. It supports Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Google Gemini CLI agents.
Features
Agents can operate Circus Chief itself. Agents can spawn sessions, schedule sessions, interact with the Kanban board — anything you can do in the UI, an agent can also do.
Schedule work ahead of time.
Automatically reschedule when you hit usage limits.
Configurable, chainable prompt templates.
User-defined commands - agents can run them and see the results, and so can you in the UI. Handy for local CI or routine workflow steps.
Worktree-per-session isolation, or elect to work on a specific branch.
Shared canvas - this is a place for shared artifacts that don't belong in the code. Useful for iterating on planning documents.
Bring your own provider. Use subscription auth for Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google, or point sessions at third-party providers with Anthropic- or OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
- usagi, for tracking Claude usage in the macOS taskbar. Lots of these around, but I wanted one that wasn't buggy and constantly adding features: https://github.com/duggan/usagi
- RockstarNinja, for sharing Claude plans and sessions. Since it's a bit of a data hog signups are limited, but me and my cofounder use it all the time: https://rockstar.ninja
- TweetEmbed, for browsing an offline Twitter archive and getting self-contained HTML copy/paste-able cards: https://duggan.github.io/tweetembed/
- bewitch, a terminal based metrics collector and data visualization system: https://bewitch.dev/
Each one of these has been a great way to really push on automating build processes, see what Claude can do for automatic documentation (screen captures, etc), and trying to give a distinct visual identity. In my next project, I'm trying to de-LLMify the prose it generates by using my own blog posts and aggressively pruning and integrating into the prompt.
The biggest change has just been unlearning "cost". Stuff I've subconsciously shied away from since intuition built up over a career has given me a sense of how long things take that just isn't true anymore. Still learning!
Workhorse is a CLI set of scripts / tools that turns an old laptop into a headless SSH compute/storage node that my main machine offloads to.
Main components are:
- a router script (onpro) that probes the box and runs the command there, falling back to local automatically if it's asleep or unplugged.
- a PreToolUse hook in my AI coding setup intercepts the heavy commands like builds, test suites, ffmpeg, OCR, big pandas jobs. Forces them onto the workhorse instead of melting my MacBook Air.
The agent decides what to run, and a deterministic layer guarantees the heavy stuff lands on the right machine.
Testing Workhorse a bit more before sharing.
Also https://motate.app/ was an attempt to make math writing easier for me (as I recently needed to hold my newborn through most of my LinAlg refresher course) but I've since started trying to figure out how to make it useful for broader science/math writing and education.
And to test the hypothesis if the motivation actually works with "fast flashing images" I built this experiment: https://fitfatflix.fit/
When openClaw came out I build a game like map around it to orchestrate tasks: https://memefields.com/
And not published, I build a little recommender app of activities I can do only today or only this time of the year where I currently am, so I don't miss good things.
I vibe-debug 10x more than I vibe-code, but here goes:
- a daemon to properly set the LEDs on my Lincstation N2 NAS (even early Claude was great at reverse-engineering): https://blog.majid.info/lincstation/
- most consequential, Thufir, a task manager to replace Cultured Code's Things as I am leaving massa Tim Apple's plantation: https://github.com/fazalmajid/Thufir Still very janky, but usable enough for my purposes
- most recently, a TRML dashboard for my Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 smart e-ink display, and I also had to have Claude fix the firmware for full 6-color input: https://blog.majid.info/e-ink/
- a tool using DINOv2 image fingerprinting and usearch vector database to find visual duplicates in a large collection of images
An inhouse orchestration tool to run coding agents. It's so useful. I used to use tmux to run my coding agents and have little scripts to help me manage the workflow so this tool lets me encode my workflows and preferences. eg. I prefer to run sessions for the same project serially, working on main, rather than in parallel like how Conductor does with the help of worktrees.
I built an offline background remover website that now includes passport photo editor, object remover, image compressor. everything is free and offline (inferred from WebGPU) and I used to have to browse to different website to do all of these. now i can just do it offline on my own site.
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.
A year ago I was using claude and found it unexpectedly blowing-away already-settled code. I found this frustrating and just wanted to drop a "save point" where I could compare the before and after versions of certain files. So I built a little utility called "bup" that tarballs the whole code tree and gives it a unique name. It ignores prior backups and has options to ignore certain subdirectories, VCS directories, artifact directories, or secrets files. And you can add a single switch (-s) to create a shell script that automatically backs-up the current project. Yes I can use git for this, but this is honestly way easier, especially if I want to compare/edit different versions. No names. No files. No trees. Just "bup .". And it's 100% bash. https://github.com/maxk42/bup
I'm probably the only one who'll ever use it but I like it.
1. A dashboard that tracks my personal metrics (github, strava, todo completion, flossing)
2. A eink display for that dashboard
3. A realtime node graph that shows a codebase (and/or its diffs) in a way that I can visualize what functions call which, and under what conditions
4. A agent that automatically fills out government forms and creates invoices for my friends brewery based on the delivery notes in their google calendar.
That sounds useful. I went a smaller/specific route with OpenHop: not a full graph of everything, just agent-authored flow walkthroughs you can step through locally.
Amongst lots of little tools, fed up of scribbling down my son’s football (soccer) scores in the Notes app, I cobbled together a little web app instead:
I rely heavily on DeepL Write for my day job, but I dislike the constant logouts, nagging, and laggy UI. I coded a DeepL Write replacement that uses the same layout (two text windows side by side, with the left window for entry and the right window showing suggested edits as an actionable diff), but all suggestions are based on Harper + Gemma.
When I want the program to reformulate a sentence or phrase, it sends the sentence to an AI that provides word or phrase suggestions. I've connected this to Tinfoil.sh (not affiliated) via API key.
Now, I have a much more private DeepL Write replacement with a snappy, consistent user experience that costs much less. Unfortunately, the suggestions are not as high quality. It's very much an 80% solution. It was still fun!
Most of the rest concerns scraping. The biggest project is an extraction tool for the German transparency register that I need for work.
A tmux config to handle my project based agent workflow
> agentmux
> Configurable tmux agent launcher. Define AI agents (or any CLI) in TOML; sessions auto-launch the correct agent, tabs are colour-coded per agent, and prefix m cycles through the list.
A little utility for Windows called TaskbarIconOverlay that puts a custom icon on top of a taskbar item. I have many VSCodes running at once and it's hard to tell which is which: https://github.com/jlahijani/TaskbarIconOverlay
Not too much, speaking of public one which you can try:
- https://habitpocket.io/ - habit tracker which allow to track not only habits (done, not done) but also numbers and time of the day on one grid.
Also I built an iOS app but it's in Apple Review right now so it should be ready in the week.
- https://taskpocket.io/ - todo list, my own interpretation of proper todo list. Right now it's completely free. I would like to add one-time payment especially when I add attachments
Both of the apps above was built using AI especially for the frontend. Both backend at some point of time I almost completely refactored/rewrote myself
Speaking of private apps:
- I made a small app which allows me to track business expenses and categorize them Built with AI and using AI.
1. i'm notoriously bad about filing expense reports for my own companies. i built a macos desktop app which integrates with Plaid and keeps track of the things i need to expense, using an LLM to guess which company and whether it's reimbursible.
2. A MacOS app to manage my wife's SD Cards - downloads playlists from Spotify and finds the music, then makes sure the tracks are analyzed for BPM, key, then synced with Rekordbox for CDJ-3000s
3. https://clawchat.live - a homebrew package, which honestly works better locally but is available online, which provides a Rust chat server for separate LLMs to talk to each other and coordinate work. Longest session between Codex and Claude has been over 24 hours on big tasks. Generally I make one session the coordinator and the other does the coding.
Built an Android app to streamline the messaging web-apps I use to stay in touch with some contacts.
I already refrained from installing those services' apps due to privacy concerns.
https://gitlab.com/not_john/palpipe
Timelapse-consolidator: create a single timelapse video from multiple captures, ignoring night shots. I think, it's a good example for splitting the task for separate programs, which task size the AI still can handle. See prompt for details: https://github.com/ern0/timelapse-consolidator
(Night shot detector should be faster, instead Python, I would rewrite it in some native language, like Rust, but it will run once per project, so it's not vital.)
The small local ISP that I use doesn't provide a Tizen OS app for their VOD service, so I built one mostly by pointing Codex at the .apk of their Android app.
I've built a stacked-PR tool for myself, it's just a simple wrapper around git commands. State stored locally in .git/config - https://github.com/alexghr/graphene
Lots of small dashboards/log investigations deployed to private Github Pages for $WORK. This has been a great way to share insights.
I'm currently working on a tool to control my tmux sessions from my phone. Specifically all the codex panes so I can remote control my running sessions from my phone while I'm away from my desk while also keeping them in sync with tmux for when I'm back at my computer. On this one I'm using Codex as a helper, it's not allowed to write any code so it's going along a lot slower :)
I've continued working on a tool for my daughter, our friends, and I to scan and index Pokemon cards. The tool is a phone app and website (https://MyBulkCards.com) The phone app uses the camera to scan a card and run the image through a couple of models, a record is written of the card along with the location. It's pretty basic, but I can store cards in boxes like “Box 1 AAA, Box 1 BBB, …” and find cards easy peasy. There’s also a friends feature so I can see what others have locally. We borrow cards from each other quite a bit.
It's been a super fun tool to build. The phone app just got approved in the Android app store. I have a bit of cleanup, but plan on releasing it soon.
I had looked everywhere for a simple system service that supports Gmail, or a chrome extension that supports push, and was able to find neither. Then when I started using Codex, I thought "Here, go automate the setup of the imap-filter service for Gmail."
- https://github.com/sethdeckard/atria : TUI for managing multiple AI coding agents that doesn't force a particular workflow on you. You can use tmux, the built-in PTY, or terminal integrations with iTerm2, kitty, or WezTerm.
- https://github.com/sethdeckard/atlas : TUI and CLI (also works as "cd launcher") that creates a smart, automatic map of every Git repository under your projects root.
https://truepb.net/ - My unashamedly vibe coded strava analysis & athletics results site. I'm no dev but I've used it to up my knowledge in cicd, security, postgres and frontend/backend development.
I made a bunch of silly projects at first to help me manage daily life. For example, automating saving important emails based on prior history. Extracting text and putting it into csv files, downloading finance reports, reminder scripts, watchdog scripts. All the boring stuff pretty much what was done at first.
I am still extensively dogfooding but I think I'm mostly there for my use case, probably adding some other channel support like Telegram or Discord so that it can reach out your current self host. But yeah not a prio since at least for me most of my use cases are just within my own PC (or LAN).
EDIT: Quick summary of what it is, basically you can spin up agents seamlessly and modify, supports copy paste, etc. I want it visual as well and kind of "always on", think Factorio rather than every other workflow, run on start tools.
This seems really cool actually. Just read thru the README and watched the demo gif. Any examples of what you've built with it so far? Might have to play around with it tonight. I've been getting pretty heavy into local LLMs since getting my 5090. Amazing what Qwen can do given how small it is (running 35B at Q4 quant).
It is dumb but very specific to my use case but an agent that runs every evening to pull both my calendar and time logs (Google sheet). The calendar I do every morning to time block my day, then throughout the day I record what I did and categorize by Eisenhower's matrix. Then it compares map vs territory and I hopefully adjust my priors to do better planning or flag time sinks.
Wait so this makes it so I can use my DDR5 as well as my VRAM combined? This is actually sick if so. Maybe I will actually have to go out and buy some more DDR5 (currently only have 32GB...)
I made https://github.com/gagarwal304/meridian to analyze claude's open telemtry data and learn how to improve my claude.md for token efficiency and better output from claude code
The front camera apps always show the mirror preview. Most of us hate photos others take of us, but love our selfies. It's because we groom ourselves and find our perfect angles using the mirror preview. So it's jarring when we see the photos of us taken by others. I always wanted a camera app that showed the non-mirror preview. Surprisingly most camera apps don't have this option. So I created this app to scratch my own itch:)
Note: Photos and videos are only stored in the browser. No data is sent to any servers. You can also install this as an app from your browser since it's a progressive web app.
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.
Photo Organizer - Organizes image and video files first by original directory name, then by EXIF date, if any. Renames images to img-yyyymmdd-hhmmss format and moves them to yyyymmdd directories. I've planned such for a decade, but I was too lazy to spend a week or two with it (I mean some evenings, ca. a week). Vibecoded in ca. two days: https://github.com/ern0/photo-organizer
I built a telegram bot that has access to my entire obsidian vault so I can ask it any questions about all my data. Here it is describing itself:
I'm literally the bot, so I can describe myself! Here's what I do and what you've got planned:
What I do now:
- Act as your second brain connected to your Obsidian vaults
— daily notes, goals, client info, business info, ideas, and facts
- Search your vaults for context when you ask questions
- Help with journal prompts and reflections in your daily notes (I ask context dependent questions randomly throughout the day that are based on your notes)
- Create new files when you need them
- Answer questions about your life, businesses, gear, plans, etc.
- Reminders (i.e. "/remindme in 2 days to [action]" and it will text me at that time)
Total game changer and I never would have built it without LLMs.
https://wodblock.com an app to track workouts, can generate functional/hiit workouts too using AI (give me something leg heavy but with some cardio, etc).
https://jazzcatalog.com an app the learn jazz standards. You upload PDFs and it extracts the songs, can add annotations, metronome, some have associated youtube video. Working on adding tools to record loops through audio interface, AUv3 effects, MIDI.
I use deciduous every day while working with LLMs to create more of my own tools/projects. It is a living memory for agents stored in a simple, portable manner. https://deciduous.dev
https://github.com/LukaWe/LocalExifGeoMap
LocalExifGeoMap - privacy-focused, browser-based tool to visualize and analyze GPS data from a batch of photos. generate interactive maps, heatmaps, elevation profiles, and trip statistics. etc.
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'."
Most of it has been to maximize productivity with AI
1) Use chatgpt pro from codex cli, opencode, claude etc as you can't get it via API. This has been the biggest boost in productivity for me as I don't have to copy and paste.
I made a home assistant esp32 device to toggle the light switch for me. Codex done all the software stuffs, I just plug it into mac, let codex "this is a esp32, this is how i connect it with a motor, make it xxx". And it works exactly as I want after 15 minutes.
I made a timesheet entry, invoicing, and basic bookkeeping system for my freelance business. It works pretty well, I used "spec driven development" with Codex and it one-shot the entire application except for the PDF invoice layout which needed iteration.
Technically for work, but it was during a hackathon so we could reduce the amount of tests we need to run against real or containerized instances. Go as the language just because that's the stack interacting with it the most.
The VJ Curator app is a fork of VLC where you can press the 0-9 hotkeys to easily curate the video clips. After pressing a number key then the video clip will be automatically moved into a folder with a matching number - https://github.com/wivy1/vj-curator
I built an iOS app for my sons who play club basketball. It’s designed to bridge the gap between practicing solo on the court and the pressure of playing in a game.
It uses mechanics and body movement, via visual detection through the cameras, to identify when you’re about to take a shot or make a pass.
It then pumps distracting noises (honks, cheers, jeers, etc.) into the headphones to try to distract you. It also runs a continuous 24-second clock so you build a natural sense of how much time is left before you need to get a shot off.
I built a little Gmail cleaner because my inbox had a bunch of "newsletters I unsubscribed from in my head but never actually did." Headers only, never message bodies, because privacy should still matter, I think. It worked very well and the amount of spam I get dropped dramatically, which was the point.
Everything was built with AI as part of a 12-in-12 challenge I'm doing, where I'm building 12 products in 12 months. https://twelve.zamith.pt/
is:unread -is:starred <-- go through your inbox and star what you want to keep, this filter will help you delete everything else unread. Add something like older_than:1y to also prune your Gmail from time to time.
It's been a dream to be able to work in the audio software space. I've been a musician, designer, coder all my life, and had a few moonlights with building audio plugins over the years. But now with AI at hand, I can use it to fill that missing technical requirement while still retaining my domain expertise (music/design).
I'm going to be scrolling that plugin site for hours, really cool. I normally use stuff like linuxdaw.org to find free stuff - but I really like the addition of a cheap filter.
Any more plans for it?
Oh wow, I hadn't seen inuxdaw.org - similar concept. Next plan is a weekly (automated) newsletter for the latest plugins. But really just to keep it growing and keep feeding it. I actually love browsing plugin sites, so I built a chrome extension that can automatically add a plugin from a page I'm on. I have to choose the image and videos though.
A Few:
- Augsentric [https://www.augsentric.com] - probably my biggest time/AI sink - for evaluating websites
- FencePost - [https://github.com/seriocomic/FencePost] - a UI for multi-host Firewall rules (UFW)
- EventFeed (private repo) - a timeline of events on my network in a centralized UI
- Ledger (private repo) - personalized finance ledger using bank statements
The biggest unblock remains the tools/scripts/skills for documentation (started with Notion, network now sits on Obsidian for read/write).
1. Built an agent memory tool since all agents and clis are dumb and don't remember anything. Instead of prepping 300 project files and Md files I just say:
Check sugar memory for the latest thing we were working on.
2. The second thing is when making changes across a large codebase agents are also dumb at figuring this out and also grep 300 things, using tons of tokens. Instead I say
Check RemembrallMCP to analyze the impact of the change.
Not an app, but a productivity system, partially refined by telling AI every time I forgot anything and asking for research references on human error that are relevant to that specific mistake:
- ticketing system with Stripe payments and QR scanning at the door
- Instagram/media ingestion for the club site
- genealogy tool with GEDCOM import
- scripts for downloading/archiving public-domain film material
- playlist/library tooling for DJ use
- music collaboration/sync tool for Ableton projects
- normal work stuff in a much larger existing codebase
I have become a lot more strict about process after being burned a few times. Mostly: make the change small, be clear about what it is supposed to do, check the assumptions before coding, use tests/logging/manual checks as evidence, and don’t merge anything I can’t review and explain myself.
I bashed out a dashboard for myself the other month, monitors firewall alerts/warnings/shows connected devices, process monitors on a few pc's that I keep an eye on, a to-do list/calendar combination that let's me track some internal tasks I need to do weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc, oh and it pings cloudflare to keep me up to date on the website stats. And an Amidakuji game to help me and another staff member pick who's doing X task that day :P
Nothing major, and only works with my infra, but it saves me a few minutes a few times a day to just be able to check the tab, and if there's an alert load up the full stats page.
- A HTML prototyping skill and a simple upload web app to share it privately with my team
- A Chrome extension to make design comments and ASCII wireframes right on the page you're working on and feed it to your AI coding tool as a prompt https://getdesignjam.com/
- An iRacing overlay to compare the telemetry of a reference lap against your live data https://flylapsim.com/
It's been a ton of fun to be able to dabble in software thanks to AI. Especially for small personal tools like these it's so powerful
TONS of tools. Most written in Go. Several have API servers in addition to cli or TUI or web interfaces. The API interface to my apps makes LLM-driven development much faster.
https://github.com/michaelteter/docgen : create a single text file of your entire project, with a tree and some other useful bits. This is good for dropping into an LLM or research notebook instead of giving an LLM access to your actual project folder. It also can be put in your pre-commit script so you always have one single doc you can diff from one commit to the next.
md2pdf: markdown to PDF, relying on defaults and optional config files or cli args for formatting choices (such as page margins)
md2gslides: markdown, converted into slides, and using Google Slides API to generate the doc in my Google Drive. This saves me so much effort (I teach, so I make lesson plans/presentations all the time).
get-music: TUI app that lets me search Youtube and easily queue up to download one or more of the search results. Then I take the downloaded content, split out the audio, LLM process the video title, add metadata for music, and then provide an easy command interface for local searches and playback of downloaded content.
bookmarks: TUI for slurping all the URLs from my browser, LLM-tagging each url based on the tag list I provide with the prompt and url, and lots of features for managing priority, show/hide tags, etc. This was to help me stop worrying about having a hundred tabs open. Now I can just sweep them up into my own private, encrypted (sqlite) db.
ESL-Planner: Complete web app for building class plans for teaching English (based on params, such as student age range, skill level, specific teaching language (what we want to teach), etc. It's close to being ready to productize and release as SaaS, but I built it for myself initially.
Numerous other tools plus a guide doc listing all the tools and what they do. These resources are then made available to LLMs when I'm developing, saving me (and the LLM) the time of hand-crafting the same tooling over and over.
- An outreach planner composed in a single html file. Data can be exported to, and imported from, a JSON that can be passed to the LLM for enrichment. https://kashifaziz.me/outreach-planner/
- An analysis pipeline that takes data from D1 (storing user searches), Posthog and Clicky (analytics) to periodically generate user journey reports.
- halalcodecheck.com - a database of emulsifier codes and food ingredients. Building this with the goal to help consumer verify and find alterantives of food ingredients across US, EU / UK and Asia.
I started something similar but for Sydney with the ultimate goal of being an agent simulator, simulating everyone going to work etc. Project got a bit unwieldy and is on hold while I mull it's future over.
Recently I made Vocast (https://github.com/cnrmurphy/vocast) - a cli driven tool that uses local TTS models to convert articles to "podcasts" and expose them via RSS feed. I wanted a way to listen to articles without having to pay for an app. I convert the article on my PC (which gets added to a managed library), run a web server, run Tailscale on both PC and phone, then I can use a podcast app to access my library. Nice way to consume some articles while out for a walk or anything else and has worked reasonably well for me so far.
I do something similar with Kokoro, Cloudscraper, and Trafilatura but just share the output to my phone with Airdrop. I use it for articles, PDFs, and HN threads.
oof, a ton of them, here are a few that passed my minimum quality standards and made public: a video compression service (inspired by 8mb.video) [0], a music player that gets songs from a specific repository for Geometry Dash [1], a screenshot tool "for crappy OSes" (windows) [2], spaghetti C code that prints "i love you" to stdout [3], more spaghetti code [4], and a speedhack cheat for singleplayer games on Linux [5]
I've made text editor engine for .NET 10 built in C# with no UI dependencies. Includes a piece-table buffer, multi cursor editing, syntax highlighting, code folding, snippets, TextMate grammars, diff engine, undo/redo, C# REPL, plugin system. Its essentially a deterministic execution runtime for structured, auditable text mutations thats built for AI systems, automation pipelines, and tooling that needs to manipulate text documents.
https://github.com/marinusmaurice/TextApi
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 for use in work suites like Jira/Confluence.
Still fairly early, but I've been using the tool to help build the app itself which has been an enlightening experience.
It's a user daemon that runs on my machine and exposes a unix socket, and then a bunch of hooks in claude, zsh, vim, etc, that report directory and commands I've run and all that, pipes it to claude Haiku for summary, and then stores context in sqlite. It also exposes that data as MCP so I can use claude to say "hey what was I doing yesterday," or any arbitrary time range.
I find that in the age of using AI agents, "Wtf was I working on yesterday" is an even harder thing to remember for me, so this helps me kind of track everything with a database that a) has AI summaries already and b) can be accessed by AI as well as a CLI.
Because I work across a dozen repos any given week, and I have my own side projects I play with as well. It blurs together. Global git hooks are another data source for the project, which I'd forgotten to add, so that data is in there too.
The "expose it as MCP so AI can query it" pattern is one I keep seeing work really well in practice. We did something similar for business metrics in Databox - the interesting design question was whether to expose raw data or pre-aggregated metrics. We ended up with metrics (with dimension breakdowns) because agents hallucinate less when they don't have to decide how to aggregate themselves. Curious if you ran into anything similar with the sqlite summaries - do you find the AI-generated summaries more useful than raw command history?
HN Chrome Extension for dark mode and a few other styling tweaks I wanted.
Jira Chrome Extension to add some notes and links to dashboard pages that I wanted for ease of use.
Small application which takes a CSV and turns it into a Registered Server List for SSMS in order to keep my list of servers updated for queries across all our databases.
Honestly one of the good use cases for AI. Small low complexity scripts and tools for assistance is a great use case. I'm amazed at the folks that are doing huge monolith rewrites with Agents and such, but I've never had good results for that. Small time saving scripts gets me a much more direct return on investment.
A Javascript framework called places.js for creating interactive UIs using web components. It has support for cross component state management, backend data fetching, and web scraping protection. https://codeberg.org/createthirdplaces/places-js/src/branch/...
I tool which pulls all details from my Garmin and keeps a '5 day rolling average' series of stats -- my lifestyle means I can't keep up 'X steps a day', but I feel I can keep up 'average X steps a day for the last 5 days'. What's perfect is I can tweak it, I even added a special 'the weather is truely awful today, you can dip under average but you need to make it up later' option by getting it to automatically pull the weather forecast, or 'The weather is perfect today, really push'.
I made mobile friendly agentic driven IDE (as a PWA), where I can start "agent" processes on my different laptops (company, personal) or on the dedicated server and manage them from any browser / mobile device enywhere. Now I spent most of my time do programming in my head walking somewhere and talk to agents / review code directly from mobile. I also added support of n.eko like remote browsing streaming for emulating desktop browser while I'm on mobile and simplified deployment tool to manage kubernetes / docker deployments.
So many! I manage a fund that buys small e-comm brands, and at this point the whole thing runs on a combination of AI and tools created with AI. My favorite is one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/WhatsApp/email supplier convos daily and uses that to build a dashboard tracking the status of my orders.
A github client / dashboard that can pull 20 of so repos for all internal and client projects in one UI so I can stay on top of project delivery and long standing bugs. It has global search, bookmarking and text based / minimalistic ui for maxium space utilisation and information density. It's read only so to comment on issue i click a link to open GH in new tab but helped me a lot to have this birds eye view on my company. Don't get me started on GH Project. I tried Linear many times but multi project / multi repo is just not their core focus and it shows.
I had a portal/app with messages exam results, calenders for
.) kindergarten for my youngest child (who will now go to elementary school)
.) elementary school for my middle child
.) daycare for my middle child
.) high school for eldest child
All spamming with messages and news - so I made python scripts that use the apps API to get the messages (exams and changes etc) and puts it into our family telegram group chat if relevant
I just can't sit here every morning 20 minutes on my phone logging in checking everything just to find out the food plan has changed ...
Recently I got AI to help make a script to convert a CSV dump of trading activity on a trading platform for uploading into another stock trading analysis platform.
Later on, I managed to crunch the numbers in the script, and realised I could dump them out and display them in a dashboard alongside the trade activity. So I built that too,
An excel spreadsheet could have done the same job as the dashboard, but the script for conversion was greatly aided by the AI tool. The work otherwise would have been a bit of manual coding and back-and-forth testing.
Been working on this spaced repetition app / incremental reading app. I used SuperMemo for about a year straight, found the UI not that great, so I decided to make my own incremental reading app. Think: incremental everything. Supports multiple spaced repetition algorithms FSRS-6, SuperMemo 18, SuperMemo 20. https://github.com/melpomenex/incrementum-taurihttps://readsync.org
I've been making a set of local- and files-first iOS apps for myself - Photo Gallery, Music and Contacts.
I use Linux on my computer and an iPhone and wasn't happy having to use a cloud to sync my data between my devices. Syncthing/Synctrain + my apps allow me to keep everything on my private network, without ever touching a server or having to self-host something like Immich.
I host a couple of services on a box in my network. I built a tunnel that runs on the box and on my VPS to allow me to quickly access those services.
A tool that checks for new movie and tv releases, looks up ratings to see if they are worth adding to my plex server (see above about services I'm running), and then finds the magnet link and downloads them. But will only do so if my VPN is connected.
A tool that allows me to quickly build out paintball fields using my STLs of bunkers that I made, and export the full field layout as a single STL for quick painting, slicing, and printing.
https://docdiagram.com - A tool for creating technical diagrams. Basically an upgrade from mermaid. Load it into your MCP, prompt it, you'll get a clean diagram binary file in svg/png/etc.
Skills for creating good and repeatable benchmarking scripts.
A knowledge base for my research area, with tools for paper ingestion and search.
An md file to html presentation tool, there are several but this one helps me.
A review tool that splits a PR or branch intelligently into modules, and does per module reviews and global reviews for different aspects, and then summarizing that into a report. Can be used with multiple different harnesses. Written as a Python project, but build-time assembled into a single-file Python script with uv run --script shbang line.
I was always experimenting with different agents and models, and I wanted to track how much I use eg codex vs opencode vs hermes, and which models I use.
So I made, kind of last.fm/waka-code for agents where I track (anonymous) usage per project
Data is fully anonymous, all I collect is (agent, model, project name [can be mapped to something else to hide the true name]) and everything is opt-in by default (per project)
I am building my self-hosting llm-wiki system (https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...). My approach is to start with a theory of how such systems could work. Then since llms can interpret theory - this theory becomes an executable llm-wiki system itself.
I made a Safari extension with Swift that automatically suggests using Fastmail masked email addresses on login forms. Never published it, instead just using an xcode dev build on my phone. Works flawlessly.
I have a telegram bot, and I used to have it read message in a group chat to detect the language, and if it wasn't English, it would use gpt5 nano to translate.
To save on inference, I had Claude create a lightweight typescript library to handle translations and detection. Now I get the previous functionality for 200mb~ ram versus paid API credits.
I also built a home assistant menu bar in osx, let's me easily monitor activity, toggle devices, view cameras, etc.
A vocabulary flash card app. I know I know, there's a million.
None of them had share extension feature so whenever you are reading on the web or in a book you highlight the word share directly to the app and it automatically looks up the definition.
Also added a voice review (with gemini native audio model) so you can chat your reviews.
I also have a local zsh autocomplete macro that let's me type things like "git rename annotated branch" and ctrl-g and it will get me the actual command. There's also a ctrl-r mode that searches my history using natural language. This is connected to a locally run ollama so my keys don't leak.
- Day logger quarterly goal management and daily goal tracking system with multiple checkins, voice transcript task dump, jibberish to apple reminders, daily recommendations based on activity and goal tracking and always on dashboard.
- Snubnosed mandarin app. Vibecoded anki and tinder-like character game for mandarin which allows new vocab to be added on the fly. Also accurate text to speech for tones.
- What did I learn? Tweet summarize that takes all favored tweets and assembles into weekly categories and allows deep research on certain topics.
1. https://shopmath.app - I got tired of converting decimal to fraction for woodworking/renovations, and I wanted to round calculations to the nearest 16th, so I prompted this.
2. https://youtubetimestamps.app/ - I use davinci resolve and wanted an easy way to convert my EDL markers into timestamps for youtube.
I made a home dashboard (that I access on my iPad) that talks to my Philips Hue bridge for controlling my house's lights, and also shows train arrival times + what my dog should be clothed in (if at all) for her walks (there was a smallish period of time here in nyc where one day you'd have to wear a jacket and the next day you'd be sweating even in shorts). It also shows our family calendar (wife + self) - all family birthdays in the next 4 days, any events, etc
I have a service that runs on my home server and uses the Ubiquiti API to detect when I'm on a zoom call. It then pauses my Sonos network-wide. Unpauses when the call is over. The next step of it is to have it's own podcast library, so I can have my own little talk radio going on in the background all day.
Some point, I want to convert into a little app and open source it, so you can install on your laptop so it's usable by more people. And have it detect more than just zoom.
transitioned from my OmniOutliner 3(!) based system last year finally to modern macOS and obsidian.
1 year later, with no js/ts skills at all, i got 10 custom plugins, several forks where i fixed bugs and some custom adapations, dozens of scripts and snippets and what not
Now obsidian works for me like I want, and still every day I use it Im still in awe
It is a bit hard to describe until I make a video but basically I seem to have changed the fundamental unit from a document to a chunk and it is just awesome
Scrobble tui to track vinyl record listens on last.fm, sourced from collection on Discogs
Calibre web UI 2.0 to replace Calibre's mediocre web interface. Used for browsing ebook catalog, searching and cataloging with a simple list feature.
Project Gutenberg local mirror UI to browse my local copy of Project Gutenberg books
A couple of MCP servers for self-hosted services to give access to OpenClaw. Currently working on a daily digest that Claw will generate that includes feeds from these: what news stories were popular in my feed reader, did my baseball team win, etc.
I've created lots of small things, but the most interesting is a firefox plugin that detects when some media is playing and send an event with the details to my home assistant. This way I can create some automations that automatically change the lights when I play/pause some media. It's really cool to have your lights automatically dim when you start watching a movie and then for some accent light to turn on when I pause the movie to go to the bathroom.
I use it to help me rewrite my neovim config pretty often. Nothing fancy, but since my config is pretty small (20 files) I can load it all into gemini or codex and have it help me figure out what I'm missing or forgot was in there.
Besides, I made a lot of automation scripts (mostly using Ruby) that run on my raspberry pi to fetch/parse/crunch things and notify me on my Android phone through a self-hosted https://ntfy.sh server.
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
It evolved out of some weird interaction someone was smartassing me that the moon wasn't full when I was pointing to how pretty the full moon was. After that, between a friend and myself, it became a bit of a running gag how full (or not full) the moon actually was. This was my first real project I kind of "vibe coded": https://moon.masca.teide.cloud/ - showing you how full the moon is to the 10th decimal
A Linux dockbar with tons of applets and support for x11 and Wayland. Works on Gnome and KDE. I always wanted to write one as I have been involved with several open source ones, but it is a lot of time to go from scratch. I use it everyday, and I am enjoying it so much!
Built a few finance tools for Indian salaried folks — tax calculator, SIP planner etc. Honestly AI just made me braver. I wouldn't have touched half this stuff alone.
I finally shipped a Chinese learning app I wanted for myself for ages at https://wenmoji.com/. Just never had enough time to sit down and code it end to end. Still need some improvements of course, but will slowly chip away on it. I use it daily/weekly myself now.
Highlights are that it completely free, no login required and works offline (once you "downloaded"/cached some files the first time around).
https://github.com/haydenk/homestead - another Go project, working on a better uptime dashboard that can also be the main homepage for accessing homelab resources.
I also used AI to find and create issues and milestones to for me to get the project to 1.0.0
I made a little script that takes all images in a folder and formats them for my digital photo frame. It knows which have a converted file in the dest and skips them.
I built a language tutor iOS app for having voice conversations with a patient AI tutor. There’s plenty of services doing the same thing but I didn’t feel comfortable sending my broken Danish speech to a startup. It’s open source, going through App Store review now. https://github.com/challenga-org/openlanguage
Could we please stop putting price tags on 15-commit repos?
It's just crazy that every idea, created with ai, now costs 10$ or more per month, despite it costs 5$ to create.
I was running a DnD online game and didn't feel that all the battle maps out there were easy enough to use. I am running using a screen share on discord so all the extra features of Roll 20 for example just got in the way. So an hour with Gemini made the rather bare bones map that I have here.
The team behind Gel got acquired by Vercel and I already experienced falling in love with a dead database (RIP RethinkDB) so I decided to fork the concept to a TypeScript port with Svelte as the UI instead of React.
It'll live at disc.sh in a few months. Early dogfooding is promising.
I made an android app for my badminton club which allows me to take registered players from a whatsapp group through to Square for easy payments and reconciliation.
I have built several tools from general purpose agents to the current project I am working on which is AgentLine - Telephony services for AI agents it gives a phone number to every AI agent to call and sms. I built it over a period of 14 days now I have refined it so much that I have more than 36 paid customers with 300$ in Monthly recurring revenue.
I've always used notepad++ with one single giant .txt file for taking notes with dividers separated for each day so I codified that practice into a desktop app
Just a super minimalist thing where each day is one .txt file with the newest one at the top and a lazy loading scrolling list with every note going back 5 years
Supports CTRL + F searching, backups, and a bunch of other QoL features/macros
Its kind of a revolution that with agentic coding everyone can have their own hyperspecific customized apps
I restore old non-functioning radios with nice design and good audio. I replace the old tech except the speakers with a raspberry add a mic array and package them with an easy to use ubuntu. whisper and the small gemma models made everything so much easier and private. I basically rewrite the whole backend with claude and created a nice first setup experience akin to other smartspeakers. It's amazing how good the sound is from these old speakers.
Built a pwa (NextJS, Mongo) to manage a friend group prediction game for the World Cup. Every year someone from the group would volunteer to put together an excel sheet, collect predictions, etc etc. It was A LOT of work, so decided to try building something with Claude. https://toqui.app/en
I've been working on a tool to design laser cut jigsaw puzzles https://jiglu.dev/
Since I live far away from family I also added an online game so I could play with them or show them what I was making more concretely.
I've cut some jigsaw puzzles that it made, but without access to an uv printer or a laser cutter that works reliably it's been challenging to actually make them
At work, I've created a few convenience scripts in bash and Python - the second of which I am not fluent with. So, I used anonymized LLM access to create boilerplate/simple scripts with a bit of argparse and NumPy, which I then adapted to do what I actually wanted.
Would have made them without UI with a bit more elbow grease invested in web-searching for some examples, maybe even a StackOverflow question.
Generally, I'm not a fan of LLMs and their social effects.
Also I had a redis clone from before, but with AI i separated the epoll layer from the actual database engine which made it sort of embeddable.
And hooked that embeddable database into a JNI interface, and now it can run inside Android applications, sort of like a concurrent hash map, but one that lives off heap and has support for TTLs and mget, msel, mdel, hashes and all that.
I use it for some silly android games.
- app to help buy/find books for my wife
- app to help manage my climbing wall
- app to help finding good films/series
- app to track weight
- app to manage my board games and find the right ones to play
- app for planning wood builds (e.g. climbing volumes)
- telegram bots for:
- picking restaurants for weekly lunch with friends
- managing our 5-a-side football games, make teams, elo ladder
- fantasy football leagues
Mostly I was not an "I have a script for that" guy before AI, except for the occasional VERY simple or VERY high ROI thing. Now I've got more oddball scripts that do things I couldn't be bothered to automate before, including: workarounds for buggy software, stitching tmux together with other tools, automating common operations so I don't have to use the god awful GitHub UI, etc.
Built a quant system that reads earnings transcripts for what management is trying not to say. The model is surprisingly bad at this. Turns out management is too.
I wanted to use worktree's the same way that cursor/windsurf/jetbrains air etc. do, i.e. but in intellij idea using claude code. It's a bit rudimentary and I wouldn't release it on the marketplace but I made a really good plugin that allows me to work on multiple tasks at once using worktree's and has all the great functionality intellij has.
a TUI that runs all my daily Linux updates from one place.
Updating my machine used to be a dozen scattered commands: apt, fwupd, and
a pile of dev tools I want kept current (node/npm, go, claude, opencode,
plus binaries like kitty and lazydocker) that each update their own weird
way. Now it's one Bubble Tea dashboard that checks each tool's installed
version against upstream and only downloads what's actually behind, so I
can see at a glance what's current and what's not. Adding a new tool is
easy enough that I just toss new ones in as I start using them.
It also has a cleanup mode that hunts down all the pesky cache files that
quietly eat your disk and reclaims the space in one pass, which has saved
me from the "laptop full again" scramble more than once.
Currently, testing it privately and tweaking to make it awesome.
Another tool I made for myself is automated video editor (takes folder of raw photos images, and generates edited video that can be shared online). Used it among other things to edit all my GoPro raw footage laying around (hundreds of files).
After coming back from paternity leave, I found that my team had really leaned in to AI driven development. This project was half catching up and half attempting to solve the burn out from the repeated books my wife and I were experiencing.
https://termonmac.com/
A relay terminal that lets you connect back to your Mac from your iOS device.
I spent about 2 months building TermOnMac.
I am going to develop the next version TermOnHost, which will let you connect to all kinds of hosts (Mac, Windows, Linux, or any Linux embedded system)
And your hosts can connect to each other.
- little visual web app cataloguing a small vineyard by vine vigour
- 5 min web app that helps show my daughter netball zones per position
- web app to track manual irrigation runs of 30ish taps across our property
- a calculator to cost-compare types of retaining walls by length
- a virtual card deck for testing a game idea
- scripts to help clean up an unruly Gmail inbox
I'm building an app that uses cosign similarity across a bunch of vectors to derive team productivity metrics. To be honest the maths is trivial; the hardest part is gathering data and normalizing it in a vaguely sensible way.
I've also built a release notes app for my QA teams, a DORA metrics app, a thing to map UX journeys with Playwright, and a ton of games and stuff. AI got me back into enjoying building things again.
I built a browser extension to create podcasts from HN stories in French (and English), I created it for myself in first, then I released it with a shared quota for the community but no one else uses it as it was forbidden for me to post show hn.
In 2023 I wrote from scratch a iOS native app using SwiftUI. This year I used AI extensively to improve and add many features to it in a span of couple months. The app is free and there are at least 2 users of the app - myself and one complete stranger (not a family or a friend) that is using this app.
- A few Tmux plugins to automate workflow tasks (jump to pane, resize panes)
- lots of TUIs for displaying relevant information from services (github, jira, obsidian), that are tiled on a "home" tmux window, gives me a live dashboard of work that I can refer to over the day.
- TUI games, started with a simple dope wars clone … for when I need a quick break.
Dictation tool which works better than the built-in Apple functionality, for my use cases.
Bc my version uses simple copy/paste rather than deeper OS integration, it works more reliably in the Claude Code terminal (has to do with active windows or cursors or something). And bc it uses local Whisper, I also find it transcribes technical words such as “git” more accurately.
Nothing technically challenging but practical for me.
I've spent the last 3 months making it super fast to set up new OpenClaw agents in the cloud
https://operator.io - multiple isolated agents in Telegram with their own memory and tasks has been great for automating reminders, keeping tabs on things, and acting as a personal exocortex
A simple one - a small MacOS status bar widget that shows me if my Ethernet adapter is the default connection or WiFi. It also shows the reported link speed. I have a _very_ flaky USB/Ethernet adapter so seeing "Eth 10" in the bar is enough to prompt me to unplug/replug and get back to "Eth 100" (yes, it isn't gigabit).
I built a little web app that just collects job descriptions - currently up to 3m+ live / 15m dead descriptions - I mostly just use it to search to find stuff out - I should probably make they the main feature rather than the matching service idea.
Made "stop localhost" publishing for vibe coders called Revdoku. It is useful when need to quickly publish a prototype, report, set of documents and can be done right from Claude or Codex.
If you use ChatGPT then can say it is more like ChatGPT Sites but also works in Claude.
I've been a longtime user of Logseq, and thankfully both it and its plugins are open source. I've just been having a lot of fun tweaking plugins I use a lot to have the additional features I've always wished they had. It's so easy to clone the repo and just say, "Claude, make this do X as well."
I downloaded the database of traditional Irish tunes from thesession.org and now I have a tool that lets me search with fuzzy search and instantly pull up full screen renderings of every setting for each tune. I can also add tags and set my preferred setting.
It's really removed all the pain points from my practice hours, especially when internet access is shaky.
Starting making hyprwhspr because no other stt library was quite there for performance and model availability.
After that I started writing opub.dev because even minimal success in recent oss showed me just how much has changed, and I’m worried about how expensive everything will get for maintainers.
So, now I’m trying to GIVE people compute so they can start building a helpful filter layer above their projects.
We used AI to build our AI platform and now we are using the AI platform to build the tools that we need for AI. :)
But no honestly, unfortunately most tools I did for myself are not for hobbies but something that I needed for work... like this one (https://github.com/crmkit/crmkit) most recently.
I've been using AI to build and set up two websites so far one in the travel space and the other in the real estate space. I have literally not touched code or written one line of code and brought up this to websites. Triporacle.app and landradar.land
A catalogue for my e-books with integrated semantic search. I embedded the e-book records, saved the embeddings into a vector database and I can now search them with natural language: https://trnq.eu/en/projects/eblioteque/
I built several prediction models for the market price of gold and cryptocurrencies. But this is always more a fun task than serious stuff - you can't trade with it. Yes, I think it would be possible, but not w/o having the hardware and data resources. I also built a music player with an LLM agent, helping finding the right tracks.
Tubenote, a free YouTube video summarization extension.
Mangata, a walking app that makes it easy to take notes and photos while walking.
NotebookLM Clipper, a browser extension for importing content into NotebookLM.
Knock, a notification tool that sends me a Telegram alert when Claude or Codex finishes a task.
I made a world cup match ranking that ranks matches based on excitement level using a formula for lead changes, higher scoring, late goals, games that decide who advances etc. It's spoiler free and only ranks on order games should be watched. And then each rank is a link to watch the game so it can be viewed with no spoilers.
I'm close to releasing a memory safe programming language, with a declarative concurrency model, that runs on a Go-like runtime.
It has "levels" of compilation, with EASY mode being about as easy as Ruby, and the compiler can present you with options to get that as strict & performant as Rust/Tokio.
I'm going to need at least a month to finish all the documentation, though.
I built a synthetic aperture sonar / radar simulation engine so I could generate endless amounts of procedural generated scenes to train a world model. Data for sonar is especially hard to come by.
Tools? Mmmm i tried making a openCV based tool to recognise circular objects on sat. imagery, it didnt work at all (tried for two weeks), changed to a LLM, it seemed to work, or it was just a little bit off, O gave up. If anyone wants to collab in this space, shout out! Ah also a translation tool for pdfs… its also stuck in limbo, forgot why again…
I used copilot to make a basic MCP server for a large DB, so it could write better queries.
I also got it to write a mysql DB importer I could use instead of "mysql", since I often import large DBs locally. I wanted progress, estimated completion time, and I wanted it to prevent my machine from going to sleep during the import.
I've vibe coded multiple helpful apps and websites for recording data. But longer term, I'm building with its help an internal research system to organize, search, compare, analyze, and esp reuse all the large amounts of data my firm produces, with the public materials without constantly starting over in separate ChatGPT or Claude conversations.
Similar to you, the things I have truly vibe-coded (having looked at <5% of the code) are largely data focused. Data labeling, organization, etc. These applications are extremely janky, I'd never ship them to users. The UI is mediocre at best. The functionality hardly better. But the point is to get data out of them. The code is a means to an end and not a product in itself. Building a custom dataset builder in just a couple hours of work is really powerful.
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.
I made my own agent harness inspired by OpenClaw, but with internal group messaging between agents and memory sharing confined in agent groups. Plus Telegram integration with multiple agents in one channel using topics: https://bazilion.com/
A weight lifting app. I’ve paid for, and used, others over the years, but I always wanted to customize them in some way just for me. So, I just decided to create one the other day (used antigravity CLI) and I’m hosting it on Vercel as a PWA. I’m enjoying it so far and see a lot of potential with making hyper-personal software moving forward.
https://hrvsync.nglx.io/
Simple iOS app to sync Garmin HRV to Apple health. It's nicer to see the trends in Apple Health - I know that the measuring is different but that doesn't really matter if you not don't mix it.
I made a media center replacement for something like plex or jellyfin, streaming video or audio whenever I am; transcoding, subtitles, specialized dupe and renaming metadata. A little automated datawarehouse that manages all my output in an object store. My own tag system of course. A personalized eval system for llm tools.
https://app.refutu.com - Tool for planning and executing together as a team, either at home or work, planning with or without ai and controlling the board with ai chat or dnd. Simple Goal -> Action -> Tasks. Paid for 3 or more users.
LockIn - Beautiful scriptable terminal countdown timer that can block time waster apps. Enjoy fun visualizations and improved productivity that your agent can trigger to start a focus session. Install today with brew.
Since the advent of AI, I've built a voice memo app for myself. I can go on an hour-long walk, talk stream-of-consciousness style, and then have Claude structure my thoughts into organized notes. It's a great way to process ideas just by thinking out loud.
Virtdev, my own rootless development virtual machine system. Use it every day. Even integrated it with tmux.
Pugneum, my static site generator based on pug/jade. Technically made many years before LLMs, but AI is fully maintaining it now so I think it counts. It's gotten to the point I believe it's superior to markdown.
Working on a web client and bouncer for Hotline, the old chat software from ~1997. Just want to chat with my peeps who still use Hotline, from the comfort of the browser I have on whatever machine, while some server maintains the persistent connection to the Hotline server for me. Like an IRC bouncer, but for Hotline.
I wrote a note taking app that synchronizes across iOS/iPad/MacOS and stores my notes in markdown files so that my agents can summarize them each morning, delivering me to-dos, etc.
* Spoof GPS - I live in a non-english speaking country. Sometimes Google sets my location to my gps, despite having an english vpn. This is an attempt to correct that.
* Local translate, rather than sending everything to Google.
* (non browser) An SSH selection screen, so I don't need to remember the IPs
I made a nice little CLI tool for testing the subjunctive in Italian. Claude code spun off a bunch of Claude API calls to generate example sentences with fill-in-the-blank spots for the correctly conjugated verb. Having an AI generate a prompt for and call out to other AIs was a bit surreal!
I wrote a TUI to search for words/phrases in a crossword dictionary. I’ve never written a reactive TUI before, and never written Go either. I was very happy with the assistance rendered by ChatGPT.
Of course, it was great to have exactly the features I want, and I enjoyed learning some new things.
here are a few i have put time and effort into. these are not “vibe coded”, but an agent was utilized at points to save copious amounts of time implementing my architectural decisions; my schedule is pretty slammed as is.
https://mithraeum.studio - local first agent and editor in C, also a few models on HF (mainly jsut qwen wrapped atm but working on from scratch)
https://fieldopt.dev - SaaS for dispatching jobs to the field (technicians, trades, delivery, etc.)
https://github.com/zblauser/ytcli - youtube music from the terminal in zig (ps it’s free, no sub needed)
I built a terminal app for myself that conflates worktrees & tabs, runs every pane through a terminal multiplexer, lets me join in from my phone and generally makes me happy.
I use agents to do most of the tedious admin for my hire business, and I built www.vessels.app to run them on the go because there was no native solution to talk to my agents. I’ve started working towards releasing this to the public because it’s so much better than setting up agents via telegram or slack.
A few, but the one I use regularly and am quite proud of is
https://mediaden.ca - iOS app for storing encrypted photos/videos on storage I (the user) exclusively owns, with zero servers, zero telemetry, and a host of other privacy related features.
It essentially uses youtube as the music source, I think I heard somewhere that playing through embedded videos skips ads but I'm not really sure, in all my time testing it I never noticed ads, but I'm also on premium so that may have been why.
by all means critique, I don't know that I have a ton of time left for it and I'm sure there's bugs here and there. I was having issues getting it to autoplay on desktop when the window itself wasn't the active tab. I never really tried it on mobile.
I was trying to get some DB of artist/song info but doing that was proving to be complicated.
I'm working on a recommendation service (which, to me, it's the piece I'm missing when I play my local mp3 collection)
I collect song metadata from various places (genre, instruments, track credits, rating). I also scrape charts by year, genre etc.
Then I run an ETL job on the json data I have downloaded, pre-building queries for extremely fast lookup tables. This gets saved to Duckdb, which is used by my go web ui/api.
It's very early days, and I only spend one or two hours a week on it, but right now it's amazingly useful. It had roughly 80k song metadata. To preview the suggested songs I ended up building a very cut-down YouTube music player, except that the playing song has all the metadata right there, and everything is a link that can take you to the artist, composer, instrument, genre, album etc. It's a great way to "wander through your collection".
Unfortunately this is only useful to me, because I targeted the music I listen to.
Next step is to download lyrics and extract song meaning, keywords etc. Then use MusiCNN,
(or CLAP,OpenL3, HTSAT) to extract embeddings. Finally train my own model for
nearest-neighbor retrieval based on a mix of metadata, giving the user the ability to tune it on the fly.
Did you ever have to pass Appstore review process? How do they look at copyright and stuff when you are publishing an app that plays your local mp3 collection (how does your mp3 collections ends up on your phone?)
I've built a lot of chatbots specifically in the space of retreving and updating large databases, where business users can query their huge database instead of sitting and writing SQL queries.
I am planning on building a run club app next trying to build a community of my own
Made a local, in-memory OTLP traces viewer because I don't like running heavy alternatives like Jaeger, Tempo for simpler use cases https://github.com/pawanjay176/trace-top
Somewhat related - I wish there was some local thing I could give my 100 holiday videos and it made something fun with the highlights to a specified duration.
2. An app that receives forwarded text messages from my iPhone and then outputs the text message onto a dedicated television connected via a raspberry Pi to display a cold-war era style GUI teletype sort of interface. It actually looks really stinkin cool
in case you forgot instruct your ai text generating tool to do so: replaces — with -, removes emojis and changes quotes to look like human-typed (even though they are not grammatically correct)
I recently posted Show HN for https://www.useorganizer.com/ which helps organize stuff using timelines and stores data in a local folder not the cloud. Open source.
Ive made my own agentic IDE centered around worktrees and containerization. it allows me to run multiple development environments on my machine with each development server running in parallel, allowing me to spin up feature branches and test them instantly.
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.
So many. Every time I encounter a task that is repetitive and has room for automation, I try to make a custom tool. It’s so easy these days. That doesn’t mean building a serviceable app is easy though.
A desktop markdown editor for design docs in git repos with markdown diff highlighting. Has been a time consuming but super fun experience https://github.com/emrul/md
- a personal and private webpage for:
health: garmin metrics, apple health metrics, blood tests, rx..
- a kind of readitlater and bookmark index
- personal finance: wip
- in my homelab only available within tailscale.
The final idea is to own all my data, but I’m still on it.
I made a CLI tool that securely stores and injects your AI API keys into scripts, so you never have to worry about .env leaks. Have a look at https://llmvlt.dev
I was able to create a CLI (https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli) without knowing Go. Like 0% Go knowledge. It is currently over 300 files (266 Go files).
I made a small pantry application to track what foods I have in storage. It can spit out a json blob of that information which I feed into an LLM to make meal suggestions optimizing the ingredients I already have.
I 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
I'm building an app that generates lifting mesocycles and tracks every set and rep. Each week, it uses feedback from the previous workouts to adjust training volume and intensity. It's replacing an app I currently pay $25/month for.
Wispr flow released android version few months back but wasn't supported in my 6 year old phone so made a similar app named Floatspeak. Which motivated me to made a windows version of it and now stopped paying Wispr flow altogether.
https://runnem.com - something I use to easily get projects running again when I get back to them. It also helps the AI get at the logs of the running processes.
I've been trying to make a comprehensive trading platform for crypto - with different verticals like DeFi and CEX. Why so? Because there are more libraries like ccxt to get data to analyse - rather than for the Forex and funds
Well, I've been pretty active in our rec baseball team for the past few seasons, so: 1) App to help my son and other kids learn baseball IQ, and 2) Streaming app to compete against GameChanger.
It's been refreshing to say the least. :)
Forgot to mention: I built my personal finance app. I've been using a spreadsheet for almost 12 years now. Different versions over the years, but the same concept. It took me 3 days to get a web app that works better than the spreadsheet, and it's been life-changing!
Not tools but my Quickshell config. Of course AI made a ton of mistakes so I cleaned it up a lot myself. But I was able to go from not having ever written a line of QML nor reading the docs to having a working top bar pretty quickly.
I’m a UK teacher. I have built a custom GPT that marks essays for the subject I teach in a repeatable and reliable way. It gives actionable feedback to students.
I use it, and have given my students access to it too - they use it to help their revision.
Kids making mud cakes, climbing trees, and taking shots at each other with shanghais. Teachers lounging on a beach somewhere. Meanwhile in classrooms, bots.
How about critiquing? Like, the moral equivalent of an editor pointing out issues and/or suggesting alterations? I think it would still be the student doing all the things you pointed out, but I suspect there's a fair amount of leeway in the interpretation of each of those.
I'm building a replacement for TablePlus: a TableAI database client, because the latest releases of TablePlus have gone down in terms of user interface quality. You can find it on the Mac App Store(TableAI - AI database client)
Looks really cool, its nice to have an alternative to the big players.
The only criticism is that, in the UK at least, "slash" can mean urinate, and that's all I can think of when I read through the website. Probably a me issue though!
Spent a lot of time initially with asking it to generate me radically different approaches. Then I cherry pick what I like, iterate over and over again.
It's still something I ask of it regularly.
Thank you for the kind words. I've always struggled with UI as I have a backend engineer background, now more on the CTO sides of things. I've always lacked the creativity IMO, and this gave me a very good opportunity to practice and try to build something ""unique"".
i made a tool thats a combination of 2.5d cad and smart stylus for making things i can print for leather making, with embroidery patterns on top.
ive made some wallets, a incredible pair of ear muffs, and a bunch of key tags.
i keep being asked if im selling anything, and when i get the next piece together of building/buying an embroidery machine that can work on leather, i might
i still dont want to buy a proper fabric cad system, so im trying to figure out a minimal version for making glasses cases for everyone's christmas gifts. its handy being able to draw inputs for claude, but its also nails-on-a-chalkboard
A ninteneon3ds game explorer where i can look at games and bookmark them with comfortable screenshot preview so i can check what i would like (i never knew what game i should play on it and there are hundreds)
These are all very neat things and I’m very pleased to see the hacker spirit move into AI, but I gotta admit - some of this just comes across as “what did you print with your printer?”
Another recent thread mentioned that AI has helped devs build better “shop jigs.” This seems to be where the rubber is meeting the road for AI-powered development. So maybe more people will be developing custom tooling for their own little problems but you still need reliable, deterministic, interchangeable tools to realize the value of all these shop jigs.
how did you do the family week management stuff? i am building out a knowledge base/communication layer first to be able to access more info through claude voice mode, but debating architecture still.
basically trying to see what a vertically integrated agent looks like, where the agent has deep access inside a framework and it operates from within a framework, so like, instead of reading files, opening processes etc - it gets a bunch of framework specific runtime tools(logs are the easiest example)
https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ – Suite of skills, agents, and tools that make general SOTA models actually good at building and/or auditing iOS/macOS apps. Built for myself initially, I FOSS'd it once I determined how generally helpful it was. It's helped me learn a lot about doing sophisicated things with LLMs in a token-efficient way.
https://charleswiltgen.github.io/TagLib-Wasm/ – Also built for myself initially, I FOSS'd it because there was nothing like Mutagen for TypeScript/JavaScript runtimes. (I don't dislike Python, but think it's a bit of a mess.) This was my first serious project to leverage LLMs for coding.
https://pwascore.com/ – Built because I wanted to quantify how bad Safari was at PWAs. Learned that, objectively, Safari is as bad as PWAs as Firefox (which is to say, not terrible, and not to blame for why PWAs continue to be mostly-irrelevant).
I’m building an agent-native deployment PaaS. I’ve done a lot of DevOps work and I keep starting side projects, and deploying with AI agents has been one of the most painful parts.
Sure! I wanted to mimic the process of daydreaming on a car ride, where external input and inner monologue can mix.
I wasn’t planning on posting it yet, so I’ll have to get you a thorough follow up, but in a nutshell it’s: a continuously running 448-concept space (philosophy, cognition, art, nature, math) that occasionally “crystallizes” a group of 4 concepts via Hebbian learning and stochastic noise. Those concepts get sent to the LLM with minimal guidance beyond some safety guardrails and encouragement to be creative. It has access to a sandbox to produce essays, stories, music, “art”, and small python scripts.
Self-updating memory system. Notes, essays, and artifacts can also be discussed with me through some outbox channels.
On top of that it’s got a separate academic philosopher + psychiatrist llm that critiques its work and has a regular cadence of “sessions” with it, as well as a research assistant bot who I talk to (but doesn’t interact with Sisuon) who has full project context and memory access. The sisuonspeaks site is a VERY abridged collection of Sisuon’s essays, along with analysis, commentary, forum posts, and a podcast…all created by, you guessed it, more LLMs.
Code review tool that breaks up diffs and regroups fragments based on runtime execution paths and/or architectural boundaries. I find it useful sometimes to see changes organised that way.
I wish I had time, but I would definitely make some Android apps to sideload onto my phone. They would be very bespoke and probably only relevant to me, but they would be streamlined to my life.
I built https://sdocs.dev and use it daily. It’s a CLI-driven markdown reader which (privately) renders Markdown in the browser.
When you install the CLI, it (with your permission) asks to update your base agent prompt files (e.g. `~/.codex/AGENTS.md`, or `~/.Claude/CLAUDE.md`) with info about how to use the tool.
This means all your agent chats know about SDocs, and it’s nearly always your agent which invokes the tool: “Hey Claude, sdoc me a list of all my open MRs”, etc.
Mods! I've written mods for a couple of games that I've always wanted to but never had the time to learn the SDK for. Most recently for Project Zomboid.
Always curious about which llms perform best in specific scenarios, so I built a local desktop app to benchmark and evaluate prompts and llms side by side.
I made a modal editor, like Vim and Helix, in Rust that has some prose features I wanted, and with a keybinding system I find more logical and consistent.
I stopped paying for Wyze subscription after replacing the camera backend service. Saving me about $30/m and a much finer tuned OpenCV to Claude API vision model.
What were you getting for $30/month from Wyze? We have a package that is a flat $99 per year for a dozen cameras (plus however many more we want to add for no additional cost), unlimited recording, etc.
Built an Apple Watch app that streams music from Plex. It’s more stable than Spotify and Apple Music and it’s been a blast running to my own music collection!
html snippet playground - for testing html/react snippets
token speed calculator - for estimating tg/s of ai based on ram speed and model size/params this helps in comparing different hw, estimating likely speeds i will get on hardware
prompt assembler - to create prompt and context once and reuse it in different ai's, picking and choosing context in a prompt, creating agent.md etc.
dashboard builder - for viewing gsc, ga, stripe data in one place
I wired up a stream deck to perform long-running tasks. Very much tailored to the kind of HCI that I prefer, so I can be interrupt driven versus checking on status all the time.
Eg: push a button, it shows that it's working for a while, then strongly flashes when it's done (success/failure). When you have it right under the monitor, it's like a macro pad for long-running things.
This reminds me of some of the very early peripherals you'd see on the Alto and other computers. I was surprised something like this didn't seem to exist, but maybe I'm just terrible at searching.
Hey brad. Love your blog's layout. The neon sign headings are so catchy! And I'm going through some tough times in my life, and I can totally relate how cathartic the process of 'creation' is. Thanks for sharing!
I'm glad it was helpful! Sorry you're going through some tough times :( Hope you can find a way through and find the support you need from friends and family. Share your creations would love to have a look!!!
Looking into twitter right now, it seems like the way to do it is with headless browsers, but they usually cost money.
For reddit there used to be the json endpoints that you could just fetch, and you can batch your subreddits, so its nice end easy. They have just killed those...old.reddit still works, but i fear like the days are numbered there as well.
www.propelcode.app - cursor on my phone.
www.propelagent.app - voice agent for my home health care agency, but it also tells bed time stories to me and my daughter a few times a month.
I also built a new web framework we use internally which is amazing. We might open source it soon. It has a postman clone that has a bunch of features I wanted. It really is the case that we can just build tools any time we want.
magpie - extracts book recommendations from reddit threads. I had a bunch of saved threads from 'books' and 'suggestmeabook' and 'printsf' etc., and I realized I could pull them down and do a semantic search.
oh boy, lots. i made a trainer that coaches you in nondual philosophy by quoting from the Upaniṣad; a Vedic Aspectarian that calculates your chart and analyses your transits; a better I Ching program that utilizes a time variable to throw the hexagrams; and then there’s our research software. none of this would have been possible without AI.
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 useful tool that I'm using on a daily basis.
Go-micro.dev - Totally revamped the open source project, docs, etc with Claude.
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 obvious. kuddos.
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.
There are plenty of other tools already that do this but hopefully this one adds some quality of life niceties such as dark mode and a mobile responsive design that seems nicer to use than the others out there.
Hope the colours look ok. I'm a colour blind person (deuteranomaly) and I've optimised it for what looks good to me. Am open to adding a mode in line with what regular vision people might prefer.
No frameworks used, vanilla JS. No sign ups. Data/state persistence is purely local storage.
Absolutely no commercial interest here. Built this purely for the love of it. Will forever be free.
I have always been interested in computers, building my own, playing pc games, etc. However, I never learned to program. LLMs have given me the ability to bring things to life that would have otherwise been impossible. I have a lot of pent-up software I have wanted for a long time.
I build a lot of data pipelines, and I've had to deal with too many inconsistent "source to target mapping specs" (usually Excel files) in integration and data projects in my life. They're too opaque for AI coding tools to get consistent results for generating implementations, suggesting tests, making test data etc. So I made "Satsuma"
(https://equalexperts.github.io/satsuma-lang/)
At first glance, it's just a nice version-controllable, parseable DSL. But I also made succinct prompts with the grammar that lets LLMs produce and reason about Satsuma, a language server, CLI tools for the AI tools to use to navigate specs token-efficiently, reason about lineage, pretty viz in vscode plugins/syntax highlighting, some agent skills etc. There are metadata conventions for succinctly representing a lot of quirky formats and capturing common analytics conventions (scd2/Kimball/datavault/etc c.)
Yes, yes, I may have gotten carried away.
But I'm finding it really useful as a specification tool in projects for reverse engineering mappings from code/workflows, generating new code (dbt, Spark etc.)
This definitely isn't something I would've had the bandwidth to push this far before AI!
Started making Agentikus as a way to manage my -back in the day- multiple OpenClaws. Soon enough realized that many will have the same problem soon. And started adding features that I was missing on Codex and C. Code. It’s a fun ride.
Side note: before coding agents I would not get passed the branding and login page.
i built a program that watches wifi traffic and if it sees my phone connected to the office wifi; it marks me as in the office on our internal chat tool (Zulip).
And the inverse as well, of course.
Runs on a raspberry pi that I was otherwise using to take backups periodically… has been working pretty good honestly.
I also built a program that fills/submits my time reports, and does the same for all of my subordinates - then signs them off… Saves everyone like 5 minutes if we remember to do it, or 12 minutes and frustration if we’re reminded by HR about it (which happens because who the hell cares about time reports?)
Came here looking for some examples, i tried some pcb routing, its horrendous. But you inspired me to maybe just run with it? Like design a alarm clock and see what abomination ‘it’ will come up with and just run with it/produce it anyway? Would be fun!
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.
1. A personal dashboard that is gloriously incongruent, but solves almost every problem where I have to glance at my phone: my home and car battery charge levels, my failing github actions, planes overflying my house, medication tracking, Life360 integration so I can ensure my kids charge their phones, sports and finance tickers, birthdays, fuel prices, public transport, integration with my bathroom scale....the list goes on and on. It has ticker mode, card mode and alert mode and lets me add features via a Github and Claude API integration.
2. A shopping list app that allows me and my partner to coordinate on our shopping
3. A recipes app that includes AI scanning
4. A standalone home battery dashboard/app
5. A fuel prices app that is tailored for the closest fuel stations and is ad-free
6. A tool to draw classroom supervision maps for my partner (thrown away already, I didn't want adware/bloatware so I built it, she used it, then I threw it away)
7. A quiz website, cos the one I used to play on was overrun by ads.
8. A time tracker that I'll throw away at the end of the tax year
And more, and that's just what I did for making my life easier, there are other more "enterprisey" things I am working on. They're web apps that I add to my iphone desktop or run on otherwise junky old tablets or on TVs.
The point is that they do exactly what I want them to do instead of relying on downloaded apps that get me 80-90% of the way there, even if they'd be classified as "AI slop". I know enough about security and caching that they aren't full of holes and don't kill upstream, but I don't really care about the code, and it's literally easier for me to build something new than to go to Google or an app store to find software that's full of ads.
I wrote a tool to give agents signal on what is and isn't clean code. I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time reviewing agent code.
After asking agents to make the same types of changes over and over again, I decided to make a tool that would just tell the agent that its code needs improving. I figured that if I could get the agent to self-review and improve the code it writes, that it would save me time when I finally come around to reviewing it.
Oh man - I've created more than I can count at this point, but here's some of them:
- A chat-based web app for ad-hoc telemetry data visualization.
- A firefox-extension meeting transcriber
- A personal chief of staff
- A web-based personal finance budgeting tool (no AI at runtime, obviously)
- An iOS and Android app for solo work with a dead man switch if timely check-ins don't happen
- A custom dotfile/machine config manager that works the way *I* want
- A bookmarking tool/web clipper that puts together daily content-only collections from what I've been clipping and send them to my Kindle. This one I actually intended to make a SaaS, but meh.
Being able to put together quite big projects by myself for myself in a reasonable amount of time is such a joy.
Not really a tool but converted a hobby swift app to a webUI animated showing mexico city and london when there's rain https://tlaloc.cloud/
The one tool i noticed could be helpful given the volume of screenshots i share with the agents is screenshotter: just a simple script that watches my screenshot folder and compresses the images so i can save some bandwidth and hopefully some tokens https://github.com/mgranados/screenshotter
I vibe coded two apps, I program but not in the languages used in the apps. I'm utterly clueless about Lua and Python. Both apps work fine and I use them all the time myself.
1. A Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth LSP for the Helix editor (Python)
2. A CMSIS-SVD Sqlite3 search and paste pop-up window for Neovim when editing STM32xx embedded Forth programs. (Lua)
As another post pointed out, AI as a field of research started about the time I was born (LLMs are another matter of course). So everything I've created has been since that time. Some of my software tools are listed at https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Colin+Macleod - no form of AI was involved in any of them.
Over the past few days I have been making a spell checking TUI app. I used AI (meaning: free Gemini web interface) to discuss various aspects about the apps and debug compiler errors ang suggest useful rust crates for various problems.
Just a more helpful discord chat generally. It also gaslights you too!
I'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.
I get annoyed that existing tools have limitations so I fix them or build my own:
- I didn't like that I can't use my newsreader on my laptop and my phone as easily so I built https://github.com/mjc/nntp-proxy. that turned out to be really hard to benchmark once it got fast enough so I am working on an nntp benchmark tool https://github.com/mjc/nntpbench. both can do request queuing because the nntp RFC says servers have to accept as many requests as they can, and then process them in order. so if your client doesn't do that, you can use more connections to the proxy and it will queue for you. it also routes stateless commands to whatever server is least-loaded, and will switch to stateful mode if your client needs it.
- I didn't like how expensive AWS Transfer Family is, so I built this https://github.com/elixir-ssh/sftpd and then rewrote it in rust (alpha) https://github.com/mjc/sftp-s3-rs. this shook out a bunch of bugs in russh, which was fun.
- didn't like that there's no par2 implementation in rust so I built this https://github.com/mjc/par2rs (I'm too lazy to move to tape backup so it works pretty ok for dvd/bluray parity), unfinished but good enough for my use.
- same deal for 7zip in rust. https://github.com/mjc/r7z
- a medication tracker thing that uses claude/codex/copilot to scan the bottles and parse them as well as identify pills etc. works better than you'd think but I'm not planning on releasing it for a while.
fixed or fixing bugs in:
- exqlite (it should not crash anymore and should return busy a lot less often.)
- russh
- swift-nio-ssh (this might be why codex's remote can't connect to your ssh box) https://github.com/apple/swift-nio-ssh/pull/236
- NanoKVM (working on making the streaming for this a lot more fluid)
A website that tracks when we last went on a weekend trip and other kinds of things, and reminds us with a cute friendly (not AI written) email when it's time to plan something again!
It really helps us to not forget to spend significant time with each other when life is busy.
A rant follows.
I've generated probably as many lines of code by this point as I've written myself over the past 5 years or so.
I found AI generated code mostly very frustrating, kind of low quality in its own way, and too complex. I have pages and pages of instructions to guide the agent(s) to do a better job at this, and it has gotten better, but the fundamental limit of this technology is tangible.
Like, okay, CPUs still get faster every year, and every now and then someone makes a breakthrough and we get a bump in speed from something. But when you write high performance code, you very quickly run into hardware constraints, like how fast information can move and how far away components are from the CPU cores themselves. People keep saying performance isn't THAT important, and that modern hardware is so fast and amazing, and that they struggle to even find a way to use all of their CPU cores and RAM with their little app or program or game. Yet here I am, writing code that will noticably speed up if I run it on a CPU with a little bit more L1 cache.
This is similar to how it feels to program with AI when you're reasonably competent (to put it mildly; I avoid the 10x developer label because comparison to others is very silly). Everyone keeps saying it's getting so much better, and it's so good, and worrying about code quality and architecture is dumb because we can move so fast it doesn't matter. Yet here I am, writing code by hand because I tried doing it with AI a couple times and it just doesn't hit the mark.
I'm not doing anything special, I just have high standards and a good amount of experience when it comes to software quality, performance, and maintainability, which is why I keep getting hired. I'm convinced that people who think their AI generated software is good are the same people who write short variable names and think it makes their software faster (hyperbole, but you get what I mean).
I can feel when I hit the limits of the hardware, and I can feel when I hit the limits of LLMs, and I know for both of them that a 2x increase in performance will not change what is and isn't physically possible.
Thanks for the reminder, I made a very simple and small mac os guitar tuner and intonation app (all others are either paid, have in app purchases or are outdated) that I still need to publish!
CodeMerger: https://codemerger.nl
I've never liked the lack of control I feel using agents or tools like Cursor or Antigravity. I found myself having much better results simply pasting full source code in free chat, so I built a tool around that philosophy and I've been exclusively developing with it for a year now. It includes a Project Starter and code architecture analysis tool.
Presentable: a photo library sorter with Ai powered organization assistance, a compare canvas with various viewing modes and customizable folder sorting shortcut templates (wip).
AlwaysWhisper: a tool that let's me attach STT to my entire OS, with custom wrappers for different programs, adding theoretical voice control to any software (wip).
ScreenLoader: an Electron based tool that can load any web source as a kiosk app, full of useful features like keep-alive, covering multiple screens and tracking output logs.
Inputboard: a unified all-inputs hardware board, that transfers input data to any prototype I want to work on using an optocoupler, so I won't have to fiddle around with setting up clean and reliable inputs from cheap Chinese components every time I just want to test something.
Squire: an agentic board game helper, that can ingest a manual and will hopefully help decrease the time spent on endless discussions about seemingly conflicting rules. It should also be able to help me play a game when I don't fully understand the rules myself yet (wip).
NodeRunner: an agent that plays the WikiGame, focusing on speed, efficiency and token usage (the result of a fun competition with a colleague).
Sonic Bloom: more of an experiment than a tool. It's a wireless piece of custom hardware, that listens to conversations, sends data to an LLM through fast STT and returns a color choice that matches the topic being discussed to the hardware, which then controls an LED ring. It also has a small display that explains the logic behind the color choice.
Image-to-story: a VLM tool that kickstarts a written story using an image and has some rudimentary tools to expand on it based on user instructions (wip).
At-work-or-not: and Android app/website where colleagues can check if I'm working from home, if I'll be at the office or if I'm not working at all. Also doubles as a private record for tracking transport expenses.
SharedMaps: a Maps based website where groups of people can share custom categories of geo locations and drop comments on them.
VMG: an image format that includes audio with images and offers TTS input to easily add narration.
Who wants Coffee: a small Android app to help me remember who wants to drink what when I go for a round at the office.
And a pile of Python scripts for smaller useful tasks.
Built a meeting-intelligence pipeline that turns raw, error-prone transcripts into a structured, queryable knowledge base. Meetings get auto-transcribed by Krisp, whose speech recognition mangles the things I most need correct, like colleague names, customer names, internal product and architecture terms. I hand each transcript to Claude alongside a hand-built context document, and it works a fixed routine: read the context file, read the transcript, then reconcile every uncertain name or term against a master error table before drafting anything. Only the genuinely unresolvable handful surface as questions; everything else is corrected silently. Once I confirm those, it emits a cleanly formatted markdown summary in a manner I describe as a template: overview, topical notes, decisions, action items — and pushes the work items into Todoist so commitments don't get lost.
What makes it more than transcription cleanup is the back end and the feedback loop. Each summary hits Obsidian with YAML frontmatter and live Dataview queries, so open action items and meeting metadata behave like a database rather than static notes. In Cowork the whole accumulated Obsidian folder becomes fully queryable rather than merely searchable — instead of grep-ing for a keyword, I can ask questions that reason across months of meetings ("what were Todd's table-stakes asks, and has anything shipped against them"), with the model able to look across separate conversations. The other half is self-improvement: every clarification I resolve gets written back into the context document: its people directory, terminology glossary, and especially the ASR error table, so a garble I corrected once is corrected automatically from then on. Over time that one document has become a domain-tuned lens, and each meeting both draws on it and sharpens it, which is why the summaries keep getting tighter and need less of my intervention.
Beyond that: I use a Netatmo weather station which has a RESTful API (or sends to a cloud server that has one) - I pull that information (which I can see on the web and their apps) into my own VictoriaMetrics / Grafana set up on Kubernetes, via a Go app Claude built.
This app above was when I had my little aha moment: Netatmo's OAuth is slightly broken (issues with the different tokens and refresh). But I'd written a dog-ugly app which managed to work a while ago. Claude kept trying and strugglign to understand why its OAuth code wasn't working, and was asking me "are the credentials right?" etc. "Yup, I'm able to get data from my old app", then it said "If you have the source code to that app, I can figure out what's up", it looked, identified the issue, tried to work around it and then we "agreed" - "Hey, this should work this way, but it doesn't, and whether my old OAuth code should work or not, it does, so drop that in, and keep going". "Great, let's do that."
Vibed a ton of small projects, mostly for my own usage, to understand what agents could do, or just to satisfy my curiosity. Most are rough around the edges, and a bunch quickly became obsolete as agents got better and I stopped using them.
https://modelarchviz.tsilva.eu/ — View model architecture diagrams, codebase, and paper side by side. Includes a chat bot that can see selected content and select content itself. WIP.
https://embeddingviz.tsilva.eu/ — Visualize model embeddings and/or layer activations for different content with PCA, UMAP, or t-SNE. WIP and poorly tested.
https://github.com/tsilva/dlab — Workbench for deep learning experiments. Open the repo in Codex, pick a training target, e.g. maximize validation accuracy on CIFAR-10, and ask it to start a research track. Then collaborate on training runs, evaluations, sweeps, and iteration toward the goal.
https://github.com/tsilva/gymrec — Record and replay gameplay from Gymnasium environments as Hugging Face datasets. Supports stable-retro environments such as NES, SNES, Genesis, etc.
https://github.com/tsilva/agentpong — Run coding agents in VSCode/Cursor terminals, one per Aerospace window. Agents trigger desktop notifications when done; clicking a notification sends you to the correct desktop. I haven’t used this in a while, so I’m not sure it still works.
https://github.com/tsilva/agentbox — Run agent CLIs inside Docker sandboxes. Project-level config defines sandbox access. I stopped using this once agents got better built-in approval mechanisms.
I've been making a lot of audio experiments for my own amusement. They all have some potential to drain your cpu, sorry!
https://www.noisetable.xyz/ - a collection of chance-based audio 'channels' in a VCR inspired interface
https://concrete95.net/ - a musique concrète web app that's made to look like windows 95. Pulls random audio from freesound.org and loops a small section, you can also layer synth pads or melodic synth loops. I'm often able to get some really pleasant background ambience.
https://windso.me - a sample-based step sequencer that doesn't let you choose the sample that's loaded, kinda fun, still needs a lot of work!
Nice, Noisetable is so relaxing. Reminds me a bit of those generative music apps from Brian Eno.
Oh awesome, his work has always been an inspiration, I really appreciate that.
These are lovely
Thank you :)
I get a security warning on firefox when visiting noisetable.xyz
Uh oh, thanks for flagging. I'll check it out!
noisetable is great, though would be great to have a warning that it uses flickering before starting the game. Or maybe add a check if visitor has motion reduced (prefers-reduced-motion css block?)
Great callout! Thanks for the heads up
Whoah, I checked that https://concrete95.net/ sooooo coool! What the heck :D
:) Thanks so much, glad you're enjoying it!
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-hook/ git only allows one script per hook event; this is a dispatcher that discovers and runs every script in a hooks dir, in parallel, for both global and repo hooks.
- TubeGate https://www.codeofhonor.com/projects/tubegate/ Chrome extension to block YouTube videos based on keywords (like “sponsored”).
- push10k https://www.codeofhonor.com/projects/push10k/ iOS app to track my progress toward 10,000 push-ups.
My blog is AI-coded: Zola static site, Sveltia CMS, Cloudflare Pages/Workers, with GitHub Actions handling builds and syndication. https://www.codeofhonor.com
Wait. You worked on Guild Wars, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo?
This place is incredible.
Guild Wars was one of the most fun games ever. The crazy combinations of skills you could try in the random arena were so much fun.
Guild Wars 2 and most other games are pure slop.
They did announce Guild Wars 3 last Friday btw. Not set to release until 2027.
Also Guild Wars 1 has been receiving new content updates this year.
I just found your blog yesterday reading up on the stories of how Warcraft and Starcraft were made!! Have been hacking on small games and a tool to build 3d environments for a while and get very inspired by hearing stories from back in the day. Thanks for making everything public. I really enjoy your writing.
Thank you, glad you enjoyed the articles. I wish I had the motivation to write more!
I'm sure it will flow when the time comes :P
For me.. the most interesting part of the whole Warcraft saga would be more discussions around the arguments/design decisions of.. "we should include ___."
For example... War2 stuck with two races (and introduced alliances w/ other races like elves) instead of adding new races. How did you get to that decision? did you do any prototypes? Was it just a pure argument? What did you find in the process?
That kind of behind the scenes design discussion is rarely surfaced (and often messy) but is as interesting (to me) as the technical decisions.
One more idea.. You've worked across great companies and great games. If you were going back now to your former self striking out to ship your first commercial game, what are the 3-4 pieces of wisdom you wish you'd internalized back then?
Cool but mate, this is just not true:
>>Some content-management software (CMS), like WordPress, requires using the same presentation layer that the CMS uses
Headless wordpress has been a thing for quite a while and it’s trivial for a use case like this
You are correct, I will amend that. I do think that locks you out of a lot of the plugin ecosystem if using it as a static site generator, yeah?
As a developer who deploys wordpress often, I can tell you that if you have the resources (experience and time) to setup a headless wordpress you probably don’t need 99% of plugins. The really important ones (ACF Pro, cookies-stuff, SEO etc) are compatible with headless. I regularly deploy non headless high impact wordpress sites with about 6 plugins max. Theme is custom developed as a skeleton starter plus custom fields. I feel you though, it’s imperfect but so far I haven’t found an alternative for client work especially that beats the WP ecosystem
This sounds like it's worth a blog post. I'm sure lots of folks, including me, would be interested in the details of which plugins to maximize utility, and what the deploy process looks like. Cheers!
Thanks to Push10K now I am on my 160th day of streak and 13,135 pushups (or my own version of equivalents) so far. It is the best thing I did after feeling like Glutton after dinner last Christmas.
That is awesome! Congratulations on completing so many — and such a big streak! Good luck on your journey to the 20k, and let me know if you need any features to make it work for you.
> - git-multi-hook https://www.codeofhonor.com/projects/git-multi-hook/ git only allows one script per hook event; this is a dispatcher that discovers and runs every script in a hooks dir, in parallel, for both global and repo hooks.
Newest Git supports hook events.
You are correct: git 2.54 supports multiple hooks via a the git repo and global configuration files.
Git-multi-hook predates that, but I updated it to use the new 2.54 config-based format.
The significant advantage of git-multi-hook is that they all run in parallel. I run eight hooks on precommit, so parallelism is a big win.
I will update the README to make note. Thanks!
git-hook documentation says that hook events can be configured to run in parallel.
Here's what gemini says about running hooks in parallel:
> Native Git traditionally executes hooks sequentially. However, you can achieve parallel execution by leveraging dedicated third-party hook managers or using built-in shell background processing
.. and that's what git-multi-hook is: a third-party hook manager, that uses shell background processing :)
Just out of curiousity, what are the 8 hooks you run?
The precommit checks I run are:
- end-with-blank-line: normalize file endings
- find-do-not-commit: do not commit files that include "DO NOT COMMIT"
- lint-code: run `$REPO/scripts/lint` if it exists
- lint-nodejs: run `$REPO/{pnpm/yarn/npm}` lint if `package.json` exists
- lint-shellcheck: shellcheck all the files that have no extensions or end in `.sh` that have a shell-shebang
- lint-swift: run swiftlint
- prevent-commit-secrets: run ripsecrets to avoid committing secrets and credentials
- validate: run `$REPO/scripts/validate` if it exists
By default all of the scripts check the files in the git staging area, but they can also be run standalone to check everything. You can find them here: https://github.com/webcoyote/git-multi-hook. Glad to take suggestions for more.
I see how it is.
I would love to see the push10k on android playstore/fdroid. It looks so inviting and motivating that I searched for equivalent alternatives for android but found none! Would you, maybe, publish it there as well, pleeeease?
Thanks for the push10k app, I didn't know I was looking for something like this
Glad you’re enjoying it. It started as a tool for my own motivation, and I’m so glad it’s helped you too :)
I grew up playing Warcraft II. Thanks for all of those great times.
Glad you enjoyed playing. It was an amazing journey building the game, and I’m grateful so many folks appreciated the experience we created.
The funniest thing I've made is a free utility called "Moniker" that contextually renames files based on their contents.
Uses local AI models and I was able to snag this great domain name.
https://finalfinalreallyfinaluntitleddocumentv3.com/
But hands down the most useful thing I've made is HutchDB, which is a MCP service that you can call from any AI chat or Agent setup to store data for you.
Literally from your AI you just say "save that to Hutch" and then it figures out:
- The schema + fields - Builds nice webviews (Kanban, Timeline, Grid, Calendar) - Lets you share the output with people
So people use it for all kinds of things like time tracking ("every hour save a summary of my activities to Hutch"), for Agent to Human handoff ("Every day check social media for mentions of my company and save them to Hutch").
I use it for things like recording all of our marketing activities and then having my AI compare those to signups for rough attribution, etc.
Dead useful and at https://hutchdb.com
I love it! A few questions that made me think: - how do you know that "people use it for all kinds of things"? I just read your privacy policy and I'm concerned about my AI agent possibly leaking some API key to Hutch and then you can read it. - how is this free? You're hosting on Vercel, one of the most expensive hosting providers. What happens when this goes semi-viral? How do I know you won't just pull the plug to cut costs or start charging $500/month? I don't want to sign up, invest my time, and then lose access. - I signed up and now I can't access privacy policy nor terms of service pages, because when I go to https://hutchdb.com/ I get redirected to https://hutchdb.com/dashboard
This is all very fair criticisms. This thread asked: "What are tools you have made for yourself?" and that's genuinely what this is. I wanted it so I made it and then AI makes it so easy to just throw up a marketing page.
I've a a handful of dev friends that have started to use it as well and give their feedback and it's been slowly growing as I've added sharing/invites.
I would absolutely not recommend putting big production data into it currently.
My vision for it was something more like how the #1 use of spreadsheets is actually people making lists and not actually people doing lots of calculations.
Given the uptake today (thanks everybody!) and your feedback (thanks Mystery-Machine) I'm going to work at addressing your concerns.
You completely ignored every question related to costs/privacy.
I thought it was more implied, but let me be more explicit:
- This is something I made for myself without a lot of commercial thought, so I still haven't thought through pricing + usage + limits + operational limits. In it's current wildly unoptimized state it's still very cheap to run.
- For the specific concern about API Key leakage there's not a lot I can do about that (that I'm aware of) as the logic of what gets sent is handled by the client AI. It is possible to pull down and audit both the tools + instructions that are published by the MCP server if there are concerns on that side.
dope!
Gemini 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).
ChatGPT has helped me with innumerable little technical things and feels indispensable at this point.
I can't help thinking that this is a combination of Google sucking more and more and various problems of daily getting so hard need something like a script to solve them. (Recent challenge - "what affordable campgrounds are near the Pacific Create trail and open now").
I similarly used it to finally facilitate a switch to Arch to a couple months ago. Not technically a tool, but it was very convenient to take the Arch wiki, and personalize it by saying "My hardware is X and my use case is Y, can you filter out the 90% of things from here that aren't relevant to me?"
instant access to answers for my specific problems, without judgment
For me that’s killer feature, even if we don’t achieve AGI at least we got good enough „something that will google it for me”.
It is great both ways as an expert in my niche I don’t have to waste time on reading through entry level fluff. As non expert in other fields I don’t get to be scolded for asking entry level questions so RTFM and LMGTFY will sink in history fortunately.
It's dumb, but....
I made a scraper that searches through all the news and finds anything 'war' related. It then summarizes it and give me that new in the Star Wars crawl with music.
If you upload those to YouTube, you might find yourself an audience.
Can... Can I have this as well?
How soon until we can just share a prompt://make-me-a-react-app-showing-a-summary-of-war-news-as-a-star-wars-crawl ? :-D
You can already share Claude artifacts this way.
Please, please share this. I want to see this so badly.
Not the author, but I had a good vibe coding go at it: https://force.nuts.services
Code: https://github.com/kordless/force-news
It wants me to login. 99% of the requests are gonna be for "War", could you just cache it?
Wait, it would be easier for me to clone the whole thing and change one feature... What strange times we live in.
Sure, whatever you like. All of it is open source, including the crawler: https://github.com/deepbluedynamics/grubcrawler
Almost everything I build will run locally or on Google Cloud in serverless mode.
The README on the repo for the app is has been updated with instructions for you. You will need Docker.
The force is with you, my friend
Love this
You should totally buy a domain for it and call it internet-art
This might be the best thing I've read about in quite a while. I'm extremely impressed with the quality of the concept. Well done.
I shipped a QA harness for Claude Code. Instead of clicking through flows by hand, it reads your code diffs, identifies the affected UI flows, and tests them in real browser
Plus after each run you get screen recordings with console logs, network requests, HARs, and Playwright traces so you can inspect exactly what the agent did :)
https://github.com/wizenheimer/canary
P.S. I attempted to do a Show HN but got flagged for some reason
> got flagged for some reason
From a quick look at your profile, the majority of your submissions have been Show HNs. HN only allows some fraction of your submissions to be Show HNs (imagine if the front page was nothing but), so eventually they will just be auto-flagged.
Ahh, got it. I didn't realize HN did that. Thanks for letting me know! That probably explains it :)
Oh, that looks lovely. A much more coherent version of the scraps I've been assembling for myself. Kudos, I'll be giving it a whirl :)
I wrote a pen-plotter GUI and gcode sender in Rust. By hand. Like an animal.
I am the only user. Sometimes it's the process that matters, and exercising your brain is important too. I get that there is a lot of existential dread around AI taking our jerbs, and excluding humans from the process of creative work, but... you can still just write code, just for the personal satisfaction.
https://github.com/armyofevilrobots/bap-egui
This is going to be one my next projects for experimenting with the Web Serial API. I got an old Ioline plotter that refuses to die. Any advise or tips for where to start with the SVG to Gcode conversion?
I used svg2polylines to load the SVG into line segments, interpolating any splines into something easier to use for a plotter. Feel free to take a look at the core/project/import.rs in the project I linked. You might also want to look at the core/post.rs which does the gcode generation.
Nice I am designing/building a pen plotter myself at the moment and was surprised by the lack of good software. Will give this a try!
I was going to ask what is a pen plotter. Apparently this is like a printer but it uses a real pen to draw. Neat.
thank you! I will give it a try with my penplotter. I tried to vibe something like that in the past, but the outcome wasn't at all what I expected.
A voice memo app, quite like the actual voice memo app from Apple. The thing is: now I can put my voice memo's on iCloud put Claude Code on it and make my transcripts into structured notes that my app then also displays.
So basically a way to just go on an hour long walk with myself, spit everything from the top of my dome stream of consciousness style, and then have Claude structure whatever I said.
It's nice to have something that structures my thoughts by just thinking out loud.
I vibecoded it (it's approaching 20K lines including tests). It works quite well but there are some bugs, so will have to do some actual engineering. But the UX is working quite well.
Relatedly, I have recently started walking and talking, and I just use lightweight gamer headphones that have a mic. I just record it with a generic voice recorder app, then I use a local instantiation of whisper to transcribe it when I get home. I throw the transcript and the recording into a database and then I can search the whole thing, or have AI look for interesting patterns in my thoughts.
This is really useful. Thanks for sharing.
I love it!
But I have to ask: why not just advanced voice mode in ChatGPT or Claude?
FWIW - In the Claude app (on android) when in transcript mode, it has a hard limit of 10 minutes. If you transcribe longer than that, it crashes and you lose everything you've said.
To make matters worse, they've recently gotten rid of the timer, so you have NFI how long you've been speaking for.
I use it for therapy-based stream-of-consciousnesses + venting and then have my project set up to understand the schema therapy work I've done with my psychologist and give me insights / draw threads between things from my past and now, and losing 10 whole minutes of talking and processing is SO FRUSTRATING!
It seems clunky for me. The dictating it self had weird bugs, like sometimes it decided to not work at all and the conversation mode is not very usefull for OP case if I am undestanding it correctly.
I talk/walk for hours and want all audio files and transcripts in one place, full control.
Basically the entire business model of Plaud
I am curious to check them out! I hadn’t heard of them. Marketing stuff takes time as I have noticed with aliceindataland.com [1]. Maybe I should do a show HN. I will think about it.
To be fair, vibecoding this memo app in Swift didn’t take too long. There were some tricks to it, using xcodegen helped a lot so that I don’t need to use the Xcode project.
It’s fun to see Swift code. I used to do some Objective-C back in the day.
[1] another thing I made. It’s a sequel to the Alice in Wonderland stories. It’s also a SQL course. I vibe engineered it, meaning I looked at the code and used AI-assisted development.
Except for the story though that’s almost all fully me. LLMs aren’t great storytellers. The same is true for the lesson scaffolding, that’s almost only me.
Many, really, but there are few I'm especially proud of:
- https://github.com/exlee/pikchr_pl - DiagramIDE (diagram amiga-style workbench where you can script Pikchr diagrams using TCL, Prolog, Pikchr or - recently mruby). Note: you need to navigate to actual crate for description. There are binaries built in case someone wants to try it.
- https://svg.axk.sh - semi manual SVG fitter so that I can easier vectorize AI-generated pseudovector images (who doesn't like 30kb SVG versus 1.8mb PNG?!)
- https://github.com/exlee/rik - this one makes me laugh every time I use it - it's an AI harness with text editor as an UI (i.e. it reacts to comment strings) - I gave it personality so it makes wacky comments but other than that it's very constrained agent (limited edition ;))
These are not vibe coded but AI made it much easier to slide through major friction points (e.g. for SVG fitter I really didn't want to reinvent fitting algorithms)
These are really cool - I've been meaning to return to my pikchr-in-wasm IDE experiment. I only ever built a PoC, and that was before AI coding. I should pick it back up and polish it a bit, but after seeing your DiagramIDE, I might just use that.
This whole thread is turning HN into my favorite app store. Good stuff.
Thank you. If you encounter any bugs don't hesitate to fill in a bug report. Love getting feedback from the actual (i.e. non-myself) users :)
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 claude code.
End result: an online store where we sell jewelry pieces that actually are lambda-diagrams (Tromp diagrams) that compute Graham's number, or of the Y-combinator (well, technically it's just a fixed point operator, one beta reduction away from the Y-combinator. But Y-combinator was not aesthetically pleasing from a jewelry point of view)
store: 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 claude code.
End result: an online store where we sell jewelry pieces that actually are lambda-diagrams (Tromp diagrams) that compute Graham's number, or of the Y-combinator (well, technically it's just a fixed point operator, one beta reduction away from the Y-combinator. But Y-combinator was not aesthetically pleasing from a jewelry point of view)
store: https://studio-galois.com
I've found that Gemini Pro is surprisingly good at 3d reasoning. To back that claim up, I've had it create:
A WebGl program that takes input like X123 Y123 Z123 via WebSerial every 100 ms and builds an object out of the resulting path. Required some performance optimizations (just had to tell it what to do). Also asked it to make the corners nicer and it did. (To be fair, I'd already asked a lesser model and put some things in the prompt to nudge it the right way.)
Various OpenSCAD models. E.g., remote control holder with 5 slots, staggered heights, slight slant because it looks cool, and the slots all have different depths. One shot. It implemented the slant/tilt using a shearing matrix. 100 points.
> 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).
Surprised there is no self-similarity in the Recursion Earrings.
Jewelry looks beautiful. Have you managed to make any sales?
Thank you.
We have not really started advertising, but my wife is (very) often complimented on the jewelry when she wears it and that has led to a few sales.
Dope af, looks great.
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister (https://hister.org/ - https://github.com/asciimoo/hister) with the goal to reduce dependence on online search engines and AI answers.
Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface with offline result previews & detailed query language to explore collected content or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.
It can provide a privacy-respecting search experience for serving "recall" type searches where users retrieve previously visited content, but falls short in "discovery" type searches (yet).
This was the first AI project I ended up working on as well, except I approached from building a meta-search first. I only added support for a local index recently (via SQLite FTS 5). But I haven't shared my project, whereas you have a truly fantastic webpage for yours. Plus going the extra distance with a terminal interface and MCP server too.
Much kudos. I hope more people discover how powerful even a local search index of previously visited content can be. And I hope more people can build large indexes as well, so we're not just relying on Brave & Mojeek & Marginalia (and EUSP) to rescue us for the fallback discovery searches.
Mostly games-adjacent hobby tools, it turns out.
(Edit: forgotten in first edition) A cookbook to store the recipes my family likes to cook so I can eventually break up with Pinterest: https://github.com/vtbassmatt/Cookbook
A data extraction pipeline and search engine for a new card game called Mood Swings: https://moodswingsdata.github.io and https://moodswingsdata.github.io/feelings.
An app to let my friends and me build a Magic: the Gathering cube iteratively together: https://github.com/vtbassmatt/popcorn-cube
A custom wiki engine for a family of podcasts I enjoy: https://github.com/vtbassmatt/totalus-wikium
A systemd log viewer for the web: https://github.com/vtbassmatt/djournal
https://github.com/vtbassmatt/djournal is not public ? I'm using https://github.com/ralsina/grafito but I'm not super happy with it
Oops, I forgot this one wasn't public. Sorry! Auth was implemented using a library I don't know much about, so I figured better safe than sorry.
Games stuff for me too - geoguessr in my case. It'd never have been worth putting in the time to build them without AI but so easy with AI.
For storing receipes I like Mealie, and I didn't have to code it myself.
Did you take down djournal? It returns a 404 now.
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 :)...almost.
The pattern generalized is LLM finds the presets,i can even upload a file to make it zone in, the code validates and loads into the plugin. Also using this contract/adapter approach for Terraform, game engine presets, CI pipelines, etc.
Wrote about it here: https://vishsubramanian.me/lm-guitar-tone-generator-polychro...
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.
thanks.Frankly — the system prompt is the sauce. The LLM has encyclopedic knowledge of every amp, cab, and pedal ever made which still blows my mind, but without guardrails it'll confidently tell you to boost mids on a JCM800 (which is how you disappear in a loud mix i've noticed). That era cheat sheet is all the working knowledge over the years of spectacularly failing to get the right tones.
Once someone does that encoding work for a genre, it's reusable forever I think. I'm pretty comfortable with late-80s/early-90s rock well enough to write the specs. But you're right — a "modern metal" prompt, a shoegaze one (which my teenager wants), a funkone,etc - that's the next layer. tone_system.md just needs to be updated. I plan to expand this to more plugins. Contributions welcome.
Amazing! Even though they’re “just prompts” that knowledge is still important and valuable. Very cool. Unfortunately I’m just a guitar newb trying to figure out what pickups are doing things to my tone so you probably don’t want me in there :)
Very cool! I was thinking of doing this. One question, what made you choose polychrome dsp over something like neuraldsp?
No real reason really.In fact its on my list next. I was working on a track in logic that i was mostly sourcing the polychrome presets and i plan to add the same functionality to all my other plugins. The Gojira archetype is one i have my eyes on first
I vibe coded myself a simple little Home Screen-installable webapp that tells me when my first meeting is the next day (I am in a lot of meetings, and they're constantly in flux). That way, I don't need to be logged into anything work-related on my phone, or even mentally engage in that world. I just want to know when I need to wake up. All it shows me is the time, and I can tap on it if I want to see the title. It adjusts the font and color according to how early the meeting is (earlier than 8a gets Nosifer).
Could I have done this myself? Of course. Would I have tho? Prob not.
This kind of simple, hyper-specific bespoke utility is the perfect thing for vibe coding IMO.
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956, before I was born. AI itself is even older than that (e.g. William Grey Walter's robots, Elmer and Elsie in 1948), but it was called cybernetics back then. I've been doing symbolic AI, on and off, since the 1980s.
I assume, though, you mean LLMs. I haven't used them first hand, but I have fairly recently implemented a multi-layer artificial neural network in C, mostly as a learning exercise, but as I had previously built a speech spectrogram in Lisp, I thought I'd try to use it to recognize phonemes, with one hidden layer. The Lisp communicated with the ANN via a Unix pipe. It worked reasonably well for just vowels, but when I added other sounds (e.g. l, r, s, z), its performance deteriorated. I think the C is bug free, but I don't know an easy way to train the ANN. I've tried adding to the training set, adding an extra layer, changing the number of neurons in the hidden layer. The usual debugging skills don't seem to help there.
> I haven't used them first hand
Why not? Given your background surely you would be curious.
I'm interested in how they work, but building anything like them, given the hardware I have, would be impractical. I've seen others use them, including to answer some questions I had, but the answers they gave were obvious, unhelpful, or wrong.
Even if they become more reliable, I like to understand and work things out for myself, rather than just be given the answer.
> I assume, though, you mean LLMs. I haven't used them first hand
Wow, kudos. Honestly.
I need to finish off that blog post.
With Tailscale, you can basically point a domain to the FQDN of a machine you’re sharing with people and the domain will simply work for them (and only them)[1]. But for it to work without them having to know or specify the specific application port, you have to grant them access to 443 (and 80) in your Tailscale ACL for that specific host.
So yeah, now immich.familydomain.com works without family members having to remember the specific port. BUT, serveradmin.familydomain.com (another app on the same host) will ALSO be accessible to them (from a networking POV). We opened port 443/80 for that host after all.
I took a few hours with Claude back in January (?) and we wrote a tiny Go authorization gateway which basically consults both Tailscale’s public API and Tailscale’s `localapi` and returns the appropriate response to Caddy based on the requesting user’s actual allowed ports.
So now I can share different apps (subdomains) with different people without forfeiting access controls, all driven by Tailscale’s policy file.
(I hope I didn’t mess up the crux of it, pretty late here)
Edit: why not (something like) Authentik? Quoting from the draft:
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4PDUXB_fgI found cloudflare zero trust excellent for this and it works perfectly well on the free tier (I do use cloudflare as my registrar)
Pangolin would have been a better direct fit than Authentik. It does come with an embedded idP nowadays but can also use Authentik. Another tool to keep an eye on is Netbird which is like a tailscale like mesh but has proxy support for whatever app you want to share with or without authentication.
authentik is also an oidc provider... couldn't it also be the way they auth to tailscale too?
Maybe…I really didn’t want to have to install another app just because I’m sharing though. My line of thinking was/is:
If tomorrow I decide not to share with anyone, I don’t want to have to reconfigure stuff. I simply edit the Tailscale policy file, and (maybe) spin down my server.
I built a browser extension that stops animated images such as GIFs by default.
I've always found it annoying that browsers autoplay animated images, and there still isn't a built-in way to control that behavior.
The extension shows the first frame and adds a play/stop button directly on the image.
What started as a personal utility ended up being published on the Firefox and Chrome extension stores. It's still a small project, but it solved a problem I had every day.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gif-control/
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gif-control/nhoihin...
Bug reports and feedback are very welcome.
Disclaimer: I previously posted a Show HN about it, but it didn't get traction [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48208916
> I've always found it annoying that browsers autoplay animated images, and there still isn't a built-in way to control that behavior.
When I first started daily driving Linux in 2011, this was the default behavior of konqueror, Firefox, librewolf, and opera.
I would have to set a flag in the software to get it to autoplay videos and gifs. They would just load with a warning message in the render space that said click to load auto play video.
Not surprised that it’s gone.
Nice, this means ebay will be usable for me again. A while back they started permitting videos instead of pictures for the thumbnails of certain products and I pretty much stopped browsing the site. As if online retails websites weren't bad enough already.
> I previously posted a Show HN about it, but it didn't get traction
FYI your linked submission is marked as dead. Not sure if that's a problem with your account or not. You should email the HN mods.
I built https://beachcomber.sh after one day getting huge lag and asking claude to investigate found that one of the factors was thousands of resources purely for giving my prompt, tmux statusline, nvim statusline, claude statusline the same identical information.
I probably would not have bothered to allocate time to this pre ai, the juice wasnt really worth the squeeze. But I approached it with an initial amusing naivete about it being 'super simple'. As is almost always the case with software theres a reasonable amount of hidden complexity. But I have been using it as a sort of learning proving ground for how to work with agentic development. For example I got to a point where claude wouldnt implement properly and would argue with me about changes because it would read the current/old docs in the repo and get confused about reality. So right now I'm experimenting with 'canonical specs' that can only be changed modally with gates and a defined cascade from canon, to code, to docs in that order. Otherwise you end up in a weird thrash about the docs and the code disagree and which one will the agent decide to change for consistency?
Anyway, its been interesting and its v0.6 and at a point where Ive not hit a sharp edge dogfooding for a while and some beta testers would be valuable. Right now you have to manually wire it into your stack, once some others have kicked the tyres hard enough I will make some pr's to the popular tools to consider integrating it.
https://github.com/amedeedaboville/mish A mosh clone that uses QUIC as the transport layer so it can do both “unreliable datagrams” like UDP and also a TCP-like reliable stream, so it has scrollback buffer.
Also QUIC means the crypto is handled for me, no need to trust the LLM to hand roll its own crypto.
Cool Rust libraries enable this like alacritty for the terminal, and being able to have russh (rust implementation of ssh) means it works even if ssh isn’t installed (eg on windows which og mosh never supported).
Claude tested this thing forwards and backwards: e2e tests, simulated (foundationDB like) tests for the network and for tokio async thread ordering, 12 different fuzzing targets, even some light model checking on the protocol itself. Each fuzzing round found bugs.
Except for a few “it may have bugs, I have only proven it correct” scenarios I’d say it’s looking like it’ll be as trustworthy as (maybe more than?) the original. I’m really happy with it.
I have been thinking of this for a few years! Nice, I will check it out.
I got tired of all the quirks when opening CSV files in Excel, so I built a fast and lean viewer for CSV - at least this was what initially planned.
Later I find the technique I developed to instantly load arbitrary large CSV files can be generalized to work with any format, with an incremental parser combinator. This means the tool can read from not only files, but any stream-oriented sources like a pipe.
I did used AI in development but it didn't speed up the process very much, as I found a lot of time was spent on the deign of an intuitive and consistent UX. The project is still not very production ready, but in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/Verticalysis/Hitomi
I've redesigned my workstation OS using NixOS and Claude Code and it's been a huge success.
I like the ideals of NixOS: reproducible setup from a git repo, ability to boot into a past config if you mess things up. But it's a big job learning and implementing that configuration manually. I've been playing with NixOS for ~2 years and like it but never really got that close to a full workstation setup.
When Ubuntu 26.04 came out I really needed to upgrade my 22.04 workstation and decided I'd really give NixOS a try before going with 26.04.
This time I decided to entirely configure it via Claude Code. I've been entirely running on it for a week and there's nothing I'm missing. I even took a stepping-stone approach where I first installed it on my old laptop, left my current workstation in place (in case the experiment failed), and then did a reinstall of my current workstation. NixOS made setting up the second machine trivial. Now, if my normal workstation were to have a hardware failure, I can just grab my /etc/nixos and rebuild and I'm back in business. Which is important since my workstation is now out of warranty and 6 years old.
One win is that I had been using LunarVim and AstroVim, and liked the "batteries included" approach, but they were hard to upgrade and while I was trying to do as little customization as possible, I still needed to do some and that was tricky in their configs. I used Claude Code to build a neovim setup with just my desired features, and it's now a single ~700 line neovim.nix file with everything in it. It's fully featured including LSPs+TreeSitter, etc.
I’d love to give NixOS a try on an old ThinkPad. I’m pretty comfortable with Claude; is it as simple as ask and go, or do you have any suggestions for getting started?
That's exactly what I did, an old ThinkPad t470s.
I installed NixOS, and then I copied /etc/nixos down to my main workstation where I had claude code working, and used it to modify the configs. I'd then rsync them to the other machine and run the "nixos-rebuild" there.
I don't recall exactly how I did the initial copies, because SSH wasn't set up there. Probably would be best to just ask claude what needs to be done to enable SSH, it's only like a 1 line change.
Some of the first things I asked it to do were:
Those are the top things that come to mind. Honestly, it went pretty smoothly. The only real issue I had to speak of was that I'm running bleeding edge, and the moment I decided to unplug my desktop monitors from the Ubuntu machine and connect them to NixOS I had it do a package update at the same time. This hit a Gnome+Wayland bug which left me at a black screen. A nice thing about NixOS is you can just reboot and at the grub menu select an older system config, so I did that. Claude tracked down an open bug about it, tried a few mitigations, but eventually I told it to just revert the version of gnome until it was fixed upstream.It has gone extremely smoothly. Zero regrets. My manual attempts at NixOS always ran me into dark corners that I didn't know how to do (like installing gitbutler-cli, which is not packaged for NixOS yet), and Claude had no trouble figuring out.
One addition: Flakes is something that I think Claude recommended at the point I switched over to home manager+SOPS. Flake, Home Manager, and SOPS were all things I was somewhat aware of from my previous attempts at NixOS. If you are coming in brand new, I'd probably recommend asking Claude to start with flakes sooner rather than later. Just specifically ask it to use flakes.
Pretty much everything else I did without asking Claude much in the way of NixOS specifics. I just described what I want in general terms.
A pile of various tools:
A self hosted web archiving tool with support for extendible processing pipelines (eg. extract article -> translate -> summarize -> generate tags, download video -> split audio track -> transcribe -> summarize), which led me to make a managed chromium browser with extensions and warc support for archiving, and a RSS feed synthesizer (take random article listing page that doesn't have RSS and generate a feed for it) so that I can plug it into my archiver. An active learning loop for a model to clean up articles by removing junk like native ads and sponsored blocks.
A tabbed terminal with project management features like launching the database, app server, and claude code in different tabs with one click, and split browser/terminal panes (eg. opening a browser automatically at the correct URL when the terminal reads http://localhost:4000/).
A modular MCP server with a MCP proxy and OAuth2 dcr so that I can easily add new random ideas for MCP servers in a few minutes with Claude and deploy them such that it's available to Claude by refreshing the tool list.
A small tool to render Claude conversations so that I can link to them from my obsidian vault with something like convo://claude-code/-home-jfim-projects-foo/<guide>
And overall just deploying docker containers for my self hosted setup
Most of it is on GitHub, in various states of readiness.
Several of these sound interesting to me, gonna check them out tonight!
Cool! Just a heads-up that some of this is in a pretty rough state, but shoot me an email if you have any questions or issues.
Sounds like we're walking the same path - but moved most of the self-hosted stuff to self-hosted Forgejo vs Github...
https://gitlab.com/grepular/calendiff - Point it at a .ics URL and it monitors for calendar changes and emails you about them.
https://gitlab.com/grepular/foxcage - Runs Firefox inside podman to isolate it from the host. Has some interesting features that I wanted and nothing else gave me.
https://gitlab.com/grepular/claude-sandbox - Yet another Claude sandbox. Runs it inside podman again. Has a pretty powerful proxy system for securing your credentials.
Currently working on a tool for sanitising email. Will be blogging it up at https://www.grepular.com/blog/ when it's ready for others to use. Does things like applying policies to html/svg/calendar/vcard parts to whitelist or blacklist tags/attributes/css/url schemas, clean URLs, fetch remote content at delivery time and attaching to the email to prevent tracking, pgp and smime auto encryption/decryption and a million other features.
A SQLite based sweeper of all the scans, notes, PDFs and images I have on my filesystem, that stores their paths and allows searching their OCR’ed descriptions and text, as provided by Mistral OCR. I can ask things like “when does my car need maintenance” or “find me that picture my kid drew for Mother’s Day”. I use pi-based bash executable to launch a doc chat like that. https://github.com/maxim/ringbinder
Nice! I did something similar for myself but fully offline. It started because I had to do a tax return and collecting information was a pain point.
Yeah, for me it was all about not letting mail and kids schoolwork pile up. I like to scan ads that local businesses leave in my mailbox, so that I can ask "show me lawn care services near me". A lot of them don't really have any other online presence.
Btw, I tried to keep the Mistral part modular, so that another OCR could be integrated.
how Mistral OCR works for you? Is it really better than Tesseract?
IME way better. It may not be the best out there, but it's cheap (2c per page), fast, easy to integrate API, and sufficient for my needs. It does things like describe what's drawn in pictures and shown in graphs, which all helps when searching.
great! have you tested how well it return coordinates of objects/text? Ive tried with generic LLMs like Gemini/Qwen/Gemma and they all are unstable with coordinates around text, better when using visual grounding though
Yeah, for perfect positioning/overlaying I would be much stricter with my requirements. For that type of OCR I used Apple’s own LiveText framework that comes with MacOS. But in this use case I only care about standalone plain text and descriptive text to store in the database, not overlay over original content, so never tested Mistral on that front.
I made a tool that creates sandboxes (docker, podman, orbstack, seatbelt, tart, containerd, kata, firecracker) and then sets up an agent (claude, codex, gemini, aider, opencode) inside it with max permissiveness (no prompts to call sed, etc).
It creates its own copy of your workdir for the agent to play in, and then you pull changes out ala git diffs or commits.
It's a MASSIVE time saver, and I use it as my daily driver.
https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai
- A telegram bot that messages me in the morning and afternoon with a todo list essentially. It’s connected to Google Calendar and a crude memory database (SQLite). The kids wanted me to make it sound like the character Yarnaby from Silksong.
- Automated backups of steam saves for when my kids wanted to play the same game on my account and saves get out of sync with steam cloud. The kind of thing I wouldn’t usually bother with myself.
- automated script that reruns failed GitHub actions in repositories with flakey tests ‘cause why bother fixing them? It also auto catches up branches with the main branch for the repo.
- a YNAB extension for pi (agent harness) to help with entering purchases that need to be split across categories. This is also in the telegram bot so I can use voice-to-text to explain a purchase.
- I already had some python scripts to generate pdfs of Magic: The Gathering cards for printing proxies. I had an llm extend it to make some dividers with the set names and symbols on them. Makes organizing them a lot easier in the big card boxes.
The tool I'm most proud of is "Hex Flex" (https://seidleroni.github.io/Hex-Flex-Web/). It is a tool to view and compare the contents of Intel Hex files. Should be useful to other people who work in the firmware field.
Not exactly a tool, but I also made pelohard.com which ranks the most recent Peloton classes by difficulty. Updated twice daily.
Before agentic coding went mainstream, one of my main use cases was creating sticker designs for concerts and music festivals. Creating the stickers and giving them away was a good way to meet new people.
I used OpenClaw to make a health and wellness coach agent that tracks calories and alcoholic drinks and logs it to a personal dashboard. I send it photos of my meals, and it will estimate the calories and log it. It will also help me make meal decisions and give me words of encouragement.
I used this HAM dashboard git repo to create a bespoke dashboard of different video and weather feeds from my area: https://github.com/VA3HDL/hamdashboard
I also, in the same rabbit hole, created a radio reference guide for the Sonoma County area: https://mybbor.com/petaluma-sonoma-ham-radio.html
I've spun up probably close to a dozen one-off or small websites for various little interests or projects. One of my favorites is a short domain file uploader that I can quickly host Markdown and HTML files to share with family, friends, and colleagues. It's using Caddy and running on a DO-VPS. I open sourced the code here: https://github.com/RobbyMcCullough/honeydrop
It's not just for myself, but I'm primarily creating it for myself - it's a browser for designers. I work in code but I often want a figma-type interface to explore different ideas without having to branch or litter my codebase with a bunch of demo components/files.
Normal browsers have built-in dev tools - this has built-in design tools. so I can visit my app, open up a surrounding canvas, pull fragments into the canvas, do some design-ish stuff, and merge it back into code. All in the same UI. It was cool enough that I'm going to release it, but for now it's very useful for myself.
https://matry.design/
A "Home Agent" setup, with customized special agents to manage various aspects of the house through home assistant, learning feedback from household users to try and tune everything at the right time.
Various MCPs for above.
A "remote claude code server", that gives project level overview and lets me run projects / develop on my home server rather than locally through my laptop. Supports ssh as well as a web UI (projects in a list, shell rendered using https://xtermjs.org/, with a tile overview when working on multiple projects to watch for turn ends.
Similar to above, I have a local version that auto launches a new project scoped podman container, passess through the work directory, installs CC/Codex/Grok into it and passess through the auth / config for each agent. Then dumps you into that shell with aliases to map each agent to that agent with a few special env flags to disable permission prompts, so claude = `claude --dangerously-bypass-permissions`.
An extensive MCP for Obsidian that gives agents access to use a lot of the more advanced Obsidian functionality, such as suggesting and installing plugins / configs / etc.
It's helped some of my daily productivity, but I still prefer to get my hands dirty with code most of the time rather than full prompt it.
Do you have any code/insights about this home agent you could share?
I'm thinking about creating something pretty similar, I want a digital housekeeper that keeps an eye on what is happening in my house and notifies me about dead/unreliable devices, fix broken automations, suggest new automations based on sensor data, etc...
I've setup the unofficial home assistant MCP already, but LLMs seems to struggle a bit to use it properly and I haven't looked into it yet to understand what is happening.
I wrote a tui sql client to replace DataGrip (which is really slow). https://github.com/keithn/sql It's quite customized to what I wanted, I haven't really checked it works with other things.... only thing is, I don't really use it much anymore, I just get claude to do all my querying.
Most of the tools I write now are bridges to various SaaS products that have APIs but no CLIs.
how is autocomplete implemented ?
autocomplete isn't "exact", so it does have in its suggestions things that don't exactly always make sense, but it does list things by what is contextually relevant. It has a basic understanding of sql syntax such it will suggest potential keywords next, it introspects things like tablenames so they are available in spots where a tablename would be relevant, and if it has tables it will introspect them to get fieldname, and any named things like x as y will also become suggestions within the context of the query you are working on. This results in mostly correct suggestions. However it generally always has the suggestion you want, it works really well with field names / table names, which mainly what I wanted, and very basic with sql syntax (which I normally don't need any help with other than relevant keyword completion)
- self-hosted POPSQL alternative - https://github.com/p-raj/collab-sqlc
- CleanMyMac alternative based on opensource tools - https://github.com/p-raj/open-cleanmymac
- Standup meetings to comic generation - https://github.com/p-raj/standup-to-comics
- Configurable Pomodoro - https://github.com/p-raj/open-tomato
A few more closed source ones that aren't any close to be in a working state.
Do you have any examples that you've generated from standup-to-comics? I didn't see anything in the repo, and would like to see some examples before spending the time to set up myself :)
Good point, will update the repo. Though, the comics generated by the local llms all kinda suck. And, not setting this up for yourself is smart, it kind of fills up the disk pretty fast. All the recordings, local llms, etc.
I was... not prepared for your standup to comic README. Besides just being a cool idea, you gave me some things to think about and several new rabbit holes to explore.
There’s another one I’m planning to start - subtitles for your conference calls. It would generate netflix like expressive subtitles such as - “uncomfortable silence ensues”, “looks at a distance”, “playful music in the background” etc.
I've written my own programming language. IMO, "good architecture" exists outside of specific language choices - SOLID, various design patterns, etc.. I've always felt like I'm implementing the same high level design in any language I've worked with, it's just manifested and looked different, depending on the language tooling. The "good" opinions are baked into the _structure_ of the language itself, so the robots have no choice but to build well designed codebases.
https://github.com/hale-lang/hale
One of the "huh, didn't expect that to work" moment was getting GLM 5 to make me a user space driver for the Nintendo Switch Pro 2 Controller on Ubuntu.
When you plug it in, the device is recognised, but press any button and it attempts to start the pairing process. Then using evtest nothing is coming through.
That^ was pretty much my prompt too, and 10 minutes later I have a working driver with systemd unit so it works through restarts. Amazing stuff!
Created a few Open Source tools:
Open Camera Control https://github.com/jcubic/open-camera-control - that allows me to control the settings of my DSLR while I'm recording myself.
Horavox - https://github.com/jcubic/horavox - A speaking clock
Mutimon - https://github.com/jcubic/mutimon - a config driven web scraper (found this post from the email sent by this tool).
ASCII-Globe - https://github.com/jcubic/ascii-globe - JavaScript library that renders a rotating earth or any map. Can be used to add animation to your website.
The globe is cool, but I find it unsettling that Japan is missing.
Also New Zealand.
You made that up, no one's ever heard of such a thing.
r/MapsWithoutNZ is growing
A "plans for agents" interface because I'm tired of reading huge markdown plans to iterate on the real work. Is supports infinite 2d space like miro, but has one thread per card, a cli for the agent to treat open notes. It support voice prompting too.
It feels like you have parallel conversation with an agent, except it understands all the surface. And it's granular, surgical and precise.
Usage: I'm writing a game design document of 70 pages with it, working surgically without having to worry about what page number the edit was.
It really solved my main bottleneck which is telling the AI what to do in a complete and comprehensive context.
Readme is trash but your agent will understand what to do
https://github.com/WiseDragonAI/TheBlueprintTool
Sounds interesting! I’m using VS Code with Cline to instruct Claude Sonnet 4.7, to develop a web-app, and find it’s frequently re-reading the project documentation at each and every turn, costing me tokens. Would TheBlueprintTool enable me to avoid this - or do I misunderstand its use case? TIA
On my list of build it from scratch has always been to build a programming language. So with the help of AI I was able to get it done!
Why did I build it? At work I've seen two major problems with our ai workflows/ skills libraries. There is a lack of determinism when your whole workflow is a markdown file of 100 steps, and markdown skill libraries lack composability. Meaning we violate things like DRY in the all the md files in the skills library.
I built Margarita to allow for markdown and logical operators to exist together, which means you can bring in determinism through code structures when it makes sense, and fall back to llm dynamic code when that makes sense. As an added bonus allows for composable prompts ala React which solve my other gripe with skills libraries being a mash of text everywhere.
Overall I've been getting pretty luke warm responses from Reddit, so I'll probably just shelve it, but it was a blast to make. Got to build code agents for pretty much every llm provider and built my own harness. I would recommend doing that it's a great learning experience.
https://www.margarita.run https://github.com/Banyango/margarita
I’ve got a lukewarm IQ, would you mind explaining and example/use case for this?
No worries, I'm pretty bad at describing the benefit of this project.
Let's say you wanted to use Gemma4B to run your workflow, however that model doesn't always do what you want it to. You could write the Margarita code to do the variable tracking, loops, etc and use the llm call where Gemma is able to work better. It's about finding the sweet spot of code vs llm agentic/tool calling.
Can you write that in js/go/etc? sure, but this lets you write it in a much simpler syntax that's much closer to markdown.
There's a few example on the website: https://www.margarita.run/custom-ralph.html https://www.margarita.run/components.html
- Otzel, an OT library for elixir that is in some common cases 50x faster than the most widely deployed elixir OT library:
https://github.com/ityonemo/otzel
- Spector, a bare-bones CQRS library for elixir that composes extremely well with Otzel:
https://spector.hexdocs.pm/Spector.html
- nanodrop, an elixir library that interfaces with nanodrop spectrophotometers:
https://nanodrop.hexdocs.pm/Nanodrop.html
- opengenepool, a web-based dna editing tool (technically I started this one 11 years ago):
https://opengenepool.vidalalabs.com/ https://github.com/vidala-labs/opengenepool
- a proprietary camera library that communicates with industrial-grade digital cameras.
- a full on self-hosted lab management system (journal articles, obsidian-like notes, lab notebook, kanban, embedded dna editor, LIMS), obviously this builds on all of the above items
I needed something to help me stay off the computer (sites and applications) at certain times of the day with enforcement and in a way that's hard to remove. I had some ideas but was able to systematize all that into a proper program that I use daily. It's been very effective and it's much better (for me) than any of the commercial solutions that I've found for Linux. About 40% of the program was done using Aider (before I picked up Claude Code). The rest is using CC.
https://github.com/nibrahim/glocker
A music theory learning tool. I'm building bits as I learn new areas - https://www.asmusictheory.com
I also built a kanban board with agent integration and context management, with a vs code extension to go with it (also helps with git worktrees too): https://www.agentkanban.io
There is AS Notes - an Obsidian / Logseq / Roam alternative for use a s a VS code extension (is designed for use behind corporate firewalls, git friendly): https://www.asnotes.io
Also NumeroMoney: https://www.numeromoney.com - For personal finance spending analysis and budgeting.
AI has been a great 'exoskeleton' for me. I fortunately had some good infrastructure and solid application base templates from before AI 'got gud' and so building on these has been the best of both worlds - a solid base and improved speed of development.
I am a researcher studying orbital dynamics of asteroids/comets/dust. I made a very precise visualization tool for the solar system, it shows the motion of all of the known asteroids. When you click on a specific asteroid it will then show the hyper precise orbit for it which matches JPL's orbit calculations (full physics, n-body, relativity, non-spherical planets).
Not mobile friendly
https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/
An emacs routine to convert a region of org-mode formatting to Markdown formatting and put into the clipboard:
Too many to enumerate but a couple highlights (and many of these I've turned into apps):
- https://blunders.ai : Chess improvement app
- https://fretwork.ai : Freelancer management app (CRM/Billing/etc)
- https://validity.ai : Provide agents the ability to check the UI code it made (w/out needing to run through your full app)
- Save money on groceries + meal planning. This has probably saved hundreds if not $1k+ for our household at this point (some details here: https://x.com/ryanlanciaux/status/2063604299590939042)
- Orchestration / Starter Kit / Chat : Tool to help me manage multiple agent sessions at once. Some details on this one here https://x.com/ryanlanciaux/status/2063976049537417408
Tell me more about the grocery app. Sounds awesome!
https://gist.github.com/ryanlanciaux/895ce19d94db765be4ebf53...
Go: A server and client for managing webhooks in development environments: https://github.com/onebusaway/hooks
Ruby on Rails: A volunteer 'jobs' board for OSS projects (ironically): https://ossvolunteers.com
JavaScript (client side+Cloudflare Worker): A map showing stop-level usage of OneBusAway across the Puget Sound region, updated daily: https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org/onebusaway/visuali...
Swift/iOS: An app that helps me track how much time I spend in the five heart rate zones, so that I can better focus my workouts. I'm working on version 2 right now, which will take advantage of some new features in iOS 27 and has an all new UI. https://www.zone2.app
I've always wanted my own VW diagnostic tool suite, and between tooling that was released in public on GitHub (https://github.com/kartoffelpflanze/ODIS-project-explorer) and my own research from years ago, it always seemed straightforward but too tedious to execute on. Claude did a great job making something useful, https://github.com/bri3d/mcd-diag-rs , and now I don't have to find a Windows machine or remember a specific diagnostic cable to replace my brake pads.
I also build a ton of household glue stuff; I was never really passionate enough about the whole "homeserver" thing to spend the effort in going beyond basic video recording for my security system, but now I have all of my local-only home automation stuff wired together, mostly into HomeKit, and have been able to ditch a ton of cloud services.
elaborate on the home automation pls
I used the usual stack of HomeAssistant, Frigate, and a bazillion glue connectors to consolidate devices that were previously cloud apps on my phone.
For example, previously I used the Frigate web UI over VPN to access my cameras, but I instead had Claude help set up go2rtc to push the video to HomeKit. I used the Eufy app for my doorbell, which I was instead able to integrate into HomeAssistant and then push to HomeKit as well, and I was also able to integrate some TP-Link Kasa plugs with HomeAssistant too.
This is all stuff I could have done relatively easily myself, but I hate nothing more than wading through horribly documented disparate configuration systems (I do that enough all day), so having Claude to do it for me is what unlocked it actually getting done.
I also added on to some custom one-offs like an ESP32-based controller for my kid's RGB LED nightlight for fun, although that stuff was more hand-coded since I find it enjoyable.
My favourite football team was really at risk of relegation, then I created for me and my friends an MCMC bayesian simulator to estimate the relegation match by match. It was an opportunity to get used in real life to some concepts (MCMC, Metropolis-Hastings, etc) that I always struggled to understand. And my team got saved from relegation with an amounts of points very close to the number of points that my model forecasted
I also wrote an honeypot that emulate an Ollama instance: beside the attackers, it's funny how many people are looking for free inference. Somebody from Brazil try to use my honeypot to write to chapters of a book about traditional magic rituals. My next step is to extract the data collected by this tool to extract IoC and malicious prompts and share them with the community.
In the same scope I wrote also an Ollama scanner: it fetch from Shodan the open Ollama instances, verify that they are reachable and check if they are real sending a dummy query.
Tottenham?
Fiorentina, in Serie A. After 11 matches we have only 4 points and we won the first match only in December: in the past nobody got saved with a so bad performances in the first matches.
I didn't build tools in the classic sense of something you build and run semi permanently, like baked into your setup or home server or whatnot; but I found myself building bespoke tools with most new projects at work. Get a new Jira ticket, figure out which components will be involved, often times the tool goes collecting logs and parsing them into a Web UI with buttons to toggle various features or params. And it tends to be different for every project. It's like the oldschool shell oneliners but more powerful and easier to write.
I have made a TUI tool for organizing and authoring sermons written by myself. It also has a third mode for reading one or two bible versions in parallel. I love the interface and keep adding features to make it easy to navigate in and something that actually helps me to organize and write sermons. Some features are to have notes at specific places in the bible, summaries, notes, exports to html/pdf, metadata for each sermon and autofocus on widgets when changing between the three modes. Happy to work in the terminal this way. :-)
"Hi everyone, today we're going to read the book of Acts."
opens terminal
(made me smile)
I could, but I would most likely print out a copy from the pdf export or bring a tablet. ;-)
Just curious, how do you feel about using AI to help write the sermons?
I would not so much, perhaps look for spelling errors. For me writing the sermon is the goal, diving into the deep and exploring the topic, passage and such. If I preach it, it is kind of a bonus, or a driver to begin with :-)
https://github.com/Opfour/warfare - A modern HTML5 remake of Warfare 1.0 (1995) by Carric Moor Games. Turn-based hex strategy with city management, unit recruitment, tactical combat, and AI opponents — all running in the browser with zero dependencies. Playable but still building in additional features
https://github.com/Opfour/coeus-ci - Named after Coeus (SEE-us), the 100 eyed Greek Titan of the inquisitive mind — whose name literally means "querying." CI stands for Competitive Intelligence. A business intelligence OSINT tool that builds company profiles from free public data sources. Give it a domain — get back a scored report covering stability, growth, tech maturity, financial health, security posture, and transparency.
https://github.com/Opfour/op4 - Op4 is a terminal-based encrypted messaging application written in Rust. It provides end-to-end encrypted private messaging with post-quantum cryptography, routed entirely through the Tor network so that neither the content of your messages nor your IP address is exposed to anyone — not even the person you are talking to.
Spartan (Private) - Open-source safety app for women. Community-based emergency response.
AATR - (Private) Catering unified platform: events dashboard, pack lists, and staff management
https://github.com/Opfour/thelinuxreport.com - Linux news and information aggregator.
God I love this stuff!
(edit: I also have about 6 more projects I am working on locally not yet uploaded to GitHub)
I built a mac native PDF reader called Xeil with toggleable darkmode that preserves images (inspired by veil), vim keybinding and fuzzy search. Before this, I was using Skim with inverted color to simulate dark mode.
Dont have the code up for sharing but I documented xeil (along with a few other tools) in my blog: https://paul.mou.dev/posts/2026-04-28-software-for-one/#xeil
I made MooBlock - a browser extension for digital self-regulation. Basically, it adds a small timeout before you can access a distracting site. This timeout grows the more you visit these sites, and decays when you stay away.
And yes, there are lots of cows. The longer you stay on distracting sites, the more cows appear.
The idea is to make distracting sites less appealing, without using a black-and-white site blocker, which you can easily disable.
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/mooblock/eanbagjehd...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mooblock/
Countless little things to clean up data or improve tools I wrote long ago. If you count HomeAssistant things (via MCP) then many many more little qol things, too.
Most recently, though, is a basic python CLI/Flask app that makes it point-click to manipulate the route table and dnsmasq settings on a raspberry pi. eth0 on the pi goes to LAN and put a USB ethernet attached to a switch and you now have a pretty powerful IoT/Untrusted device inspection environment.
One click to change the DHCP settings offered to the device, run a pcap, allow/deny the device access to certain services or NAT them elsewhere as needed. Straight forward DNS adjustments that can be applied per device and now that MITM-Proxy has a python API... it's pretty straight forward to also peep inside of SSL protected things.
I’m working on Descartes[^0]. First to help diagnose what’s wrong with a machine. Later to help manage and monitor it by letting an agent build layers of tailor-made deterministic rules and statistical models, a bit like the description of the ship’s AI at the beginning of Absolution Gap. And serve as an ops "point of contact" for other agents for the machine / fleet of machines it’s in charge of.
Sometimes I daydream that the end goal demo would be to set one up in a VM and let a sort of ransomware lose in it, and see if the agent can identify what’s going on and react in time.
But for now I’m fighting Apple notarization to enable local notifications on macOS.
[0]: https://github.com/lightless-labs/descartes
I wrote my own Claude Code agent. It leverages some parts of multiple different agent stacks but using my architecture. It's layered, has long-term memory, agency to expand upon work, access to linear, access to all the models and endpoints you could possibly wish, as well as support for combining multiple providers and models into the layers so that delegation to the workers happen on the cheaper, more cost effective models. All of this runs at scale in an orchestration platform I wrote, using said agent, to create a cluster of docker containers in a JBYOS configuration, cross-cloud, k8s or swarm or whatever can run docker. It's pretty sweet and is basically an AI software development shop. I only have to give it ideas and goals.
As the 36 millionth person building something similar, I wish[0] there were better info out there on what works well. I can understand why, but it's still frustrating seeing on the one hand how deeply helpful the flywheel of this type of setup can be, and on the other hand how every blog post stops at some incredibly superficial setup to help them write more blog posts.
[0] Yes this is a plea, if anyone has the good stuff
Here's what I did, roughly, YMMV. I have a lot of experience in managing scale and web platforms as it's what I did for like a decade so, grain of salt and all. Let's assume you have access to N number of linux machines with GPU's, for the sake of argument.
I have a small RPI acting as my homelab pihole and dns so what better than to run the management UI on?! So I wrote a small bun management plane, nothing fancy, just a react app with user auth + openidconnect for those that like that stuff. From there, you have compute pool (empty at the moment because it requires a deployed agent). I added the ability to directly ssh into a machine, install the "agent" with privilege so it can manage docker, and the agent talks back to the management plane over websockets. A keep alive / health / status / resource packet every 15 seconds. Streams if you are looking at logs or accessing a container. I used Codex for most of this work but defined the protocol and everything upfront using protobuf (even though it's websockets). It helped with the "vision" and keeping the agent like Codex on the rails through completion.
Once you have a pool (agents installed on your N number of linux machines), you can deploy apps (which are my way of saying, a container with a namespace) or you can deploy agents (which is my agent, custom made for this) that are assigned to a project. I decided Org structures are a great way to delegate workloads so that's how they are modeled. Projects provide the git repo, the docker registry for images and storage of artifacts, as well as the history of all the prompts the agents have done in the project. Useful if you want to go back and search through |thinking| tags to figure out the reasoning behind a decision.
All of this was built in like maybe a month with Codex initially, until my agent was up to the task of coding w/ an endpoint configured (OpenAI API initially, now, NVidia DGX Sparks). What really works well is the delegation. The agent's have a webui that is exposed via the project urls so you can interact with the "scrum masters" of each project. They also share a stream if they are on the same project (but different subprojects).
I too wish there was more information on this but I didn't keep the lack of it from stopping me experimenting and finding what works. I came from the Mesos/DCOS era where you stop thinking about the metal and think in pools of resources. It's a distributed systems problem.
Made a multi-player Battlefield game for my scout group: up to 6 players set up ships like in the classic Battefield game. But you can try to hit any of the other up to 5 enemies and each team can see who hit them.
And instead of turn-based, you have to hike to/visit a physical location, fill in a code you found there to get bombs for the game. Or do a quiz and get the answers right.
Great fun so far!
If anyone wants to play, go to https://live-battlefield.ngrok.app/join/uag-fav-dzs and if there's a bunch of players I'll start a game sometime this evening (some 8 hours from now).
I had OpenCode with DeepSeek V4 Flash create a quiz about the HN FAQ, so use that to earn bombs :-)
You will need to place some ships (or have them auto-placed) before the game can start.
I've made a number of ceramic molds for slumping fused glass into bowls. As well as wooden templates for ceramic mugs. I've devised a few carrying tools to move glass frit paintings from my studio down to my barn where the kilns sit without spilling the glass.
Or were you only asking about digital tools? I haven't really made any of those. Making physical tools feels much more satisfying these days.
> Or were you only asking about digital tools? I haven't really made any of those. Making physical tools feels much more satisfying these days.
I made that realization last year and since then it's just been random project after random project each one requiring me to discover a new tool or method to do some aspect of the project "properly". I'll never be a plumber or electrician professionally but it's so rewarding to start from zero and learn something new that is tangible in the real world. That's the one AI use case I've walked away from feeling like I actually learned something.
I’m fixing up an old Bridgeport-style 5hp mill and converting it to CNC. I got it working enough to make myself a fly cutter out of scrap steel. :)
Best comment on the thread. Fellow potter & sculptor here, is your work online anywhere?
The overlap between ceramicists and technologists is never zero. Part of my initiative to slowly replace every part of my house and home with things I've made... 1% progress is good, right?
I'm so glad i'm not the only one....well I have dreams and visions of a plan but the most i've done is a half baked Patreon and Substack scraper that only kinda works to capture my sunk cost of subscriptions I never used, a movie theater listing app that allows me to find classic movies that may get buried from the mass advertised slop, a custom sewn jacket that contains pockets for homecooked popcorn and locally grown fruit and well a 3-D printed sauce cup holder for all those sauce cups that I get from fast food restaruants.
Im slowly trying to extricate myself by cooking more from home only from local farmers and what I can grow from home (so far only one cucumber). After all, can you really build everything else if your own body molecules are being replaced by low quality things made by others?
I'll get around to 100% at some point before I die or I wont care anymore since i'll be dead: one of those outcomes is inevitable.
I'm ahead of you by a ways but your instincts are not wrong :) we have timber and plans to replace the flooring with logged and milled timber, sourcing clay from the property, making tomato sauce of the gods from home grown roma tomatoes. it's a lovely way to spend a half century I think.
Can you fire ceramic in a house oven? Or do you need something more industrial?
You can do interesting things with microwave kilns these days, I wonder if they get hot enough for ceramics? They can melt copper, I believe, so they’d be in the ball park.
No.
Low fire clay fires at 1060°C+ and high fire clay at 1222°C+.
[Corrected to both be Centigrade]
Which unit is correct?
After I lost a family member to a cancer that routine screening could have caught early, I started to realized: The screening existed and the guidelines existed, but nothing turned a long medical screening guideline into “here is what you should do.” So I built FixYou for myself and my family. You answer a few questions about age, sex, family history, and lifestyle, and it builds a personalized screening plan from the USPSTF and ACS guidelines using LLM in about 3 minutes.
For anyone that’s interested, please free to try it here https://www.fixyou.app/
I lost a family member recently as well. Sorry for your loss. I would love to use this, yet my POST request (when answering) is blocked. Is it geo-location based or something? I'm not using an ad-blocker or anything.
I’m very sorry for your loss as well. Have you try it in your browser? There should be no geo block.
That's great. Being in the same shoes I wanted to try it, unfortunately I get "Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again." error.
I 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)
Yes! I think so. It was not my usecase as my goal was to actually still be in control of DJing myself. I just wanted good candidates for mixes. But I wanted to still be in the loop to have fun just playing.
This sounds awesome! Is it on GitHub anywhere?
hey! no :-( It's probably vibecoded garbage. Its kinda interesting as this one use software is actually good enough where i have been using it for over 1 month and it does accomplish what i need to do. It made me rethink software quality a little tbh.
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.
This is my daily driver, a security-hardened Docker-image with OpenCode to run the coding agent in an isolated environment.
https://github.com/pkhamre/opencode-docker
Also made this minimalist carousel generator after seeing a carousel I really liked at LinkedIn.
Project: https://its.pkhamre.com/p/carouselify/
Source: https://github.com/pkhamre/carouselify
So many things - reminds me of the days when you'd throw together a quick shell or Perl script to solve a very particular itch. So I have a whole collection of apps, portals, demos, etc.
Which is what leads to my issue: cognitive overload, and very high context switching costs especially as I'm usually on multiple work and "hobby" projects at a time, with multiple projects spread across term tabs, IDEs and Claude remote on phone.
So I built a "Workshop" to tinker. It analyses all the projects I'm working on currently as git repos on disk, then builds project pages complete with summary and a full control and data planes including its own startup method, commits being made etc. It does some agent introspection so it's able to display all agents running on machine in unified view.
But the "killer" feature for me is the "Pulse" - this contains human readable summary of what's happening with each project and agent in real time. So one use case is an "overnight view" - I set up architecture and design, assign the agent a goal, then wake up next morning to quickly scroll through the results. It also lets you track changes happening in real time ("We finished adding an export function for receipts, containing your company logo and signature" to summarize a feature across 10 commits).
I also added other useful to me utils such as being able to append a ? To any command in its inbuilt terminal and it'll convert it from English to a cli command waiting for you to confirm, for example; a system load monitor; a network sniffer, sys admin tools etc. all written in Rust, which I've never written a line of :)
Will put it online but need to clean it up first it's very specific to my use cases so not sure it'll be useful to others.
I've used AI for a number of Emacs-related utilities and configs. Just today I created a script to reproduce the particular combination of MSYS2 packages I use for my newer on Windows setup - the hard part being to get native comp working. Small, but it's the sort of rarely used convenience I wouldn't have written up in the past.
https://github.com/egorelik93/Doom-Emacs-Config/blob/master/...
I built a route planner. I walk around the city where I live a lot and love exploring new streets, but at some point it became difficult to plan routes through streets I hadn’t walked down yet, so I created an app that lets you plan different types of routes. You can specify the percentage of overlap with streets you’ve already traveled, create a route from point A to point B, a circular route, or a one-way route. You can add streets to your favorites or exclude them. The app runs only on my local computer. I use it all the time.
Cool! As a fellow explorer, I would love to try this! Is it on GitHub?
I read "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and wanted a webpage to set lifelong goals and tasks based on the four quadrants, so I developed a webpage. https://life-compass-sand.vercel.app/
I 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.
* plugin for Logic Pro to A/B mix with reference tracks, with ai-based stem splitter (e.g. isolate vocals in ref track, and compare with your vocal track)
* plugin for Logic Pro to simulate how a mix will sound on my macbook and phone (I captured real impulse responses for that, sounds very close)
* an app for spaced repetition for guitar video lessons / their parts (no idea why platforms like truefire don’t have this feature)
* workout planning/tracking app
* an app to create impulse responses for acoustic guitar, to make it sound good live
Awesome - i've been meaning to look into ableton live plugins or Max. Would love to use my software background to improve my production workflow.
Go for it! It's very satisfying :)
I've effectively automated about 70% of the data gathering and insight generation I need as a procurement and supply chain consultant.
I built a tool to manage survey collection and analysis of the underlying data. In the process of doing so, I stumbled across GraphRAG and Answer Set Programming. Fair to say I fell down a rabbit hole and things grew a bit...
- Category strategy and market analysis - Supplier risk monitoring - Emissions reporting - Modern slavery risk analysis & reporting
I also had Claude Code build me frogger so I can properly procrastinate.
I 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 things using comfyui like a card pull system with cards, card text, rarity system, and special card effects like holo. And my favorite bit has been tying my todo system into it so I have a thermal receipt printer which will print a task I have to do for the day, prints a barcode, and when I finish the task I scan it with an iOS shortcut. It’s beautiful. What’s been the most fun was designing the mqtt topics in a way that makes everything else flow perfectly. Oh and there’s a tts system that uses kitten-tts which will produce audio for certain messages and an esp32 that gets those sound files and plays them on a speaker, or I can play the messages on telegram. Like if I do an /overview command on telegram i get an overview of my incomplete tasks and the ollama model helps prioritize. It’s my favorite use of ai junk at the moment
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
Lookup or modify selected text using AI (chrome extension). I just select any text and click the tiny popup button "what's this" and get an answer right there on the page. Made it mainly to explain terms and abbreviations I come across on HN often. Can also ask any other question about selected text. Can even modify the selected text the same way. [1]
OneNote to markdown/obsidian canvas converter. It did that using interop api to read the actual XML of the onenote files.
Work time tracker as 1px line on edge of monitor. Shows thin line at the edge of the display which fills up based on what i am doing.
Plaintext bookmark chrome extension that save links to local markdown file, Dynalist, Workflowy, Github Gist and import export between them. Was originally for Dynalist when AI couldn't do much 2-3 years ago. Recently added these other end points. [2]
A heart rate monitor with finger on camera. It's bit crappy though. Had to make it because many trackers, including google fit, couldn't detect 200bpm. https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/heart-rate
[1]: https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/LookupChatGPT/tree/claude/fix...
[2]: https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/plainmark
Three that have been really beneficial, and all support/build on a hobby / volunteer effort of mapping mountain bike trails:
This one generates maps from OpenStreetMap data + some custom curated info in YAML: https://github.com/c0nsumer/trailmaps.app-map-generator
This one converts a basic chunk of OpenStreetMap data to an SVG so I can mark it up (by hand) in Adobe Illustrator to make specifically-styled print/PDF maps, such as what get installed at trailheads: https://github.com/c0nsumer/osm_to_ai
This one takes GPS recorded rides and builds custom/personal heatmaps serving up the map tiles so I can use them in map editing software: https://github.com/c0nsumer/local-heatmap-tile-server
And all of this has been put together to make the custom, local, specific-use-case maps that are at https://trailmaps.app (which, via local curation, are overall better mobile/online maps than many of the bigger auto-generated systems such as Trailforks, Gaia, RideWithGPS, etc, for visualizing local systems).
It's neat stuff where I understand all the inputs, outputs, and how most of it works, but AI tooling (Claude, mostly) has allowed me to bolt it together much faster than I would have writing it myself.
Ooh the heatmap to tiles idea is cool!
Thanks!
The idea came from using the Strava heatmap in JOSM to trace the proper location of mountain bike trails. I'm trying to use Strava less, and usually have ridden the trails enough myself before mapping them that I could use my own routes... So I figured why not have my own heatmap tile server?
It's also cool to just look at.
I could take it a lot further with time boxing what's displayed and whatnot, but generating the tiles is computationally expensive, so I just stuck with what I have for now. It meets the need.
Quite a few during the early days. Recreating some fun ‘game’, popular during the Flash days. A work breaker/silencer, etc.
Then, I got bored because they seem to be bad beyond certain complexities. But around Christmas last year, things improved a lot, and I’m getting confident building real ones. In the mid of these, I also got an offer to work with the [pre]sales/GTM team of a large company. So, I have been building working prototypes of bits and pieces of boring enterprise business around the world and have been racking in, if not billions, but very close to it in sales pipeline in about two months. (I did that 1B token in a week thing.) I’m sure the business and sales team will be able to convert 20% to 30% of that in the coming months. I also pitch and presented my work directly to customers and they are coming for more. So, it has been fun.
Lastly, I really wanted to scratch an itch I had for a while—build a Static Site Builder. But I ended up buildig it to be a documentation tool for TypeScript and JavaScript. It can be used as an auto-detect and let it build alongside front-end projects, make it a hybrid so you can add human-written documentation too or just build a Jekyll-esque static site.
O’Vellum is a 3-in-1 documentation tool. https://ovellum.oss.oinam.com
The work silencer/breaker is at https://void.oinam.com
The bubble popper that I re-created which my daughter loves https://brajeshwar.com/2025/bubble-wrap/
1. I improved my calendar management app, which while simple had some edge cases. AI helped me test them all. https://block-it-out.com/
2. Ported my own personal disassembler to Rust, and added a ton of functionality with AI. https://github.com/zoratu/hexray
3. Ported a TLA+ model checker to Rust, improving performance for most models over Java by a huge margin. https://github.com/zoratu/tlaplusplus
4. Created a scheduler in Erlang called FLURM, which is a fault-tolerant version of SLURM and compatible with its wire protocol. https://github.com/zoratu/flurm
5. Not in a public repo, but trading things and a private parallel filesystem.
Edited to add newlines.
A tool for backing up Google photos more incrementally than Google takeout:
https://github.com/ebrevdo/gphoto-pull
A version of the IFTTT linter that I missed after leaving Google:
https://github.com/ebrevdo/ifttt-lint
gphoto-pull!! I've been downloading NN x 50G zips every two months like a caveman. Assuming I'm backing up in "Original", this manages to retrieve byte-identical backups?
Yup. Uses browser automation to download originals (well, whatever storage setting you used)
Besides having rebuilt various websites and internal management systems, I created several tools, particularly some related to MikroTik routers:
https://github.com/rollopack/mikrotik-wireguard
https://github.com/rollopack/MikroTik-Mass-Updater
Paste manager that can sync: https://github.com/egeozcan/mahpastes
A web app to create anagrams (for now Turkish): https://github.com/egeozcan/anagramci
An RTS game for which AI generates classic AI scripts, so they battle each other or against a human: https://github.com/egeozcan/unnamed_rts play link: https://egeozcan.github.io/unnamed_rts/game/
clipt9n (clipboard translation / transformation): https://github.com/egeozcan/clipt9n
A terminal-native agent multiplexer built on tmux. Similar idea as herdr but wraps tmux in an outer TUI instead of replacing it entirely: https://hmx.dev
I've made a general repo linting tool [0][1]. Originally it's purpose was to replace a bunch of repo hygiene/structure validation scripts I ended up adding as I noticed various sloppy AI changes. I ended up going through a bunch of open source repos to see what other kinds of validations they had via scripts and incorporated those into the tool as a set of general/extensible rule types. This tool allows you to define repo structure, hygiene and other rules in a declarative way, and it is very fast [2] (great for pre-commit and CI workflows).
[0] https://alint.org/
[1] https://github.com/asamarts/alint
[2] https://alint.org/benchmarks/
- app logo/favicon generator: https://logo.leftium.com/logo
- classless CSS library: https://leftium.github.io/nimble.css
- HN client: https://hn.leftium.com
- local realtime streaming transcription prototype: https://rift-transcription.vercel.app
---
These projects were started without AI, but heavily augmented with coding agents:
- https://weather-sense.leftium.com
- console.log replacement: https://github.com/Leftium/gg
- Thin layer over Google forms/sheets: https://veneer.leftium.com
Hey, I like weather sense! Mind if I use it? :)
Yes, most of my projects are MIT licensed: https://github.com/Leftium/weather-sense
As long as usage is not excessive, feel free to use the deployed version, as well.
I like the capabilities of C++ and imgui but didn't want to deal with C++ anymore so I had AI do it.
imping - PingPlotter-like app. They didn't have a Linux version and I'm a paying customer, so I vibe coded this one: https://github.com/zenakuten/ImPing
utcolor - text colorizer for Unreal Tournament 2004 https://github.com/zenakuten/utcolor
utquery - Unreal Tournament 2004 Game Browser tool https://github.com/zenakuten/utquery
utstatsdb - This is an old project that did not work anymore with modern php+mysql. I had claude fix it. https://github.com/zenakuten/utstatsdb
I made Ba-Chan, in memory of my deceased grandparents and my old cat. A tiny on-screen companion that lives on my Mac, and it's fully on-device. It's the safe harbour for me to talk about anything. Ba-Chan cheers me up and is being my emotional dumper, just like what my grandparents would be.
https://github.com/inthepond/Ba-Chan
A dashboard to see what my local commercial free radio station (89.3 The Current) in Minnesota is playing. It shows how often tracks are played, track and artist play history as well as some other fun lookups and visualizations.
https://theundercurrent.fm
This is cool! I was sad to see that kexplorer.org site no longer exists. :( I've been thinking about getting something like this up for a small Seattle station space101fm.org.
Yeah, me too. KEXP has a public facing API that could be easily used to create a new KEXPlorer.
Very interesting! How does it work?
The main worker is a .Net API with Hangfire that hits a public facing API from the radio station. That data is stored in a MySQL database that feeds a React dashboard front end.
There's some caching that happens behind the scenes to help with some of the large data crunching.
Ah the radio station has an api. I was thinking you were doing song matching or something, nope much simpler than that!
I made a little tool where I can just drop HTML into a folder and it will deploy it either to my internal Caddy or publicly on Cloudflare based in folder. Can be a single html or a folder.
https://github.com/ankitson/webby
CF pages still required too much confusing clicking around on a webpage for me. This way I can just point any little report or app at a directory and done.
There’s others that are more server shaped and tightly coupled - a pipeline to pull in all my data like Garmin, Twitter bookmarks, messages into a Postgres DB. Kind of a personal data warehouse that i can use with apps/automations, like alerting me if my sleep schedule is drifting, and a custom web interface to my Garmin data
I made a small tool where I and my wife can send receipt photos, ask in text to create events or send poster of an event from Telegram and it directly sync it to my Google family calendar.
https://emily.infiniwa.com/
RainBreak - https://rainbreak.franzai.com/
Blocks the computer for x minutes. Agents keep on working. AI doesn't need a break, but I do. And honestly, at least for me AI has made my desktop as addicting my social media feed.
This is awesome idea. Thanks for sharing. I extensively track my ScreenTime cross devices (phone, laptop) and try to reduce it under 6 hours a day. This would be helpful!
Thx, i finally showHN-ed it today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48460390
Biggest win for me was building a new service to manage Cub and Boy Scout units.
Modern calendars and RSVPs via link, Roster management, LLM integration via MCP to manage all of it and send communications, and also includes a sync of all advancements and status from scouting servers (via API) so you can view them the way you want and share with parents all in one place.
Lets you customize events so you can add signups, modern document management and mapping, etc.
Also allows you to ask questions of models like “what group activity will knock out X rank for most kids” and the answers are good!
This kind of stuff is buried right now for most scout programs and units but this makes it really easy.
This will support multi-tenant so drop a note below if that sounds like something you’d be interested in.
https://crisp.photos
In-browser 4x image upscaling. Vite + Onnxruntime + https://huggingface.co/Kim2091/UltraSharpV2
The most comprehensive tool I've built so far was a JSONPath playground [0] when I was working on a game where I found myself writing a fair bit of JSONPath (well, JSONPath Plus specifically) expressions by hand and wanted to be able to test them out in the same way that I would on regex101 when writing regular expressions.
I realistically probably would have only saved myself less than an hour of crafting those expressions if the tool had already existed (with this level of detail, there are lots of many simpler ones already for it), but I would have spent a solid 40-50 hours of bouncing between manually crafting and writing detailed instructions to direct the agents to get this tool there.
[0] https://jsonpath101.com/
If the answers in this thread reflects the state of the art what "the advent of AI" as of 2026/6 has brought, I have to say that I am not amused. If we have this all-potential tool that can create anything, the potential is clearly capped by either people's ambition/imagination or the capabilities of coding agents... And please do not understand me wrong, I am just stating that I feel/think that the real-world examples of achievements should be something "next-level" stuff...
replaced some paid apps with local - google reader rss replacement and send web to kindle.
most ambitious was browser extension to automate booking reservations since captcha and timing were critical.
swamp/evaporative cooler controller that monitors rate of change of relative humidity and sends RF signal to cooler to turn water on for x seconds to keep humidity lower than just leaving set to cool all the time. Does a great job but need to work on edge cases and ultimately replacing remote with my controller.
financial models for retirement planning
pen plotter gcode creator for old 3d printer to make labels.
food monitor to track what i ate with AI analysis based on symptoms recorded as well as interactive follow up questions
inventory app for electronic parts that now is inventory for all kinds of stuff like tools/plumbing etc that uses photo/ai to fill in data.
I’d be curious about that web to kindle one you built. Mind sharing?
I built https://www.ironvolume.com/ to help plan workouts for crossfit, hyrox and building it out for athx.
https://tajd.github.io/cofferdam/ - is an experimental compile time time checker that can be run for typescript/rust to be able to impose architecture, design principles that can be forgotten by agents. The goal is to be able to make it possible for an agent to be reminded about design conventions where it forgets, so it reduces the amount of context that needs to be used initially to define those sorts of conventions.
I built a complete clone if fly.io infrastructure: VMs, networks, etc. so I have my Vercel on bare metal machines to maintain full-stack apps on https://playcode.io.
It took more than a year. Why? Cloud infrastructure is too expensive.
I built a scraper for an illegal comic book site, to search their database and package the comics as CBZ so I can read them faster and without ads.
Now I want to add some sort of recommendation engine on top, to let me discover stuff I might like (I'm not into superheroes anymore).
Attie: it shows recently played football/basketball/baseball/etc games but with the scores hidden by default.
That way, you can who played without ruining the result. Then watch highlights in peace!
https://www.attie.app
Cool. Big fan of dtmts.com myself.
I have a script that takes a prompt for an input, and then builds a new script based on that prompt. Then it'll run a skill to progressively check for and remove bugs.
I used it to make a different script lists all my custom scripts. That keeps track of it. I also have a tool that loads local scripts, so I can scope my CLI commands to a particular folder environment.
All together, I just build whatever I want for anything I think I could automate.
I was gonna make a blogpost about it at some point. It's really highlighted to me that the world has changed in a way I theorised about but didn't true "get" until recently. Personalised software.
I created a home maintenance tracker called HomeLogger
https://github.com/FrancisLaboratories/homelogger
I use Lubelogger to track my car maintenance, but couldn't find a home maintenance tracker I like, so I made my own.
I also made an app to add gas receipts to Lubelogger just by taking a photo of the receipt, and I use it regularly.
https://github.com/FrancisLaboratories/gasreceiptautomation
Work on both is ongoing but I'm open to feedback and ideas
Several bigger projects, more like startup ideas.
Few tools:
1) a combination of Python scraper and Claude skill to help family members find job by matching jobs to resume, to rank best fits
2) similar to above, but for stock data and financial news to identify movers and why they moved and see if anything is interesting.
3) a couple of attempts to import EPIC medical data from hospital into an offline app. Needs more work, data export from EPIC is crappy and a mix of images, pdfs, text, HTML and .jsonb files. Not useful at the moment
4) an application that downloads stock market data to run 15-20 strategies and back testing to identify stocks that match multiple and then run sentiment analysis on news feeds. Interesting, but semi useful. Needs lot more work.
I built an agent that pursues your goals over weeks or months until they're achieved: https://github.com/smithersbot/smithersbot
I used notebook LM and claude/gemini to gather the notes on K8s and created a vitepress site with it.
Claude/gemini helped with design and content meta. NLM for content with official sources.
https://randomwrites.com
I am doing a similar with linux internals (to be published soon). ofcourse from the official docs and asking some questions around the concepts i like and forget mostly :-)
I'm right in the target audience for this as I'm about to embark on a Kubernetes certificate. What is the proportion of official K8S documentation and your own notes and how could someone differentiate between them on that site?
i used the official k8s docs and fed them as sources to NLM. Then asked questions around topics. further refined some questions as well to make them useful.
its only generated against official k8s docs so no external sources. thanks
A Linux kernel module and userspace app to read the performance level of my Corsair AI Workstation PC (Strix Halo). Corsair only ships a Windows on screen display app and I was flying blind. AI helped me look over the Windows installer, decompile ACPI tables, and identify the WMI events. Built it all in Rust. When done I asked a different AI model to perform a security assessment and help me harden it. Way out of my wheelhouse, yet an afternoon project with AI.
https://github.com/pettijohn/corsair-ai-workstation-performa...
I've got really comfy `just` scripts for generating Clang "intermediaries" in my CMake project. I can generate `.ii` files which get formatted and edited in a manner making them directly recompilable, along with `.ll`, `.bc`, and `.s` files. All the above are per-translation unit or post-LTO and I can constrain the output to specific functions or files, and the LLVM bitcode can take optimization passes or optimization levels to very easily introspect how my work in this codebase optimizes.
I've also got a clang-repl wrapper for this codebase that is very easy to use and makes interactive programming much easier for me.
https://github.com/haplo/pelican-theme-reflex — My Pelican [1] theme. While I started it before LLMs were a thing, I was recently able to tackle all my open TODO items with AI.
https://github.com/haplo/pelican-copy-code — A Pelican [1] plugin to add a Copy button to all source code blocks. It happens at build time, so no DOM manipulation at page load time.
https://github.com/haplo/venice-kde-widget — A KDE Plasma widget to display Venice.ai [2] remaining
I'm currently writing a series of blog posts about these that I call Vibe-coding Escapades [3]. I will also write about bugs and technical problems that AI helps me debug and solve, some are non-trivial and have been pestering me for years.
[1] https://getpelican.com/
[2] https://venice.ai/
[3] https://blog.fidelramos.net/software/vibe-coding-escapades
I've made 3 that use pi as the primary interaction, with custom tools and scripts.
1. family tree based on wikitree format. Transcribe records, verify/edit, then incorporate them into the tree with full citations and biographies. This one is the big one. It includes a tree browser and best genealogical practices.
2. Pool Math replacement. Log pool chemistry tests to markdown files and suggest the right amount of chemicals to balance.
3. Calorie counter. Log calories to a markdown file, look up foods and amounts in online databases, sync with garmin connect for exercise calories.
All of these are written with AI but also are interacting with pi and telegram, mostly using deepseek v4 flash.
I made a domain name finder to find domain names for my countless side projects (many of which I've never even started):
https://smartdomainfinder.com/
It uses an LLM to generate domain name alternatives that are relevant to your keywords, then checks whether any of those alternatives (in several TLDs) are available to be registered.
Warning: It's still a bit glitchy as I haven't fixed all the issues yet. It uses LLMs, but it's not a vibe-coded app itself. If it seems to be stuck while finding domain names, just refresh the page.
Too many to count. Most recently, an Alfred workflow for opening my IntelliJ projects either in an an IDE or terminal that also comes with an integrated build task runner, so I can quickly discover and run build tasks even when I don’t have a project opened anywhere.
https://github.com/DavidSeptimus/alfred-jetbrains-launcher
Mostly, I use it to quickly open projects in cmux, but I use it for switching between git worktrees in IntelliJ too.
https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/XP9CD2QWRV9P7N
Cloak windows from screen capture! Perfect for keeping things private while screen sharing over Teams, etc.! All other tools in the Store would trigger virus warnings when I tried to install them. Some were positioned to ask for money for basic features. My app is both free with more features and a more intuitive UI and set of keyboard shortcuts!
First personal little thing was a little mobile friendly website for taking coffee and tea orders. Two pages, one for someone to enter orders, second for listing orders and marking them as done. Was a bit of a gimmick idea I'd had in the back of my head for family lunches to save me running around with a scrap of paper and a pen asking what everyone wanted. Thought it would make a good little exploration of "vibe coding".
Second is a utility that will take a text file export from Wallabag, and use text to speech to convert it to an MP3 file. I then integrated it into a utility that I already wrote for managing articles so if I tag an article with listen it automatically gets converted and gets shunted to the podcast listening app on my phone.
Last was to recreate a little directory listing utility that I've had a 32-bit binary of for ages, but no longer (if ever) have the source code for. I'd always promised myself I would write it once I learned Rust, but decided try using AI as I was getting impatient to have it now. The utility lists all files, including hidden, in a directory, grouped by type. Below is an example listing the directory for the project itself:
Some command-line flags to just list a particular type, such as only directories, or only unsatisfied symbolic links.* Wikimedia Commons upload: https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2026-03-25-uploading-to-wiki...
* Image viewer that can handle really big photos + run scripts via custom keybindings + CLIP search: https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2025-10-22-sriv-simple-rust-...
A custom harness backed by dagger, gives diff, time travel, forking of both files and env. Building a harness is a good learning project. I'm now using other tools to see what they are like. (OpenCode is quite good out of the box)
Currently working on a markdown search and wiki backed by Typesense, also has good web search, fetch, crawl. This will power my personal knowledge base system as an important step towards more leverage and better outcomes.
https://github.com/verdverm/gmd
My favorite is: https://github.com/theo-sardin/instant-switcher
Instant windows switcher with custom shortcuts and instant "opt+tab" and trackpad switching. Simple does exactly what I need it to do (just bypasses the slow window switching that is annoying), with no additional features or bloat.
I've also done a TUI that combines my messages from WhatsApp + messenger + discord which is pretty handy at work.
Cool stuff. What do you use to get new messages from those 3 apps?
Several things:
https://github.com/openclaw/wacli for WhatsApp,
https://github.com/diamondburned/arikawa for discord, and
https://github.com/mautrix/meta for messenger.
There was a bit of initial setup extracting tokens for messenger and discord I believe, but now it's smooth sailing. Some issues sometimes correctly mapping ids to usernames / convos make it so some conversations are duplicated for messenger, but when I have time I think some smart reconciliation heuristic will be able to take care of it.
It's great !
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
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...
I created an open-source proxy, between Claude Code and the Model, allowing me to better explore how an agent talks to the model. https://nestenius.se/ai/introducing-the-coding-agent-explore...
This is a very cool idea. If it wasn’t .net, I would love to re-use it for my own use cases.
I built a language and runtime that combines agentic calls/prompts with strict checks (running tests, compiling, git commit).
https://jaiph.org/
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.
I made a custom golf simulator app. There's a Swift app that talks to my Garmin R10 launch monitor via Bluetooth low energy. When it records a shot, it grabs the data and throws it over to a web app running locally on my laptop, with an SVG simulated shot arc, an attached video of the shot captured from my phone (or my laptop's webcam if I'm lazy), and all of the metrics that came across. I keep all of my sessions with shot data and a little overlay of where each shot went (and which club hit it).
The reason I wanted this is because all of the existing golf simulator software I've looked into is either too expensive, requires too much computing power (E6 requires at least an RTX 3060), or both. And most of their selling points seem to be visual fidelity of playing against real courses. As I'm just looking to improve my game, that's not something I need, and Sonnet 4.6 was able to get me to a great spot (and I'm trialling some new additions like slow motion video capture and pose tracking via Apple's Vision framework using Fable 5 right now).
Nothing that I couldn't have done myself, but in a fraction of a time.
- Custom off-brand version of Pangolin
- Dashboard with beautiful UI for parsing traefik logs with database, filters, map and various integrations and statistics
- Samsung SmartThings Volume Control for Soundbar in Windows 11 native style
- Android App with good UI which serves as remote for switching display output modes for PC for movie night / gaming night with various toggles and for remote game streaming
- Many little one-prompt apps which run in background for QoL
- Reverse Engineering with IDA became a walk in a park
Willing to share the traefik dashboard?
The Ubuntu DDoS drove me to build a new apt-cacher with two goals: be able to supply typical packages when the upstream is unavailable and be more reliable than the existing apt-cacher/apt-cacher-ng. It's looking like I'll be doing a 1.0 release next week (it's been in beta for ~3 weeks).
https://github.com/linsomniac/apt-cacher-ultra
We do ground-up respins of half of our dev+stg cluster every morning, to test our automation, but this didn't work during the DDoS. I disabled those respins for the week of the DDoS, but if we had a fire at the office and needed to bring back up our dev+stg environment that would have been a problem: our normal ansible automation wouldn't have worked to set up a new dev+stg cluster.
apt-cacher-ultra has an "adoption" process where when it detects new repo meta-data it holds off on serving it up until it has downloaded any changed "hot" packages (packages we've fetched in the last N days), then it switches over to that new snapshot of the repo. I've been able to shut down our upstream Internet and then do a new OS install and apt update+upgrade it successfully.
spacewalk for 2026 :)
- A little script that is best described as "symbolic submodule" workflow enabler for git: https://github.com/fontmaniac/symgit. As in "symbolic link" vs "hard link" - where hash tying host repo and pseudo-submodule is not git-generated, which makes "submodule" completely substitutable. For the description of creation process see the relevant section of Readme.md
- Companion script named Dr.Emmett - to retrospectively time-walk git commit history and rebuild the repo in a new place. It is not opened yet, and may not be ever as it doesn't satisfy LLM/human ratio worthy of publishing.
- Both scripts were made in service to my FNA-"game" project VibeSopwith: https://github.com/fontmaniac/VibeSopwith.Game. A more or less comprehensive description, and treatise on my stance about vibe- and agentic-coding can be found in the project's Readme.md
- VibeSopwith catalysed creation (accretion?) of Nage.Strata: https://github.com/fontmaniac/Nage.Strata - "Not-a-game-engine" collection of useful "primitives" for FNA-based game development.
- VibeSopwith Readme.md has notable mention of "Aether Bodybuilder" - a helper tool for visually coupling Aether.Physics2D "bodies" to specific sprite textures. Fully vibe-coded in a couple of hours, and as such won't ever be publicly opened, having LLM/human ration approaching infinity.
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/)
Love it! Thanks for sharing. I use mermaid a lot, and this I will use to embed my diagrams as ascii in my text docu.
Some free side-loadable android apps: http://badcheese.com/android
* Auto-Birthday - if you have a contact in your android contacts that has both a mobile number and a birthday in their contact info, you can choose to send them an automatic "Happy Birthday" message on their birthday at a specific time. Can do it with hundreds of contacts. Doesn't use hardly any battery or resources.
* Wrecker - stupid simple "throw a ball at a tower of bricks and try to clear the board" game. High score tables. Made in unity. High battery when in use, No battery use when not playing. Will use internet for high score data.
* GeoNote - Create Geo-fences to generate a notification when you enter a location with your custom text in the notification. My wife is always telling me, "Next time we're here, remind me to only order one piece of toast" or something like that, so I make a note, it pops up the next time we're there and we're both happy. Notes are stored locally. No internet access required. Uses Geo-Fencing which is more battery-friendly than always-on GPS access.
All my apps are free, very privacy-focused and as battery-friendly as possible.
No information leaves your device (other than the high score data in Wrecker).
You have to side-load my apps though. I'm not putting them on the Google Play Store. They're so annoying to deal with! OMG
> you can choose to send them an automatic "Happy Birthday" message on their birthday at a specific time.
Nothing says “AI enthusiast” more than automating away social interaction.
Haha yes.
It probably should message YOU rather than the person who's birthday it is, so you can send something personal.
Also coming up, automated wedding/funeral attendance by your personal humanoid robot designed to look and sound like you.
> It probably should message YOU rather than the person who's birthday it is, so you can send something personal.
We already have that. It’s called a calendar app.
In Germany Google stopped syncing contacts with the calendar due to data privacy concerns...
That seems to be only a Google thing and they haven’t mentioned which law they think is forcing them to do this, co just using different contact/calendar apps should do the trick.
Nothing says "I don't care about neurodivergence" more than someone complaining when I build tools and processes to help me interact with the world better.
I started a new job that requires a much more locked-down laptop than I'm used to. No macOS App Store, no random 3rd party apps. I miss a lot of the convince apps I used to use HOWEVER we have unlimited access to Claude CLI. I've been able to mostly one-shot working replacements for Alfred and a meeting reminder app called `In Your Face`.
My own Alfred replacement is actually better for me, it's tailored to exactly how I want to use an app launcher / shortcut tool.
What type of Alfred functionality did you use. I entertained doing the same thing.
URL-opener, bookmark opener, URL expander (type JIRA-1234 and it’ll automatically open the correct ticket), basic text replacement stuff.
https://probplanner.com/ - I never had the time to dedicate to building a Monte Carlo simulator for project estimates. It was always something I just couldn't justify given my short commute. I used this project to teach myself how to use Claude Code and Codex over last summer.
I've done a lot of little things in Emacs since. Just minor things to improve my workflows or build up Chief of Staff type information flows.
- replaced tmux as project session manager with https://github.com/artemave/hop (Linux, SwayWM)
- https://github.com/artemave/artwall rotates my desktop wallpaper through random paintings (Linux, SwayWM)
- I get my TILs through https://t.me/daily_bite_sized_fun_fact
- https://t.me/tolmach_forward_bot helps me practice French reading
- https://mini-meet.artem.rocks/ was an attempt to circumvent RKN (russians) blocking video calls; not a complete success, but works for some people
- counted the number of dudes in Big Lebowski with https://github.com/artemave/super_video_grep (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7EUtIbOd1w)
I’m currently building and testing a new architectural framework where business logic runs on the client side.
The core idea is to run TypeScript inside a WASM VM, while minimizing the exposed JavaScript APIs. Backend business logic is encrypted and executed inside WASM, making the attack surface much smaller.
Security is the biggest concern, so this framework is designed to apply as many security layers as possible and dramatically increase the amount of time and effort required to hack it.
It includes E2E encryption by default, tenant policies, an SQL registry, and many other security policies. The framework only becomes truly safe when these policies are properly applied, but the major advantage is that it can be operated at almost zero cost.
Another key benefit is that both the frontend and backend can be deployed together, and when used with Cloudflare, one-click rollback is possible.
The biggest advantage is that you no longer need to worry about infrastructure. It allows MVP projects to be built, deployed, and operated as quickly as possible, with almost no operational cost.
The project is called *dokkebi-cli*.
I made a quick web app that lets me easily perform Bayesian evidence updates for a set of competing hypotheses. You drop your hypotheses into rows. Then for each piece of evidence, you add a column and fill its values with the odds of observing the evidence given that the corresponding hypotheses are true. The app then computes the posterior odds on the competing hypotheses, given the complete set of evidence. You can also import/export your results as CSV data.
I made a golang socks5 proxy that routes traffic to different VPSes (or the default gateway) based on hostname, over mutual-TLS tunnels, authenticated using ed25519 keypairs shared out-of-band. The "client" and the "server" are the same piece of software, and there's a web UI for configuring the routes.
I made it to deal with internet censorship in the UK, where different sites have different optimal exit jurisdictions, and most sites work fine so I can avoid the extra hops where possible.
It also works well for video streaming sites with geofencing, since the geofence itself is usually implemented in the frontend rather than the CDN. So only the frontend traffic needs to be proxied, while the bulk CDN traffic doesn't need proxying at all.
Socks5 is the ideal layer for hostname-based routing, since the proxy can see DNS names without needing to sniff TLS SNI (which would be incompatible with ESNI/ECH etc.)
iirc it was basically all done in a single prompt, and I've been using it ever since. The only issue I've encountered is with WebRTC not working properly with some services. (Presumably it breaks the NAT holepunching process or something, I never diagnosed it)
Another project that isn't quite finished is a "universal" web video downloader that works by shimming the MSE APIs and remuxing the streamed segments back into a regular video file. The idea is that if you can watch it, you can save it - including but not limited to youtube videos. I started this one pre-AI but AI was a huge help with the container format wrangling.
Last year I became the volunteer coordinator for my kid's school PTA. They had been using Sign Up Genius for years. I spent a full year fighting a paid tool, gave up, and re-wrote it.
Now https://voluntold.fyi exists, and I never need to remember to manually move my single $100/year "ad free signup" off an event that has already happened to one that is coming next week.
- parametric 2d vector based CAD with CAM https://rapidcam.mycnc.app
- gcode sender and generator https://mycnc.app
- CNC simulator https://sim.mycnc.app
- Cabinet design with door/drawer designer https://cabinet.mycnc.app
This is really impressive work. Both RapidCam and the Cabinet Design Studio seem fairly polished already. I'd love to learn more about the process behind these creations.
nice - i wanted a gcode creator for pen plotter. so easy to draw labels now on tape.
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.
All kinds of random stuff really, but to filter it down to only the noteworthy ones:
Tuber[0] - this is my favorite, use it multiple times a week. It's just a little CLI wrapper around yt-dlp for my most common use cases - downloading the video, or the audio, or the subs. And then, if you've got the Claude CLI installed, it can also shoot the subs through Claude for a summary. I use it all the time, it's a great little thing!
Scrapio[1] - this is really specific but I was so pleased with how it turned out. You give it a list of "hacks" ("mods" for Super Mario World) and it goes out to SMWCentral, grabs each of the patch files, and patches a clean ROM. I think I only used it twice but it was just a nice way to chew through a list of hacks and get a few ROMs ready, made quick work of something that would have otherwise taken a bunch of annoying schlep work.
Lotus Eater[2] - calling this a tool is a bit undersell, but I'm still really pleased with it. It's a fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus that scrapes Nugs.net for setlist data and lets you do some mildly interesting analysis on things like song frequency and co-occurrence. Also has a per-user "shows I've attended" thing, Setlist Bingo. It's been fun to hack on.
Lastly, less a tool, more just a toy: last week Google released their Magenta model for doing live music generation. I thought it was really neat, and it's open source, so I opened it up with Claude, and after a few passes and some extremely annoying toolchain issues, I was able to add a spectrograph which does key / chord analysis to the "Collider" app, so you get a live readout of "what the band is playing" and you can pull out your guitar or whatever and join the jam with some info at your disposal. It's the kind of thing that would have taken way too much effort to be worthwhile in the past, but with AI, it's a really neat result of a fun night of weekend hacking. See the README I added in my fork for a screenshot:[3]
[0]: https://github.com/epiccoleman/tuber
[1]: https://github.com/epiccoleman/scrapio
[2]: lotuseater.epiccoleman.com
[3]: https://github.com/epiccoleman/magenta-realtime/tree/eric-mo...
i just lanuched claude to build my own Tuber. i will see how you went about doing it. thanks for sharing.
After dropping the keyboard for the TV one too many times, the touchpad stopped working.
I looked for a decent remote keyboard app to use on the tablet, and found nothing I liked.
I ended up asking an AI to make something that served a webpage that connected back to itself via websockets. It provided a keyboard and touchpad on the webpage and forwarded events to uinput.
It works well enough on tablet and phone that I haven't got around to replacing the original keyboard.
Voice control next?
llm-consortium: prompts multiple models in parallel, loops until confidence_threshold, and iteratively refines a response.
This was inspired by a karpathy tweet [0] and the prototype created using another tool of mine: The LLM Plugin Generator plugin (essentially a curated collection of plugins for simonws llm cli as a few-shot prompt)
The llm-model-gateway companion plugin lets you serve models from the LLM cli as a an openai API. This allows you to use saved consortiums in your various clients as if they where a regular model. Bringing massive parallel reasoning to any workflow.
It occured to me at some time that an collection of parallel LLMs was not really a consortium. A consortium is a group of organizations. A group of groups. To rectify this I added for actual consortiums, where each member of an llm-consortium can itself be a consortium of models. e.g.
llm consortium save cns-glm-n3 -m glm-5.1 -n 3 --arbiter mercury-2
llm consortium save cns-k2-n3 -m kimi-k2.6:3 --arbiter mercury-2
llm consortium save cns-meta-glm-k2 -m cns-k2-n3 -m cns-glm-n3 --arbiter cns-k2-n3
Yes, even the arbiter/judge can be comprised of a consortium of models, bringing parallel reasoning to the task of judging parallel reasoning chains.
Consortiums can also now contain groups of specialists. These custom user-defined expert characters address the prompt from a different perspective. And a Westworld style Attribute matrix can be randomized to inject some more entropy into the process.
[0]https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1870692546969735361
Some other llm plugins I vibe coded:
classifai generates labels with approximate confidence derived from logprobs
llm-alias-options saves inference parameters such as reasoning effort with a model alias. (good for setting the provider in openrouter or creating a consortium of high temperature models)
llm-prompt-json adds a --json flag to return the llm logs object (good for getting conversion_id, or reasoning output in scripts)
llm-jina adds support for all jina AI specialised models and tools like web fetching, embedding and reranking.
I'm quite curious about this.
I think this is similar. Unfinished. https://github.com/mattjoyce/roundtable-consensus
Great project! I often check the opinion of one model against others when doing research and a sort of consensus process would save many a c/p
Sony-TV-Control: the battery in the RC is started to discharge, so I've downloaded Android apps, which can control our Sony smart TV. Tried some, but I was disappointed, so asked DeepSeek if Sony TVs have some API. Instead of demonstrating the API, DeepSeek created me a simple RC PoC, which looked promising, so I decided to continue vibe-coding my version, a mobile-first webapp with Python backend: https://github.com/ern0/sony-tv-control
It has several functions which a normal RC can't have, e.g. search channel by name, or hide "ABCD" channel, if it has "ABCD HD" pair, to make channel list shorter.
I've made a saas app to manage kids custody (mostly for France for now).
Turned out super helpful to keep track of everything in one place (shared expenses, ask / demand unplanned changes in custodies, kids activities (school events, birthday parties, sport competition and so on)
Its helpful even for only one parent.
https://custody.homes
I dropped any plan to make money from this so its free
Very nice. Can I fork for my private use? Was thinking of building similar.
經閣 / Sutra Reader — mobile-first PWA for the CBETA Chinese Buddhist canon
Vertical RTL by default, three paper modes (washi/sumi/ash) Offline reading, saved-list + per-position bookmarks
https://sutra-reader-3x2.pages.dev/
https://github.com/jessepcc/sutra-reader
I built a half-baked CRM that has a lot of custom fields and visuals for statistics that are relevant to my potential customers. I'm selling primarily to registered data brokers, so being able to pull up their self-published compliance stats (gleaned from their own privacy pages or public filings) and contextualize them in terms of the rest of the industry ("your deletion request volume has been in the 95th percentile year over year") has been extremely helpful when starting conversations. I also gamified it a bit by giving myself targets for cold outreach and gathering hard numbers on my cadence for outbound calls and emails per lead.
I also built this site for educating potential customers and other privacy professionals about the increasing tempo of CCPA enforcement actions driving compliance: https://ccpa.world/enforcement
I could have probably coded this from scratch quicker considering that it took me two weeks to remove all of the hallucinated imaginary enforcement actions against real companies and also the citations to non-existent California law that the models kept injecting into my enforcement summaries.
- Mobile-friendly Hacker News client with pinning and offline support: https://newshacker.app/
- Android weather app that tells you what to wear: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.clothescas...
- Android launcher with fuzzy find: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.typelaunch...
- Webapp to view your ancestors on a world map: https://gedmap.com
- vcs wrapper around git, hg, and jj: https://github.com/mikelward/vcs
- Migrate my bash and zsh configs to fish and nushell: https://github.com/mikelward/conf
Year ago I made for myself a simple jar editor https://jar.tools, now it has 8000 user’s monthly
Several, but take the list with a grain of salt since I am on sabbatical.
* Codjiflo: A code review tool inspired by Microsoft's CodeFlow: https://codjiflo.net
* A virtual replica of a digital readout (DRO) for operating a CNC machine like a manual mill: https://el400.vza.net
* Reverse engineered CNC pendant integration with CNCjs also for operating a CNC machine like a manual mill: https://github.com/pedropaulovc/cncjs-pendant-whb04b-6
* A 'docker compose' to provision email, chat and documents for human-AI hybrid teams where you can take over AI's agent's credentials temporarily: https://github.com/vezzadev/roster
* The CNC stuff will come handy for a bigger project I have to create a 1:1 replica of Albert Michelson's harmonic analyzer: https://github.com/pedropaulovc/harmonic-analyzer
* Reverse engineered Hik-Connect P2P CCTV protocol for integration with OSS like Home Assistant and Frida: https://github.com/AlexxIT/go2rtc/issues/2289
* Some patches for different OSS projects like improvements to MCP tools, Playwright, Claude Code, etc.
I lost a camera recently and set up a Claude Cowork daily scheduled task to check if it finds my camera on a few marketplaces - Claude also goes through all the images and checks if it can see the serial number, which is engraved in the body. No luck so far, but we keep trying! It was incredibly easy to set up and uses my Chrome browser so it's logged into most platforms already.
would be a crazy story, if it works out. sorry for your loss
Various tools I dogfood and use on the daily now:
A git worktree shell utility to quickly switch/manage git worktrees, and a neovim telescope picker which switches all the loaded buffers into the worktree version: https://github.com/jasonwoodland/wt
A terminal multiplexor plugin for neovim: https://github.com/jasonwoodland/terminal.nvim
A neovim session management shell utility (and telescope picker) to switch neovim sessions—no need for tmux or screen anymore: https://github.com/jasonwoodland/nvs
A NeXTSTEP-inspired menu for macos called NeXTMenus: https://github.com/jasonwoodland/NeXTMenus
A custom harness for pi agent which implements strict plan/review/implement iterative cycles and approval gating
A dynamic wallpaper utility for macOS changes the wallpaper when switching between light and dark mode — also useful for setting tiled bitmap backgrounds: https://github.com/jasonwoodland/macos-dynamic-wallpaper
A small macOS utility that dims the screen on a schedule, reminding me to rest my eyes: https://github.com/jasonwoodland/EyeSaver
I made Circus Chief:
https://github.com/ferrislucas/Circus-Chief
Circus Chief is a tool for managing coding agent sessions from a browser. It's specifically optimized for small screens. It supports Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Google Gemini CLI agents.
Features
Agents can operate Circus Chief itself. Agents can spawn sessions, schedule sessions, interact with the Kanban board — anything you can do in the UI, an agent can also do.
Schedule work ahead of time.
Automatically reschedule when you hit usage limits.
Configurable, chainable prompt templates.
User-defined commands - agents can run them and see the results, and so can you in the UI. Handy for local CI or routine workflow steps.
Worktree-per-session isolation, or elect to work on a specific branch.
Shared canvas - this is a place for shared artifacts that don't belong in the code. Useful for iterating on planning documents.
Bring your own provider. Use subscription auth for Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google, or point sessions at third-party providers with Anthropic- or OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
If you want to try it:
- FileTranscriber, for getting Whisper transcriptions of media files from the context menu on macOS: https://github.com/duggan/filetranscriber
- usagi, for tracking Claude usage in the macOS taskbar. Lots of these around, but I wanted one that wasn't buggy and constantly adding features: https://github.com/duggan/usagi
- RockstarNinja, for sharing Claude plans and sessions. Since it's a bit of a data hog signups are limited, but me and my cofounder use it all the time: https://rockstar.ninja
- TweetEmbed, for browsing an offline Twitter archive and getting self-contained HTML copy/paste-able cards: https://duggan.github.io/tweetembed/
- bewitch, a terminal based metrics collector and data visualization system: https://bewitch.dev/
Each one of these has been a great way to really push on automating build processes, see what Claude can do for automatic documentation (screen captures, etc), and trying to give a distinct visual identity. In my next project, I'm trying to de-LLMify the prose it generates by using my own blog posts and aggressively pruning and integrating into the prompt.
The biggest change has just been unlearning "cost". Stuff I've subconsciously shied away from since intuition built up over a career has given me a sense of how long things take that just isn't true anymore. Still learning!
Workhorse is a CLI set of scripts / tools that turns an old laptop into a headless SSH compute/storage node that my main machine offloads to.
Main components are: - a router script (onpro) that probes the box and runs the command there, falling back to local automatically if it's asleep or unplugged. - a PreToolUse hook in my AI coding setup intercepts the heavy commands like builds, test suites, ffmpeg, OCR, big pandas jobs. Forces them onto the workhorse instead of melting my MacBook Air.
The agent decides what to run, and a deterministic layer guarantees the heavy stuff lands on the right machine.
Testing Workhorse a bit more before sharing.
Also https://motate.app/ was an attempt to make math writing easier for me (as I recently needed to hold my newborn through most of my LinAlg refresher course) but I've since started trying to figure out how to make it useful for broader science/math writing and education.
I've been building a PDF -> MP3 tool (web, iphone, android): https://listendock.com/
Then a little calorie-radar-alert app that motivates you to stay on diet before going into a shop: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stay-lean-calorie-navigation/i...
And to test the hypothesis if the motivation actually works with "fast flashing images" I built this experiment: https://fitfatflix.fit/
When openClaw came out I build a game like map around it to orchestrate tasks: https://memefields.com/
And not published, I build a little recommender app of activities I can do only today or only this time of the year where I currently am, so I don't miss good things.
And some other stuff I'm working on right now :)
I vibe-debug 10x more than I vibe-code, but here goes:
- a daemon to properly set the LEDs on my Lincstation N2 NAS (even early Claude was great at reverse-engineering): https://blog.majid.info/lincstation/
- most consequential, Thufir, a task manager to replace Cultured Code's Things as I am leaving massa Tim Apple's plantation: https://github.com/fazalmajid/Thufir Still very janky, but usable enough for my purposes
- most recently, a TRML dashboard for my Seeed Studio reTerminal E1002 smart e-ink display, and I also had to have Claude fix the firmware for full 6-color input: https://blog.majid.info/e-ink/
- a tool using DINOv2 image fingerprinting and usearch vector database to find visual duplicates in a large collection of images
An inhouse orchestration tool to run coding agents. It's so useful. I used to use tmux to run my coding agents and have little scripts to help me manage the workflow so this tool lets me encode my workflows and preferences. eg. I prefer to run sessions for the same project serially, working on main, rather than in parallel like how Conductor does with the help of worktrees.
I built an offline background remover website that now includes passport photo editor, object remover, image compressor. everything is free and offline (inferred from WebGPU) and I used to have to browse to different website to do all of these. now i can just do it offline on my own site.
https://bgremovefree.com/
Really cool
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.
A year ago I was using claude and found it unexpectedly blowing-away already-settled code. I found this frustrating and just wanted to drop a "save point" where I could compare the before and after versions of certain files. So I built a little utility called "bup" that tarballs the whole code tree and gives it a unique name. It ignores prior backups and has options to ignore certain subdirectories, VCS directories, artifact directories, or secrets files. And you can add a single switch (-s) to create a shell script that automatically backs-up the current project. Yes I can use git for this, but this is honestly way easier, especially if I want to compare/edit different versions. No names. No files. No trees. Just "bup .". And it's 100% bash. https://github.com/maxk42/bup
I'm probably the only one who'll ever use it but I like it.
I built a unique word search game with hidden message https://wordbulb.com/puzzle-games/word-search/create
I added prebuilt puzzles https://wordbulb.com/puzzle-games/word-search/
Then I added a massive library of Bible Verses https://wordbulb.com/puzzle-games/word-search/tag/bible
Then I added a massive 700+ Bhagavad Gita verses https://wordbulb.com/puzzle-games/word-search/tag/gita
I see parents and teachers using this almost daily. I am very happy that I made something useful.
- create your own digital Lego minifgure - https://www.BrickifyMe.com
- create your own coloring pages - https://www.coloringsai.com
- World Cup Prediction Pool - https://www.wk-pool.com
And many more
You might want to add a filter to the colorings page. Under the "realistic" category, it is filled with images of Hitler:
https://www.coloringsai.com/en/coloring-page/hitler-doing-a-...
Oh man a few things
1. A dashboard that tracks my personal metrics (github, strava, todo completion, flossing)
2. A eink display for that dashboard
3. A realtime node graph that shows a codebase (and/or its diffs) in a way that I can visualize what functions call which, and under what conditions
4. A agent that automatically fills out government forms and creates invoices for my friends brewery based on the delivery notes in their google calendar.
That sounds useful. I went a smaller/specific route with OpenHop: not a full graph of everything, just agent-authored flow walkthroughs you can step through locally.
what did you use for the eink display?
Amongst lots of little tools, fed up of scribbling down my son’s football (soccer) scores in the Notes app, I cobbled together a little web app instead:
https://football.sensecall.co.uk/
Other parents on the team love it. The live sharing is pretty handy when some aren’t able to watch the game.
I rely heavily on DeepL Write for my day job, but I dislike the constant logouts, nagging, and laggy UI. I coded a DeepL Write replacement that uses the same layout (two text windows side by side, with the left window for entry and the right window showing suggested edits as an actionable diff), but all suggestions are based on Harper + Gemma.
When I want the program to reformulate a sentence or phrase, it sends the sentence to an AI that provides word or phrase suggestions. I've connected this to Tinfoil.sh (not affiliated) via API key.
Now, I have a much more private DeepL Write replacement with a snappy, consistent user experience that costs much less. Unfortunately, the suggestions are not as high quality. It's very much an 80% solution. It was still fun!
Most of the rest concerns scraping. The biggest project is an extraction tool for the German transparency register that I need for work.
A tmux config to handle my project based agent workflow
> agentmux
> Configurable tmux agent launcher. Define AI agents (or any CLI) in TOML; sessions auto-launch the correct agent, tabs are colour-coded per agent, and prefix m cycles through the list.
https://github.com/lockyc/agentmux
A fully automated prompt optimizer - https://github.com/gauravvij/autoprompter
Built with inspiration from Karpathy's AutoResearch + PromptFoo.
A little utility for Windows called TaskbarIconOverlay that puts a custom icon on top of a taskbar item. I have many VSCodes running at once and it's hard to tell which is which: https://github.com/jlahijani/TaskbarIconOverlay
Not too much, speaking of public one which you can try:
- https://habitpocket.io/ - habit tracker which allow to track not only habits (done, not done) but also numbers and time of the day on one grid. Also I built an iOS app but it's in Apple Review right now so it should be ready in the week.
- https://taskpocket.io/ - todo list, my own interpretation of proper todo list. Right now it's completely free. I would like to add one-time payment especially when I add attachments
Both of the apps above was built using AI especially for the frontend. Both backend at some point of time I almost completely refactored/rewrote myself
Speaking of private apps:
- I made a small app which allows me to track business expenses and categorize them Built with AI and using AI.
I've seem frontend being covered by AI more and more, especially in simple display scenarios
Love it!
1. i'm notoriously bad about filing expense reports for my own companies. i built a macos desktop app which integrates with Plaid and keeps track of the things i need to expense, using an LLM to guess which company and whether it's reimbursible.
2. A MacOS app to manage my wife's SD Cards - downloads playlists from Spotify and finds the music, then makes sure the tracks are analyzed for BPM, key, then synced with Rekordbox for CDJ-3000s
3. https://clawchat.live - a homebrew package, which honestly works better locally but is available online, which provides a Rust chat server for separate LLMs to talk to each other and coordinate work. Longest session between Codex and Claude has been over 24 hours on big tasks. Generally I make one session the coordinator and the other does the coding.
Built an Android app to streamline the messaging web-apps I use to stay in touch with some contacts. I already refrained from installing those services' apps due to privacy concerns. https://gitlab.com/not_john/palpipe
I’ve used Claude to help write development utilities to support my retro computing interests.
The most complete tool being this unit testing support library for Apple IIgs assembly language development.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/iigs-unit
Timelapse-consolidator: create a single timelapse video from multiple captures, ignoring night shots. I think, it's a good example for splitting the task for separate programs, which task size the AI still can handle. See prompt for details: https://github.com/ern0/timelapse-consolidator
(Night shot detector should be faster, instead Python, I would rewrite it in some native language, like Rust, but it will run once per project, so it's not vital.)
The small local ISP that I use doesn't provide a Tizen OS app for their VOD service, so I built one mostly by pointing Codex at the .apk of their Android app.
https://github.com/jazzido/bvcplay-tizen
I've built a stacked-PR tool for myself, it's just a simple wrapper around git commands. State stored locally in .git/config - https://github.com/alexghr/graphene
Lots of small dashboards/log investigations deployed to private Github Pages for $WORK. This has been a great way to share insights.
I'm currently working on a tool to control my tmux sessions from my phone. Specifically all the codex panes so I can remote control my running sessions from my phone while I'm away from my desk while also keeping them in sync with tmux for when I'm back at my computer. On this one I'm using Codex as a helper, it's not allowed to write any code so it's going along a lot slower :)
I built wasm2go, which I had meant to for some time but was a gargantuan task to get into a good enough shape to test if it was a good idea.
I think it was (a good idea), and AI made it easier for sure.
https://github.com/ncruces/wasm2go
I've continued working on a tool for my daughter, our friends, and I to scan and index Pokemon cards. The tool is a phone app and website (https://MyBulkCards.com) The phone app uses the camera to scan a card and run the image through a couple of models, a record is written of the card along with the location. It's pretty basic, but I can store cards in boxes like “Box 1 AAA, Box 1 BBB, …” and find cards easy peasy. There’s also a friends feature so I can see what others have locally. We borrow cards from each other quite a bit.
It's been a super fun tool to build. The phone app just got approved in the Android app store. I have a bit of cleanup, but plan on releasing it soon.
The first thing I did was set up Linux's inbuilt imap-filter service to handle push notifications from Gmail:
https://github.com/yo-chanan/gmail-imapfilter
I had looked everywhere for a simple system service that supports Gmail, or a chrome extension that supports push, and was able to find neither. Then when I started using Codex, I thought "Here, go automate the setup of the imap-filter service for Gmail."
- https://github.com/sethdeckard/atria : TUI for managing multiple AI coding agents that doesn't force a particular workflow on you. You can use tmux, the built-in PTY, or terminal integrations with iTerm2, kitty, or WezTerm.
- https://github.com/sethdeckard/loadout : TUI and CLI for managing a personal library of Claude Code and Codex skills across your machines.
- https://github.com/sethdeckard/atlas : TUI and CLI (also works as "cd launcher") that creates a smart, automatic map of every Git repository under your projects root.
I'm using these almost daily.
Ive created a Light Gauge Steel framing tool, to design my shed and it growing beyond expected: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DauZYdsUQ1g&feature=youtu.be
https://truepb.net/ - My unashamedly vibe coded strava analysis & athletics results site. I'm no dev but I've used it to up my knowledge in cicd, security, postgres and frontend/backend development.
I built Algotutor
https://github.com/zuzuleinen/algotutor/
a spaced repetition system that teaches you how to solve algorithmic problems and Go concurrency. I use it daily.
An Android mobile app that sends e-mails to myself. So far private, but I use extensively throughout the day to send notes to myself.
If someone wants an invite drop me an e-mail.
I made a bunch of silly projects at first to help me manage daily life. For example, automating saving important emails based on prior history. Extracting text and putting it into csv files, downloading finance reports, reminder scripts, watchdog scripts. All the boring stuff pretty much what was done at first.
Now, i have gotten to point where i am replacing actual useful applications that I need to get stuff done. Plugs here: https://github.com/skittleson/mqtt_broker_esp and https://github.com/skittleson/WyzeBridge.
Built the tool to kind of builds the tools. Just publicly made available yesterday actually. https://github.com/fabritorio/fabritorio
I am still extensively dogfooding but I think I'm mostly there for my use case, probably adding some other channel support like Telegram or Discord so that it can reach out your current self host. But yeah not a prio since at least for me most of my use cases are just within my own PC (or LAN).
EDIT: Quick summary of what it is, basically you can spin up agents seamlessly and modify, supports copy paste, etc. I want it visual as well and kind of "always on", think Factorio rather than every other workflow, run on start tools.
This seems really cool actually. Just read thru the README and watched the demo gif. Any examples of what you've built with it so far? Might have to play around with it tonight. I've been getting pretty heavy into local LLMs since getting my 5090. Amazing what Qwen can do given how small it is (running 35B at Q4 quant).
It is dumb but very specific to my use case but an agent that runs every evening to pull both my calendar and time logs (Google sheet). The calendar I do every morning to time block my day, then throughout the day I record what I did and categorize by Eisenhower's matrix. Then it compares map vs territory and I hopefully adjust my priors to do better planning or flag time sinks.
Cool thing is I built the tools with the [Tool Builder](https://github.com/fabritorio/fabritorio/blob/main/docs/node...) as well, pretty small CLI helpers. https://imgur.com/a/XeYYbzC
Check out Krasis https://github.com/brontoguana/krasis
It enables something similar to unified memory. Ive got a 5060 (16GB) card and 96 GB ddr5.
I can run qwen3.5-122b int4 at 25tok/sec.And now even does image ingestion!
Ive been bulk transliterating and translating foreign language books into english. And all completely local.
Wait so this makes it so I can use my DDR5 as well as my VRAM combined? This is actually sick if so. Maybe I will actually have to go out and buy some more DDR5 (currently only have 32GB...)
Yep, thats it what it does. Only works with nvidia.
The difference it does use safetensors, and not gguf's. But it does dynamically requant to int4 8 or bf16.
Wow that's actually sick as hell, somehow hadn't heard of this. maybe I will go and blow $700 on a new ram kit... thanks for sharing!
Glad to share!
But go try it out now with a 35B model on your current hardware.
Right now, I have loaded qwen3.6-35B-A3B, 128k context, kv cache 2.5GB, thinking. Int8
Using 11.5GB gfx ram, 42GB system ram.
I dont want to oversell. All GPU would be faster, but creating a semi-unified system is deffo a game changer for me.
I made https://github.com/gagarwal304/meridian to analyze claude's open telemtry data and learn how to improve my claude.md for token efficiency and better output from claude code
ReverseCam - A camera app to show the non-mirror preview while taking selfies.
https://www.reversecam.com/
The front camera apps always show the mirror preview. Most of us hate photos others take of us, but love our selfies. It's because we groom ourselves and find our perfect angles using the mirror preview. So it's jarring when we see the photos of us taken by others. I always wanted a camera app that showed the non-mirror preview. Surprisingly most camera apps don't have this option. So I created this app to scratch my own itch:)
Note: Photos and videos are only stored in the browser. No data is sent to any servers. You can also install this as an app from your browser since it's a progressive web app.
https://www.swiftbook.dev/
Added a code runner to the SwiftBook documentation to help me run Swift in the browser without switching back to IDE
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.
Photo Organizer - Organizes image and video files first by original directory name, then by EXIF date, if any. Renames images to img-yyyymmdd-hhmmss format and moves them to yyyymmdd directories. I've planned such for a decade, but I was too lazy to spend a week or two with it (I mean some evenings, ca. a week). Vibecoded in ca. two days: https://github.com/ern0/photo-organizer
I built a telegram bot that has access to my entire obsidian vault so I can ask it any questions about all my data. Here it is describing itself:
I'm literally the bot, so I can describe myself! Here's what I do and what you've got planned:
What I do now:
- Act as your second brain connected to your Obsidian vaults
— daily notes, goals, client info, business info, ideas, and facts
- Search your vaults for context when you ask questions
- Help with journal prompts and reflections in your daily notes (I ask context dependent questions randomly throughout the day that are based on your notes)
- Create new files when you need them
- Answer questions about your life, businesses, gear, plans, etc.
- Reminders (i.e. "/remindme in 2 days to [action]" and it will text me at that time)
Total game changer and I never would have built it without LLMs.
https://wodblock.com an app to track workouts, can generate functional/hiit workouts too using AI (give me something leg heavy but with some cardio, etc).
https://jazzcatalog.com an app the learn jazz standards. You upload PDFs and it extracts the songs, can add annotations, metronome, some have associated youtube video. Working on adding tools to record loops through audio interface, AUv3 effects, MIDI.
https://music.nicotejera.com a variety of tools I built for myself to learn music theory, ear training, etc.
I use deciduous every day while working with LLMs to create more of my own tools/projects. It is a living memory for agents stored in a simple, portable manner. https://deciduous.dev
https://calcal.eu - A tool I built to plan my gear list and calorie intake for various multi day outdoor activities
https://github.com/LukaWe/espCoinWatch - espCoinWatch, an ESP8266-based Bitcoin/Crypto Ticker with Weather Support.
https://github.com/LukaWe/LocalExifGeoMap LocalExifGeoMap - privacy-focused, browser-based tool to visualize and analyze GPS data from a batch of photos. generate interactive maps, heatmaps, elevation profiles, and trip statistics. etc.
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.
A terminal and keyboard based email user agent with support for markdown, all written in Python with Textual https://github.com/juanjosegarciaripoll/pony
Most of it has been to maximize productivity with AI
1) Use chatgpt pro from codex cli, opencode, claude etc as you can't get it via API. This has been the biggest boost in productivity for me as I don't have to copy and paste.
https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop
2) A small gate to make sure any agent cannot run destructive rm -rf or git reset --hard commands, it has saved me many many times
https://github.com/agentify-sh/safeexec
3) For mac users, summarizes and speaks out loud after codex finishes a turn
https://github.com/agentify-sh/speak
I made a Tree-Sitter based parser for Emacs Org-Mode files (that's mostly complete, mostly): https://github.com/Idorobots/tree-sitter-org
On top of that, I made a Python parser that's meant to improve upon the awesome `orgparse`: https://github.com/Idorobots/org-parser
And now I'm building a CLI for Emacs Org-Mode, mostly focused on ad-hoc querying, agenda planning, etc: https://github.com/Idorobots/org-cli
I made a home assistant esp32 device to toggle the light switch for me. Codex done all the software stuffs, I just plug it into mac, let codex "this is a esp32, this is how i connect it with a motor, make it xxx". And it works exactly as I want after 15 minutes.
I made a timesheet entry, invoicing, and basic bookkeeping system for my freelance business. It works pretty well, I used "spec driven development" with Codex and it one-shot the entire application except for the PDF invoice layout which needed iteration.
A pure Go, in-memory Cassandra emulator
Technically for work, but it was during a hackathon so we could reduce the amount of tests we need to run against real or containerized instances. Go as the language just because that's the stack interacting with it the most.
The VJ Curator app is a fork of VLC where you can press the 0-9 hotkeys to easily curate the video clips. After pressing a number key then the video clip will be automatically moved into a folder with a matching number - https://github.com/wivy1/vj-curator
Collection of JSX scripts for After Effects which automate repetitive production tasks since I often work with hundreds of comps in my projects - https://github.com/nuclearsugar/AfterEffectsScripts/
I built an iOS app for my sons who play club basketball. It’s designed to bridge the gap between practicing solo on the court and the pressure of playing in a game.
It uses mechanics and body movement, via visual detection through the cameras, to identify when you’re about to take a shot or make a pass.
It then pumps distracting noises (honks, cheers, jeers, etc.) into the headphones to try to distract you. It also runs a continuous 24-second clock so you build a natural sense of how much time is left before you need to get a shot off.
I'm looking for more people to join the test flight: https://clutchshot.app/
I built a little Gmail cleaner because my inbox had a bunch of "newsletters I unsubscribed from in my head but never actually did." Headers only, never message bodies, because privacy should still matter, I think. It worked very well and the amount of spam I get dropped dramatically, which was the point.
Everything was built with AI as part of a 12-in-12 challenge I'm doing, where I'm building 12 products in 12 months. https://twelve.zamith.pt/
Quietbox (https://quietbox.zamith.pt/) - Clear spammy emails from your inbox
Did something similar for myself, but CLI-only: https://github.com/facundofarias/gmail-cleaner. Good one!
is:unread -is:starred <-- go through your inbox and star what you want to keep, this filter will help you delete everything else unread. Add something like older_than:1y to also prune your Gmail from time to time.
Mainly Andurel, which is the fullstack framework I always wanted for Go
It follows a lot of the conventions of Rails which is probably why it has turned out quite well
https://github.com/mbvlabs/andurel
I recently built a physics-driven auto-panner based on PONG, so I can also play PONG inside my DAW. https://portwaydsp.com
I also built https://plugins.audio - a Dribbble-esque showcase of audio plugins.
It's been a dream to be able to work in the audio software space. I've been a musician, designer, coder all my life, and had a few moonlights with building audio plugins over the years. But now with AI at hand, I can use it to fill that missing technical requirement while still retaining my domain expertise (music/design).
I'm going to be scrolling that plugin site for hours, really cool. I normally use stuff like linuxdaw.org to find free stuff - but I really like the addition of a cheap filter. Any more plans for it?
Oh wow, I hadn't seen inuxdaw.org - similar concept. Next plan is a weekly (automated) newsletter for the latest plugins. But really just to keep it growing and keep feeding it. I actually love browsing plugin sites, so I built a chrome extension that can automatically add a plugin from a page I'm on. I have to choose the image and videos though.
I built a 3D database schema visualization tool after YEARS of struggling to explain relational DB-related topics to non-technical audiences.
https://schema3d.com/
A Few: - Augsentric [https://www.augsentric.com] - probably my biggest time/AI sink - for evaluating websites - FencePost - [https://github.com/seriocomic/FencePost] - a UI for multi-host Firewall rules (UFW) - EventFeed (private repo) - a timeline of events on my network in a centralized UI - Ledger (private repo) - personalized finance ledger using bank statements
The biggest unblock remains the tools/scripts/skills for documentation (started with Notion, network now sits on Obsidian for read/write).
I made an android app to objectively track how often my newborn cries overnight because you get so tired you can't really remember:
https://plunio.app
Any parents with kids that cry in the night might benefit!
A more powerful search tool for the contents of Palo Alto firewall release notes: https://firewallissues.axvig.com/
A tool to periodically sync Device 42 data to Netbox (work).
this is cool! I've always found the palo alto docs a nightmare to navigate.
1. Built an agent memory tool since all agents and clis are dumb and don't remember anything. Instead of prepping 300 project files and Md files I just say:
Check sugar memory for the latest thing we were working on.
2. The second thing is when making changes across a large codebase agents are also dumb at figuring this out and also grep 300 things, using tons of tokens. Instead I say
Check RemembrallMCP to analyze the impact of the change.
1. https://github.com/roboticforce/sugar
2. https://github.com/roboticforce/remembrallmcp
This inventory tracker app that runs entirely in the browser with yjs, and syncs over peer.js, that I have not been very good about using lately
https://eternityforest.github.io/Stuffer/
Not an app, but a productivity system, partially refined by telling AI every time I forgot anything and asking for research references on human error that are relevant to that specific mistake:
https://github.com/EternityForest/THUNDERWARS
- Email triage
- Meetup alert for meetups that match specific topics
- A daily journal that transforms entries into chibi-style cartoons
- A cashflow forecast our stupid accounting software can't do on its own
- DIY service monitoring for a ragged collection of docker containers, cron tasks, scripts and various others
Some things I’ve used AI for the last year or so:
- small club website: https://www.kolibrinkpg.com
- ticketing system with Stripe payments and QR scanning at the door
- Instagram/media ingestion for the club site
- genealogy tool with GEDCOM import
- scripts for downloading/archiving public-domain film material
- playlist/library tooling for DJ use
- music collaboration/sync tool for Ableton projects
- normal work stuff in a much larger existing codebase
I have become a lot more strict about process after being burned a few times. Mostly: make the change small, be clear about what it is supposed to do, check the assumptions before coding, use tests/logging/manual checks as evidence, and don’t merge anything I can’t review and explain myself.
I bashed out a dashboard for myself the other month, monitors firewall alerts/warnings/shows connected devices, process monitors on a few pc's that I keep an eye on, a to-do list/calendar combination that let's me track some internal tasks I need to do weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc, oh and it pings cloudflare to keep me up to date on the website stats. And an Amidakuji game to help me and another staff member pick who's doing X task that day :P
Nothing major, and only works with my infra, but it saves me a few minutes a few times a day to just be able to check the tab, and if there's an alert load up the full stats page.
- A HTML prototyping skill and a simple upload web app to share it privately with my team
- A Chrome extension to make design comments and ASCII wireframes right on the page you're working on and feed it to your AI coding tool as a prompt https://getdesignjam.com/
- An iRacing overlay to compare the telemetry of a reference lap against your live data https://flylapsim.com/
It's been a ton of fun to be able to dabble in software thanks to AI. Especially for small personal tools like these it's so powerful
TONS of tools. Most written in Go. Several have API servers in addition to cli or TUI or web interfaces. The API interface to my apps makes LLM-driven development much faster.
https://github.com/michaelteter/docgen : create a single text file of your entire project, with a tree and some other useful bits. This is good for dropping into an LLM or research notebook instead of giving an LLM access to your actual project folder. It also can be put in your pre-commit script so you always have one single doc you can diff from one commit to the next.
md2pdf: markdown to PDF, relying on defaults and optional config files or cli args for formatting choices (such as page margins)
md2gslides: markdown, converted into slides, and using Google Slides API to generate the doc in my Google Drive. This saves me so much effort (I teach, so I make lesson plans/presentations all the time).
get-music: TUI app that lets me search Youtube and easily queue up to download one or more of the search results. Then I take the downloaded content, split out the audio, LLM process the video title, add metadata for music, and then provide an easy command interface for local searches and playback of downloaded content.
bookmarks: TUI for slurping all the URLs from my browser, LLM-tagging each url based on the tag list I provide with the prompt and url, and lots of features for managing priority, show/hide tags, etc. This was to help me stop worrying about having a hundred tabs open. Now I can just sweep them up into my own private, encrypted (sqlite) db.
ESL-Planner: Complete web app for building class plans for teaching English (based on params, such as student age range, skill level, specific teaching language (what we want to teach), etc. It's close to being ready to productize and release as SaaS, but I built it for myself initially.
Numerous other tools plus a guide doc listing all the tools and what they do. These resources are then made available to LLMs when I'm developing, saving me (and the LLM) the time of hand-crafting the same tooling over and over.
- An outreach planner composed in a single html file. Data can be exported to, and imported from, a JSON that can be passed to the LLM for enrichment. https://kashifaziz.me/outreach-planner/
- An analysis pipeline that takes data from D1 (storing user searches), Posthog and Clicky (analytics) to periodically generate user journey reports.
- halalcodecheck.com - a database of emulsifier codes and food ingredients. Building this with the goal to help consumer verify and find alterantives of food ingredients across US, EU / UK and Asia.
Random but... please do not use this template on real emails
"Hi [FirstName],
I came across [Company] and was impressed by the work you're doing — especially [specific detail]."
It's a terrible cold email, I get so many of these every week... There's better ways to get someone's attention
Thanks for taking out the time to look into the template and sharing your feedback. Appreciated.
Having said this, that's just a demo template and users can tweak and configure the template as they deem fit.
I figured, I just had a visceral reaction to that specific template as I get so many of them
Still a work in progress but I’m making my own subway web app. A by-product of this is this realtime subway map of NYC
https://donohoe.dev/subway/map/
I started something similar but for Sydney with the ultimate goal of being an agent simulator, simulating everyone going to work etc. Project got a bit unwieldy and is on hold while I mull it's future over.
Recently I made Vocast (https://github.com/cnrmurphy/vocast) - a cli driven tool that uses local TTS models to convert articles to "podcasts" and expose them via RSS feed. I wanted a way to listen to articles without having to pay for an app. I convert the article on my PC (which gets added to a managed library), run a web server, run Tailscale on both PC and phone, then I can use a podcast app to access my library. Nice way to consume some articles while out for a walk or anything else and has worked reasonably well for me so far.
I do something similar with Kokoro, Cloudscraper, and Trafilatura but just share the output to my phone with Airdrop. I use it for articles, PDFs, and HN threads.
After I tried and failed to find any decent QR code generators online, I made one: https://www.cutearr.com/
Runs entirely in the browser, no tracking, no analytics, no ads.
oof, a ton of them, here are a few that passed my minimum quality standards and made public: a video compression service (inspired by 8mb.video) [0], a music player that gets songs from a specific repository for Geometry Dash [1], a screenshot tool "for crappy OSes" (windows) [2], spaghetti C code that prints "i love you" to stdout [3], more spaghetti code [4], and a speedhack cheat for singleplayer games on Linux [5]
[0] https://github.com/Jotalea/keiryo
[1] https://github.com/Jotalea/nong-player-gtk
[2] https://github.com/Jotalea/crapshot
[3] https://github.com/Jotalea/miscellaneous/blob/main/iloveyou....
[4] https://github.com/Jotalea/miscellaneous/blob/main/password....
[5] https://github.com/Jotalea/miscellaneous/blob/main/speedhack...
- a sky shader with the "correct" color blue, sunsets that please me, and an astonometrically correct year round sun path
- github clone + extras
- a stack (FILO) based task manager / TODO list
- a CAD kernel with Blender frontend (WIP)
- a minecraft mod that makes real terminal emulators in block form
- ^ that but in Godot + a terrible "game" world (WIP)
- a somewhat failed app organizing claude workspaces
- a somewhat failed attempt at a VM framework for MacOS
- a somewhat abandoned gmail clone
- a farmland pricing model + maps etc.
- partially reverse engineered VCDS device
- a likely novel fractal system I need to work on some math to publish
- NTSC transmitter/receiver in gnuradio for the artful corruption of video
- backend for iOS appstore handling of account/subscription things
- an RSS / Podcast reader
I've made text editor engine for .NET 10 built in C# with no UI dependencies. Includes a piece-table buffer, multi cursor editing, syntax highlighting, code folding, snippets, TextMate grammars, diff engine, undo/redo, C# REPL, plugin system. Its essentially a deterministic execution runtime for structured, auditable text mutations thats built for AI systems, automation pipelines, and tooling that needs to manipulate text documents. https://github.com/marinusmaurice/TextApi
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 for use in work suites like Jira/Confluence.
Still fairly early, but I've been using the tool to help build the app itself which has been an enlightening experience.
"bringing the gap" -> bridging, right?
Yes, typing on mobile - ty!
Heaps, most recent is just a little applet that stops my Mac from going to sleep with the lid closed: https://transitivedev.gumroad.com/l/doppio-app
Bunch of security tools: Some are at https://diffsec.dev others:
https://github.com/diffsec/quokka
https://github.com/ihavespoons/hooksy
Claudhd
It's a user daemon that runs on my machine and exposes a unix socket, and then a bunch of hooks in claude, zsh, vim, etc, that report directory and commands I've run and all that, pipes it to claude Haiku for summary, and then stores context in sqlite. It also exposes that data as MCP so I can use claude to say "hey what was I doing yesterday," or any arbitrary time range.
I find that in the age of using AI agents, "Wtf was I working on yesterday" is an even harder thing to remember for me, so this helps me kind of track everything with a database that a) has AI summaries already and b) can be accessed by AI as well as a CLI.
What does it matter if it was yesterday or last week, and why would git log not suffice?
Because I work across a dozen repos any given week, and I have my own side projects I play with as well. It blurs together. Global git hooks are another data source for the project, which I'd forgotten to add, so that data is in there too.
The "expose it as MCP so AI can query it" pattern is one I keep seeing work really well in practice. We did something similar for business metrics in Databox - the interesting design question was whether to expose raw data or pre-aggregated metrics. We ended up with metrics (with dimension breakdowns) because agents hallucinate less when they don't have to decide how to aggregate themselves. Curious if you ran into anything similar with the sqlite summaries - do you find the AI-generated summaries more useful than raw command history?
HN Chrome Extension for dark mode and a few other styling tweaks I wanted.
Jira Chrome Extension to add some notes and links to dashboard pages that I wanted for ease of use.
Small application which takes a CSV and turns it into a Registered Server List for SSMS in order to keep my list of servers updated for queries across all our databases.
Honestly one of the good use cases for AI. Small low complexity scripts and tools for assistance is a great use case. I'm amazed at the folks that are doing huge monolith rewrites with Agents and such, but I've never had good results for that. Small time saving scripts gets me a much more direct return on investment.
A frustration at trying to keep track of my families requests for shopping grew into https://nimblist.app https://github.com/tmnrtn/nimblist-selfhost
I've also built a web based tool to track my partners business cashflow which I'm in the process of making available for self hosting
A Javascript framework called places.js for creating interactive UIs using web components. It has support for cross component state management, backend data fetching, and web scraping protection. https://codeberg.org/createthirdplaces/places-js/src/branch/...
Here is a website I made with places.js for DC area board game events. https://dmvboardgames.com/
I tool which pulls all details from my Garmin and keeps a '5 day rolling average' series of stats -- my lifestyle means I can't keep up 'X steps a day', but I feel I can keep up 'average X steps a day for the last 5 days'. What's perfect is I can tweak it, I even added a special 'the weather is truely awful today, you can dip under average but you need to make it up later' option by getting it to automatically pull the weather forecast, or 'The weather is perfect today, really push'.
I made mobile friendly agentic driven IDE (as a PWA), where I can start "agent" processes on my different laptops (company, personal) or on the dedicated server and manage them from any browser / mobile device enywhere. Now I spent most of my time do programming in my head walking somewhere and talk to agents / review code directly from mobile. I also added support of n.eko like remote browsing streaming for emulating desktop browser while I'm on mobile and simplified deployment tool to manage kubernetes / docker deployments.
A JS image pixelator: https://kremerman.me/pixelate/
Can be used to resize images, but the main purpose was pixelation for a game I was making.
So many! I manage a fund that buys small e-comm brands, and at this point the whole thing runs on a combination of AI and tools created with AI. My favorite is one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/WhatsApp/email supplier convos daily and uses that to build a dashboard tracking the status of my orders.
I write a Substack about the whole thing and have a pretty comprehensive list here: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using...
A github client / dashboard that can pull 20 of so repos for all internal and client projects in one UI so I can stay on top of project delivery and long standing bugs. It has global search, bookmarking and text based / minimalistic ui for maxium space utilisation and information density. It's read only so to comment on issue i click a link to open GH in new tab but helped me a lot to have this birds eye view on my company. Don't get me started on GH Project. I tried Linear many times but multi project / multi repo is just not their core focus and it shows.
I had a portal/app with messages exam results, calenders for .) kindergarten for my youngest child (who will now go to elementary school) .) elementary school for my middle child .) daycare for my middle child .) high school for eldest child
All spamming with messages and news - so I made python scripts that use the apps API to get the messages (exams and changes etc) and puts it into our family telegram group chat if relevant
I just can't sit here every morning 20 minutes on my phone logging in checking everything just to find out the food plan has changed ...
Recently I got AI to help make a script to convert a CSV dump of trading activity on a trading platform for uploading into another stock trading analysis platform.
Later on, I managed to crunch the numbers in the script, and realised I could dump them out and display them in a dashboard alongside the trade activity. So I built that too,
An excel spreadsheet could have done the same job as the dashboard, but the script for conversion was greatly aided by the AI tool. The work otherwise would have been a bit of manual coding and back-and-forth testing.
Been working on this spaced repetition app / incremental reading app. I used SuperMemo for about a year straight, found the UI not that great, so I decided to make my own incremental reading app. Think: incremental everything. Supports multiple spaced repetition algorithms FSRS-6, SuperMemo 18, SuperMemo 20. https://github.com/melpomenex/incrementum-tauri https://readsync.org
I've been making a set of local- and files-first iOS apps for myself - Photo Gallery, Music and Contacts.
I use Linux on my computer and an iPhone and wasn't happy having to use a cloud to sync my data between my devices. Syncthing/Synctrain + my apps allow me to keep everything on my private network, without ever touching a server or having to self-host something like Immich.
https://j23n.com/public/posts/2026/localios
Same, but for android. My best one so far is my own launcher/home screen. Works great.
I host a couple of services on a box in my network. I built a tunnel that runs on the box and on my VPS to allow me to quickly access those services.
A tool that checks for new movie and tv releases, looks up ratings to see if they are worth adding to my plex server (see above about services I'm running), and then finds the magnet link and downloads them. But will only do so if my VPN is connected.
A tool that allows me to quickly build out paintball fields using my STLs of bunkers that I made, and export the full field layout as a single STL for quick painting, slicing, and printing.
https://docdiagram.com - A tool for creating technical diagrams. Basically an upgrade from mermaid. Load it into your MCP, prompt it, you'll get a clean diagram binary file in svg/png/etc.
https://anomalyarmor.ai/ - A tool for managing data observability and data anomalies.
Used daily by customers but also for my own work. These tools fill a gap that helps me get sh*t done.
Skills for creating good and repeatable benchmarking scripts.
A knowledge base for my research area, with tools for paper ingestion and search.
An md file to html presentation tool, there are several but this one helps me.
A review tool that splits a PR or branch intelligently into modules, and does per module reviews and global reviews for different aspects, and then summarizing that into a report. Can be used with multiple different harnesses. Written as a Python project, but build-time assembled into a single-file Python script with uv run --script shbang line.
I was always experimenting with different agents and models, and I wanted to track how much I use eg codex vs opencode vs hermes, and which models I use.
So I made, kind of last.fm/waka-code for agents where I track (anonymous) usage per project
here is the example of my profile: https://clankerlog.ai/kodisha
Data is fully anonymous, all I collect is (agent, model, project name [can be mapped to something else to hide the true name]) and everything is opt-in by default (per project)
I am building my self-hosting llm-wiki system (https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...). My approach is to start with a theory of how such systems could work. Then since llms can interpret theory - this theory becomes an executable llm-wiki system itself.
It's called Commonplace: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/
https://codeplug.org
A web harness for another open source project (CHIRP) which lets you program channels into all kinds of handheld radios (HAM).
I made a Safari extension with Swift that automatically suggests using Fastmail masked email addresses on login forms. Never published it, instead just using an xcode dev build on my phone. Works flawlessly.
I have a telegram bot, and I used to have it read message in a group chat to detect the language, and if it wasn't English, it would use gpt5 nano to translate.
To save on inference, I had Claude create a lightweight typescript library to handle translations and detection. Now I get the previous functionality for 200mb~ ram versus paid API credits.
I also built a home assistant menu bar in osx, let's me easily monitor activity, toggle devices, view cameras, etc.
A vocabulary flash card app. I know I know, there's a million.
None of them had share extension feature so whenever you are reading on the web or in a book you highlight the word share directly to the app and it automatically looks up the definition.
Also added a voice review (with gemini native audio model) so you can chat your reviews.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vocabulary-flash-cards/id67750...
A flight search tool that takes a set of origin cities and finds the cheapest shared destination: https://flightjive.com
I built a color palette tweaker very specific to my OCD needs:
https://archives.fifthrevision.com/color-generator/index.htm...
I also have a local zsh autocomplete macro that let's me type things like "git rename annotated branch" and ctrl-g and it will get me the actual command. There's also a ctrl-r mode that searches my history using natural language. This is connected to a locally run ollama so my keys don't leak.
- Day logger quarterly goal management and daily goal tracking system with multiple checkins, voice transcript task dump, jibberish to apple reminders, daily recommendations based on activity and goal tracking and always on dashboard.
- Snubnosed mandarin app. Vibecoded anki and tinder-like character game for mandarin which allows new vocab to be added on the fly. Also accurate text to speech for tones.
- What did I learn? Tweet summarize that takes all favored tweets and assembles into weekly categories and allows deep research on certain topics.
Two that I use pretty frequently:
1. https://shopmath.app - I got tired of converting decimal to fraction for woodworking/renovations, and I wanted to round calculations to the nearest 16th, so I prompted this.
2. https://youtubetimestamps.app/ - I use davinci resolve and wanted an easy way to convert my EDL markers into timestamps for youtube.
I made a home dashboard (that I access on my iPad) that talks to my Philips Hue bridge for controlling my house's lights, and also shows train arrival times + what my dog should be clothed in (if at all) for her walks (there was a smallish period of time here in nyc where one day you'd have to wear a jacket and the next day you'd be sweating even in shorts). It also shows our family calendar (wife + self) - all family birthdays in the next 4 days, any events, etc
I have a service that runs on my home server and uses the Ubiquiti API to detect when I'm on a zoom call. It then pauses my Sonos network-wide. Unpauses when the call is over. The next step of it is to have it's own podcast library, so I can have my own little talk radio going on in the background all day.
Some point, I want to convert into a little app and open source it, so you can install on your laptop so it's usable by more people. And have it detect more than just zoom.
I have built :
- a GUI terminal-based Markdown previewer called "leaf": https://github.com/RivoLink/leaf
- and a lightweight AI automation framework called "flow": https://github.com/RivoLink/flow
transitioned from my OmniOutliner 3(!) based system last year finally to modern macOS and obsidian.
1 year later, with no js/ts skills at all, i got 10 custom plugins, several forks where i fixed bugs and some custom adapations, dozens of scripts and snippets and what not
Now obsidian works for me like I want, and still every day I use it Im still in awe
It is a bit hard to describe until I make a video but basically I seem to have changed the fundamental unit from a document to a chunk and it is just awesome
none of which would have been possible without AI
I’ve built a Postgres monitoring tool: https://dlt.github.io/blog/posts/pg-glimpse-postgres-monitor...
And a MCP-powered error tracking rails engine: https://dlt.github.io/blog/posts/mcp-powered-error-tracking-...
Scrobble tui to track vinyl record listens on last.fm, sourced from collection on Discogs
Calibre web UI 2.0 to replace Calibre's mediocre web interface. Used for browsing ebook catalog, searching and cataloging with a simple list feature.
Project Gutenberg local mirror UI to browse my local copy of Project Gutenberg books
A couple of MCP servers for self-hosted services to give access to OpenClaw. Currently working on a daily digest that Claw will generate that includes feeds from these: what news stories were popular in my feed reader, did my baseball team win, etc.
I've created lots of small things, but the most interesting is a firefox plugin that detects when some media is playing and send an event with the details to my home assistant. This way I can create some automations that automatically change the lights when I play/pause some media. It's really cool to have your lights automatically dim when you start watching a movie and then for some accent light to turn on when I pause the movie to go to the bathroom.
I use it to help me rewrite my neovim config pretty often. Nothing fancy, but since my config is pretty small (20 files) I can load it all into gemini or codex and have it help me figure out what I'm missing or forgot was in there.
I wrote NerdCalci (https://github.com/vishaltelangre/NerdCalci), a free calculator app for Android.
Besides, I made a lot of automation scripts (mostly using Ruby) that run on my raspberry pi to fetch/parse/crunch things and notify me on my Android phone through a self-hosted https://ntfy.sh server.
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?
It evolved out of some weird interaction someone was smartassing me that the moon wasn't full when I was pointing to how pretty the full moon was. After that, between a friend and myself, it became a bit of a running gag how full (or not full) the moon actually was. This was my first real project I kind of "vibe coded": https://moon.masca.teide.cloud/ - showing you how full the moon is to the 10th decimal
The tool that converts my telegram channel into web page with catalog of all the records where emoji used as a tags, so I can quickly find any post:
Code: https://github.com/VadimKey/xorpingtonian
Catalog (in Russian): https://vadimkey.github.io/xorpingtonian/
During vibe coding I found that emojis are not that simple as I thought about them.
https://github.com/edumucelli/docking
https://docking.cc
A Linux dockbar with tons of applets and support for x11 and Wayland. Works on Gnome and KDE. I always wanted to write one as I have been involved with several open source ones, but it is a lot of time to go from scratch. I use it everyday, and I am enjoying it so much!
Built a few finance tools for Indian salaried folks — tax calculator, SIP planner etc. Honestly AI just made me braver. I wouldn't have touched half this stuff alone.
I finally shipped a Chinese learning app I wanted for myself for ages at https://wenmoji.com/. Just never had enough time to sit down and code it end to end. Still need some improvements of course, but will slowly chip away on it. I use it daily/weekly myself now.
Highlights are that it completely free, no login required and works offline (once you "downloaded"/cached some files the first time around).
https://github.com/haydenk/overseer - a Go port of foreman
https://github.com/haydenk/homestead - another Go project, working on a better uptime dashboard that can also be the main homepage for accessing homelab resources.
I also used AI to find and create issues and milestones to for me to get the project to 1.0.0
there are great alternatives to foreman in
Those seem really nice. Neither showed up when I searched for alternatives.
I made a little script that takes all images in a folder and formats them for my digital photo frame. It knows which have a converted file in the dest and skips them.
I built a language tutor iOS app for having voice conversations with a patient AI tutor. There’s plenty of services doing the same thing but I didn’t feel comfortable sending my broken Danish speech to a startup. It’s open source, going through App Store review now. https://github.com/challenga-org/openlanguage
Could we please stop putting price tags on 15-commit repos? It's just crazy that every idea, created with ai, now costs 10$ or more per month, despite it costs 5$ to create.
I was running a DnD online game and didn't feel that all the battle maps out there were easy enough to use. I am running using a screen share on discord so all the extra features of Roll 20 for example just got in the way. So an hour with Gemini made the rather bare bones map that I have here.
https://gregryork.github.io/EpicRpgBattleMap/
I built a database.
The team behind Gel got acquired by Vercel and I already experienced falling in love with a dead database (RIP RethinkDB) so I decided to fork the concept to a TypeScript port with Svelte as the UI instead of React.
It'll live at disc.sh in a few months. Early dogfooding is promising.
EDIT: Also forgot that I removed React from GraphiQL in favor of Svelte too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48044888
I made an android app for my badminton club which allows me to take registered players from a whatsapp group through to Square for easy payments and reconciliation.
I have built several tools from general purpose agents to the current project I am working on which is AgentLine - Telephony services for AI agents it gives a phone number to every AI agent to call and sms. I built it over a period of 14 days now I have refined it so much that I have more than 36 paid customers with 300$ in Monthly recurring revenue.
If anyone wants to take a look at it visit - https://agentline.cloud
I've always used notepad++ with one single giant .txt file for taking notes with dividers separated for each day so I codified that practice into a desktop app
Just a super minimalist thing where each day is one .txt file with the newest one at the top and a lazy loading scrolling list with every note going back 5 years
Supports CTRL + F searching, backups, and a bunch of other QoL features/macros
Its kind of a revolution that with agentic coding everyone can have their own hyperspecific customized apps
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek
The wow moment came when it wrote syntax highlighting rules for 40 languages and file formats in ~10 minutes:
https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/treetrek/tree/HEAD/render/rule...
I restore old non-functioning radios with nice design and good audio. I replace the old tech except the speakers with a raspberry add a mic array and package them with an easy to use ubuntu. whisper and the small gemma models made everything so much easier and private. I basically rewrite the whole backend with claude and created a nice first setup experience akin to other smartspeakers. It's amazing how good the sound is from these old speakers.
What do you do with the old guts? I suspect plenty of people would be interested in those (me included)
If they are still salvageable I resell them on ebay
A graphviz substitute in rust:
https://azriel.im/disposition/
The text editor has an LSP built in to guide you to what can be entered, but see the examples.
I wanted a way to have visual documentation that can show/hide detail, and be pure svg so that it can be pasted into sites without becoming pixelated.
Also supports animations to show interactions between hosts, which always gets messy when drawing a static diagram.
Built a pwa (NextJS, Mongo) to manage a friend group prediction game for the World Cup. Every year someone from the group would volunteer to put together an excel sheet, collect predictions, etc etc. It was A LOT of work, so decided to try building something with Claude. https://toqui.app/en
It’s getting good traction in South America!
I've been working on a tool to design laser cut jigsaw puzzles https://jiglu.dev/
Since I live far away from family I also added an online game so I could play with them or show them what I was making more concretely.
I've cut some jigsaw puzzles that it made, but without access to an uv printer or a laser cutter that works reliably it's been challenging to actually make them
At work, I've created a few convenience scripts in bash and Python - the second of which I am not fluent with. So, I used anonymized LLM access to create boilerplate/simple scripts with a bit of argparse and NumPy, which I then adapted to do what I actually wanted.
Would have made them without UI with a bit more elbow grease invested in web-searching for some examples, maybe even a StackOverflow question.
Generally, I'm not a fan of LLMs and their social effects.
Also I had a redis clone from before, but with AI i separated the epoll layer from the actual database engine which made it sort of embeddable. And hooked that embeddable database into a JNI interface, and now it can run inside Android applications, sort of like a concurrent hash map, but one that lives off heap and has support for TTLs and mget, msel, mdel, hashes and all that. I use it for some silly android games.
- app to help buy/find books for my wife - app to help manage my climbing wall - app to help finding good films/series - app to track weight - app to manage my board games and find the right ones to play - app for planning wood builds (e.g. climbing volumes) - telegram bots for: - picking restaurants for weekly lunch with friends - managing our 5-a-side football games, make teams, elo ladder - fantasy football leagues
Among many others
Mostly I was not an "I have a script for that" guy before AI, except for the occasional VERY simple or VERY high ROI thing. Now I've got more oddball scripts that do things I couldn't be bothered to automate before, including: workarounds for buggy software, stitching tmux together with other tools, automating common operations so I don't have to use the god awful GitHub UI, etc.
MCP for magic the gathering
A game engine / MVP game
A tool to replay shell commands during presentations
A tool to generate ttrpg book pdfs from obsidian markdown
A tool to generate confluence pages from markdown
Built a quant system that reads earnings transcripts for what management is trying not to say. The model is surprisingly bad at this. Turns out management is too.
- My own whisperflow bike shed
- Converted invoicing to Typst (from LaTeX)
- Automation of blinds
- Automation of lights
- Python library to control lights
- ML tuning library
- ML feature interaction library
- Jupyter notebook slideshow interface
- Davinci Resolve Authomation
- Arduino eink bluetooth HR monitor
- Tons of small scripts
I wanted to use worktree's the same way that cursor/windsurf/jetbrains air etc. do, i.e. but in intellij idea using claude code. It's a bit rudimentary and I wouldn't release it on the marketplace but I made a really good plugin that allows me to work on multiple tasks at once using worktree's and has all the great functionality intellij has.
Having fun building something in software I always pushed for "when I will find the time".
Being proud of the result.
THAT is a real game changer LLMs allowed me, both in my professional and my casual life.
For example this:
https://github.com/yodalf/coincan.git
or this:
https://github.com/yodalf/kiosk.git
a TUI that runs all my daily Linux updates from one place.
Updating my machine used to be a dozen scattered commands: apt, fwupd, and a pile of dev tools I want kept current (node/npm, go, claude, opencode, plus binaries like kitty and lazydocker) that each update their own weird way. Now it's one Bubble Tea dashboard that checks each tool's installed version against upstream and only downloads what's actually behind, so I can see at a glance what's current and what's not. Adding a new tool is easy enough that I just toss new ones in as I start using them.
It also has a cleanup mode that hunts down all the pesky cache files that quietly eat your disk and reclaims the space in one pass, which has saved me from the "laptop full again" scramble more than once.
Currently, testing it privately and tweaking to make it awesome.
Another tool I made for myself is automated video editor (takes folder of raw photos images, and generates edited video that can be shared online). Used it among other things to edit all my GoPro raw footage laying around (hundreds of files).
Built a book rotation, reading activity tracker, OpenLibrary ebook reader for my son’s story time.
https://bedtimebookhelper.com/
After coming back from paternity leave, I found that my team had really leaned in to AI driven development. This project was half catching up and half attempting to solve the burn out from the repeated books my wife and I were experiencing.
A docker-compose equivalent for running native processes: https://github.com/sciyoshi/decompose
Similar to another tool called process-compose but with a CLI that mimics the docker one more closely and doesn't start a TUI by default.
Useful if your team's on nix and doesn't need containers.
https://termonmac.com/ A relay terminal that lets you connect back to your Mac from your iOS device. I spent about 2 months building TermOnMac.
I am going to develop the next version TermOnHost, which will let you connect to all kinds of hosts (Mac, Windows, Linux, or any Linux embedded system) And your hosts can connect to each other.
I'm building an app that uses cosign similarity across a bunch of vectors to derive team productivity metrics. To be honest the maths is trivial; the hardest part is gathering data and normalizing it in a vaguely sensible way.
I've also built a release notes app for my QA teams, a DORA metrics app, a thing to map UX journeys with Playwright, and a ton of games and stuff. AI got me back into enjoying building things again.
I built a browser extension to create podcasts from HN stories in French (and English), I created it for myself in first, then I released it with a shared quota for the community but no one else uses it as it was forbidden for me to post show hn.
https://github.com/hn-ai-podcasts/browser-extensions
In 2023 I wrote from scratch a iOS native app using SwiftUI. This year I used AI extensively to improve and add many features to it in a span of couple months. The app is free and there are at least 2 users of the app - myself and one complete stranger (not a family or a friend) that is using this app.
https://www.motormait.com/
- A few Tmux plugins to automate workflow tasks (jump to pane, resize panes) - lots of TUIs for displaying relevant information from services (github, jira, obsidian), that are tiled on a "home" tmux window, gives me a live dashboard of work that I can refer to over the day. - TUI games, started with a simple dope wars clone … for when I need a quick break.
Dictation tool which works better than the built-in Apple functionality, for my use cases.
Bc my version uses simple copy/paste rather than deeper OS integration, it works more reliably in the Claude Code terminal (has to do with active windows or cursors or something). And bc it uses local Whisper, I also find it transcribes technical words such as “git” more accurately.
Nothing technically challenging but practical for me.
I've spent the last 3 months making it super fast to set up new OpenClaw agents in the cloud
https://operator.io - multiple isolated agents in Telegram with their own memory and tasks has been great for automating reminders, keeping tabs on things, and acting as a personal exocortex
A simple one - a small MacOS status bar widget that shows me if my Ethernet adapter is the default connection or WiFi. It also shows the reported link speed. I have a _very_ flaky USB/Ethernet adapter so seeing "Eth 10" in the bar is enough to prompt me to unplug/replug and get back to "Eth 100" (yes, it isn't gigabit).
I built a little web app that just collects job descriptions - currently up to 3m+ live / 15m dead descriptions - I mostly just use it to search to find stuff out - I should probably make they the main feature rather than the matching service idea.
https://farseek.io/
Made "stop localhost" publishing for vibe coders called Revdoku. It is useful when need to quickly publish a prototype, report, set of documents and can be done right from Claude or Codex.
If you use ChatGPT then can say it is more like ChatGPT Sites but also works in Claude.
I made my own lisp, Loon! https://campedersen.com/loon
I've been a longtime user of Logseq, and thankfully both it and its plugins are open source. I've just been having a lot of fun tweaking plugins I use a lot to have the additional features I've always wished they had. It's so easy to clone the repo and just say, "Claude, make this do X as well."
I downloaded the database of traditional Irish tunes from thesession.org and now I have a tool that lets me search with fuzzy search and instantly pull up full screen renderings of every setting for each tune. I can also add tags and set my preferred setting.
It's really removed all the pain points from my practice hours, especially when internet access is shaky.
Starting making hyprwhspr because no other stt library was quite there for performance and model availability.
After that I started writing opub.dev because even minimal success in recent oss showed me just how much has changed, and I’m worried about how expensive everything will get for maintainers.
So, now I’m trying to GIVE people compute so they can start building a helpful filter layer above their projects.
We used AI to build our AI platform and now we are using the AI platform to build the tools that we need for AI. :)
But no honestly, unfortunately most tools I did for myself are not for hobbies but something that I needed for work... like this one (https://github.com/crmkit/crmkit) most recently.
I've been using AI to build and set up two websites so far one in the travel space and the other in the real estate space. I have literally not touched code or written one line of code and brought up this to websites. Triporacle.app and landradar.land
A catalogue for my e-books with integrated semantic search. I embedded the e-book records, saved the embeddings into a vector database and I can now search them with natural language: https://trnq.eu/en/projects/eblioteque/
I didn't like how diagram making apps were built so I developed https://grafly.io
I also built https://github.com/lnenad/difiko as AI generates a lot of code that needs a nice way to review it.
I built several prediction models for the market price of gold and cryptocurrencies. But this is always more a fun task than serious stuff - you can't trade with it. Yes, I think it would be possible, but not w/o having the hardware and data resources. I also built a music player with an LLM agent, helping finding the right tracks.
- A Tailwind based design system for my projects.
- A self-hosted comment system for my blog (https://github.com/karthikeyankc/discuss).
- A custom RSS reader with AI capabilities to keep tab of our competitors at work.
- A git-based CMS for my personal blog (which was also built with AI).
Here are a few small tools I built:
Tubenote, a free YouTube video summarization extension. Mangata, a walking app that makes it easy to take notes and photos while walking. NotebookLM Clipper, a browser extension for importing content into NotebookLM. Knock, a notification tool that sends me a Telegram alert when Claude or Codex finishes a task.
and more products are also in the works.
I made a world cup match ranking that ranks matches based on excitement level using a formula for lead changes, higher scoring, late goals, games that decide who advances etc. It's spoiler free and only ranks on order games should be watched. And then each rank is a link to watch the game so it can be viewed with no spoilers.
I'm close to releasing a memory safe programming language, with a declarative concurrency model, that runs on a Go-like runtime.
It has "levels" of compilation, with EASY mode being about as easy as Ruby, and the compiler can present you with options to get that as strict & performant as Rust/Tokio.
I'm going to need at least a month to finish all the documentation, though.
I built a synthetic aperture sonar / radar simulation engine so I could generate endless amounts of procedural generated scenes to train a world model. Data for sonar is especially hard to come by.
https://gergltd.com/aperturelab/
A lot, but these I still use a lot
A grocery app tailor made for me and my wife, offline first, seamless instant sync, barcode scanning, GPS/location hints
A macOS native high performance infinite canvas scribbling app for use with my Wacom for thinking through ideas
Lots of stuff for one pretty much finished video game, and currently lots of stuff for my new video game
Tools? Mmmm i tried making a openCV based tool to recognise circular objects on sat. imagery, it didnt work at all (tried for two weeks), changed to a LLM, it seemed to work, or it was just a little bit off, O gave up. If anyone wants to collab in this space, shout out! Ah also a translation tool for pdfs… its also stuck in limbo, forgot why again…
I used copilot to make a basic MCP server for a large DB, so it could write better queries.
I also got it to write a mysql DB importer I could use instead of "mysql", since I often import large DBs locally. I wanted progress, estimated completion time, and I wanted it to prevent my machine from going to sleep during the import.
I've vibe coded multiple helpful apps and websites for recording data. But longer term, I'm building with its help an internal research system to organize, search, compare, analyze, and esp reuse all the large amounts of data my firm produces, with the public materials without constantly starting over in separate ChatGPT or Claude conversations.
Similar to you, the things I have truly vibe-coded (having looked at <5% of the code) are largely data focused. Data labeling, organization, etc. These applications are extremely janky, I'd never ship them to users. The UI is mediocre at best. The functionality hardly better. But the point is to get data out of them. The code is a means to an end and not a product in itself. Building a custom dataset builder in just a couple hours of work is really powerful.
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.
I made my own agent harness inspired by OpenClaw, but with internal group messaging between agents and memory sharing confined in agent groups. Plus Telegram integration with multiple agents in one channel using topics: https://bazilion.com/
A weight lifting app. I’ve paid for, and used, others over the years, but I always wanted to customize them in some way just for me. So, I just decided to create one the other day (used antigravity CLI) and I’m hosting it on Vercel as a PWA. I’m enjoying it so far and see a lot of potential with making hyper-personal software moving forward.
Mind sharing? Been wanting to do this myself.
https://hrvsync.nglx.io/ Simple iOS app to sync Garmin HRV to Apple health. It's nicer to see the trends in Apple Health - I know that the measuring is different but that doesn't really matter if you not don't mix it.
I've made a brainf** interpreter in C, from scratch. I didn't use any "AI" though. Does it still count? :)
I made a media center replacement for something like plex or jellyfin, streaming video or audio whenever I am; transcoding, subtitles, specialized dupe and renaming metadata. A little automated datawarehouse that manages all my output in an object store. My own tag system of course. A personalized eval system for llm tools.
https://app.refutu.com - Tool for planning and executing together as a team, either at home or work, planning with or without ai and controlling the board with ai chat or dnd. Simple Goal -> Action -> Tasks. Paid for 3 or more users.
LockIn - Beautiful scriptable terminal countdown timer that can block time waster apps. Enjoy fun visualizations and improved productivity that your agent can trigger to start a focus session. Install today with brew.
https://github.com/jeffnv/lockin
Math_MCP: https://github.com/amichae2/Math_MCP
Automatically rename screenshots: https://github.com/amichae2/screenshot-renamer
Since the advent of AI, I've built a voice memo app for myself. I can go on an hour-long walk, talk stream-of-consciousness style, and then have Claude structure my thoughts into organized notes. It's a great way to process ideas just by thinking out loud.
Virtdev, my own rootless development virtual machine system. Use it every day. Even integrated it with tmux.
Pugneum, my static site generator based on pug/jade. Technically made many years before LLMs, but AI is fully maintaining it now so I think it counts. It's gotten to the point I believe it's superior to markdown.
Built this little tool for editing audio with text https://edit-with-text.oncanine.run/
(Transcribes the audio, marks the timestamps, so you can delete a word in the transcript, and it’ll crop out that segment in the audio)
Working on a web client and bouncer for Hotline, the old chat software from ~1997. Just want to chat with my peeps who still use Hotline, from the comfort of the browser I have on whatever machine, while some server maintains the persistent connection to the Hotline server for me. Like an IRC bouncer, but for Hotline.
I wrote a note taking app that synchronizes across iOS/iPad/MacOS and stores my notes in markdown files so that my agents can summarize them each morning, delivering me to-dos, etc.
FOSS https://github.com/klinquist/Notesync
Many! Mostly browser extensions.
* Highlight do-follow links.
* Spoof GPS - I live in a non-english speaking country. Sometimes Google sets my location to my gps, despite having an english vpn. This is an attempt to correct that.
* Local translate, rather than sending everything to Google.
* (non browser) An SSH selection screen, so I don't need to remember the IPs
I made a nice little CLI tool for testing the subjunctive in Italian. Claude code spun off a bunch of Claude API calls to generate example sentences with fill-in-the-blank spots for the correctly conjugated verb. Having an AI generate a prompt for and call out to other AIs was a bit surreal!
My agent checks my session logs to look for things that I should automate. I blogged about how I got there: https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html Maybe I'll share some of the skills.
A clone of Insomnia/Postman/Yaak for my own use: https://www.apikulture.com https://codeberg.org/Sheldonari/APIKulture
I wrote a TUI to search for words/phrases in a crossword dictionary. I’ve never written a reactive TUI before, and never written Go either. I was very happy with the assistance rendered by ChatGPT.
Of course, it was great to have exactly the features I want, and I enjoyed learning some new things.
here are a few i have put time and effort into. these are not “vibe coded”, but an agent was utilized at points to save copious amounts of time implementing my architectural decisions; my schedule is pretty slammed as is.
https://mithraeum.studio - local first agent and editor in C, also a few models on HF (mainly jsut qwen wrapped atm but working on from scratch) https://fieldopt.dev - SaaS for dispatching jobs to the field (technicians, trades, delivery, etc.) https://github.com/zblauser/ytcli - youtube music from the terminal in zig (ps it’s free, no sub needed)
>> an agent was utilized at points to save copious amounts of time
So ……. vibe coded.
Not all LLM-assisted coding is vibe coding, even with an agent.
that would imply i just let it go to town with no understanding.. so no.
I built a terminal app for myself that conflates worktrees & tabs, runs every pane through a terminal multiplexer, lets me join in from my phone and generally makes me happy.
https://github.com/btucker/graftty
German language tutor, a midi piano tutor, and an isochrone map generator.
Static site generator for my blog, or at least bits of it.
I use agents to do most of the tedious admin for my hire business, and I built www.vessels.app to run them on the go because there was no native solution to talk to my agents. I’ve started working towards releasing this to the public because it’s so much better than setting up agents via telegram or slack.
Wow okay to everyone trying to sign up - I forgot to turn off the rate limiter. It’s off now you can sign up to try it out
A few, but the one I use regularly and am quite proud of is
https://mediaden.ca - iOS app for storing encrypted photos/videos on storage I (the user) exclusively owns, with zero servers, zero telemetry, and a host of other privacy related features.
I made a semantic search-based wallpaper setter by indexing a couple of 1000 thumbnails off wallhaven :)
I am working on my own Youtube Music/Spotify replacement, just so I can ditch the youtube premium on mobile.
Already have $180 ARR prebooked (the money that I used to pay for youtube music), looking forward for more.
if anyone has links for open-source self-hosted spotify/yt music replacement, I would gladly appreciate links
I tried to do something like that here: https://musicdocks.com/
Github: https://github.com/jantznick/youtube-spotify
It essentially uses youtube as the music source, I think I heard somewhere that playing through embedded videos skips ads but I'm not really sure, in all my time testing it I never noticed ads, but I'm also on premium so that may have been why.
by all means critique, I don't know that I have a ton of time left for it and I'm sure there's bugs here and there. I was having issues getting it to autoplay on desktop when the window itself wasn't the active tab. I never really tried it on mobile.
I was trying to get some DB of artist/song info but doing that was proving to be complicated.
I'm working on a recommendation service (which, to me, it's the piece I'm missing when I play my local mp3 collection)
I collect song metadata from various places (genre, instruments, track credits, rating). I also scrape charts by year, genre etc.
Then I run an ETL job on the json data I have downloaded, pre-building queries for extremely fast lookup tables. This gets saved to Duckdb, which is used by my go web ui/api.
It's very early days, and I only spend one or two hours a week on it, but right now it's amazingly useful. It had roughly 80k song metadata. To preview the suggested songs I ended up building a very cut-down YouTube music player, except that the playing song has all the metadata right there, and everything is a link that can take you to the artist, composer, instrument, genre, album etc. It's a great way to "wander through your collection".
Unfortunately this is only useful to me, because I targeted the music I listen to.
Next step is to download lyrics and extract song meaning, keywords etc. Then use MusiCNN, (or CLAP,OpenL3, HTSAT) to extract embeddings. Finally train my own model for nearest-neighbor retrieval based on a mix of metadata, giving the user the ability to tune it on the fly.
Did you ever have to pass Appstore review process? How do they look at copyright and stuff when you are publishing an app that plays your local mp3 collection (how does your mp3 collections ends up on your phone?)
Right now mine isn't an app (yet) it's the backend service (api and web) so I just run it in a browser.
For now I'm letting that backend access my files directly. The front end can also play YouTube music (free, using the yt-dlp method).
None of this is public yet so right now I don't need anyone's approval.
I've built a lot of chatbots specifically in the space of retreving and updating large databases, where business users can query their huge database instead of sitting and writing SQL queries.
I am planning on building a run club app next trying to build a community of my own
Made a local, in-memory OTLP traces viewer because I don't like running heavy alternatives like Jaeger, Tempo for simpler use cases https://github.com/pawanjay176/trace-top
Too many to mention. Daily drivers: replacements for CapCut, Granola.
A remote image viewer to see screenshots in VMs.
A simple agent harness to drive spec to verification.
A YouTube video summarizer.
https://github.com/ozten - some public repos, but the majority are private repos
What does your CapCut thing do?
Somewhat related - I wish there was some local thing I could give my 100 holiday videos and it made something fun with the highlights to a specified duration.
There were two paid features of CapCut that I vibe-coded using Remotion as the basis.
1) Automatically editing out pauses 2) Making those TikTok-like captions
a small savings management app to centralize all my accounts in one view. https://github.com/Ikaer/savings-app
1. A fuzz tester rubygem
2. An app that receives forwarded text messages from my iPhone and then outputs the text message onto a dedicated television connected via a raspberry Pi to display a cold-war era style GUI teletype sort of interface. It actually looks really stinkin cool
I created GitSocial, it stores issues, PRs, etc straight in git. Works on any git forge and allows cross-forge PRs and collaboration in general.
https://github.com/gitsocial-org/gitsocial
https://undsh.com/
in case you forgot instruct your ai text generating tool to do so: replaces — with -, removes emojis and changes quotes to look like human-typed (even though they are not grammatically correct)
A MacOS desktop app and a mobile app for instrumenting GPS routes.
Screenshot here: https://x.com/LyleMakes/status/2063784301594853657/photo/1
I recently posted Show HN for https://www.useorganizer.com/ which helps organize stuff using timelines and stores data in a local folder not the cloud. Open source.
No code or docs was hand written for this one.
Ive made my own agentic IDE centered around worktrees and containerization. it allows me to run multiple development environments on my machine with each development server running in parallel, allowing me to spin up feature branches and test them instantly.
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.
So many. Every time I encounter a task that is repetitive and has room for automation, I try to make a custom tool. It’s so easy these days. That doesn’t mean building a serviceable app is easy though.
Out of a the stuff beyond a shadow of a doubt the most useful is https://ductile.run
This started off as a fancy cron with webhook and became a comprehensive runtime. I have been using it for months on several systems.
I wrote a client & server to monitor all of my computers.. ec2 instances, raspberry pis, etc. Similar to Monit & M/Monit
https://github.com/klinquist/machinemon
Made a janky little website for managing board-game meetups
https://third-space.astride.com.au/invite/c0378a6f-b1b9-4c26...
A desktop markdown editor for design docs in git repos with markdown diff highlighting. Has been a time consuming but super fun experience https://github.com/emrul/md
- a personal and private webpage for: health: garmin metrics, apple health metrics, blood tests, rx.. - a kind of readitlater and bookmark index - personal finance: wip - in my homelab only available within tailscale.
The final idea is to own all my data, but I’m still on it.
Pretty happy so far
I made a CLI tool that securely stores and injects your AI API keys into scripts, so you never have to worry about .env leaks. Have a look at https://llmvlt.dev
I was able to create a CLI (https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli) without knowing Go. Like 0% Go knowledge. It is currently over 300 files (266 Go files).
I converted my web app to a SwiftUI macOS app https://hnr.app
It has less features (no OG media or title/story analysis via Bedrock) but it focuses more on the features I like/need from an HN client
I made an encrypted static site framework: https://github.com/4pito3pito2pi/unveil-static-site/
I made a small pantry application to track what foods I have in storage. It can spit out a json blob of that information which I feed into an LLM to make meal suggestions optimizing the ingredients I already have.
I 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
I'm building an app that generates lifting mesocycles and tracks every set and rep. Each week, it uses feedback from the previous workouts to adjust training volume and intensity. It's replacing an app I currently pay $25/month for.
- web scraper for events my wife and I would like for date night
- a stateless dashboard for work that collects from 6 other APIs
- a refactor of a huge function with 8-deep indentation into readable small functions
- a road trip game for my kids where you take photos of things from the car
Wispr flow released android version few months back but wasn't supported in my 6 year old phone so made a similar app named Floatspeak. Which motivated me to made a windows version of it and now stopped paying Wispr flow altogether.
https://github.com/clj-android
I can once again write Clojure apps for my phone, which is fun to do by hand, unlike more conventional tools for writing Android apps.
https://runnem.com - something I use to easily get projects running again when I get back to them. It also helps the AI get at the logs of the running processes.
I have a bunch of ffmpeg scripts for specific things like compressing to 10MB for discord.
I've been trying to make a comprehensive trading platform for crypto - with different verticals like DeFi and CEX. Why so? Because there are more libraries like ccxt to get data to analyse - rather than for the Forex and funds
I wrote a terminal based version of Conductor, heavily based on my own preferred workflows: https://github.com/bakedbean/workspacex
Non profit catalog of currently sold swiss army knives. Filterable by tools included, with comparisons too. https://www.sakfinder.com/
I made an envelope accounting page for my accounts that don't have it. Prior to AI I was just complaining about it, even though I'm a developer.
https://buckets.joelryan.com
Well, I've been pretty active in our rec baseball team for the past few seasons, so: 1) App to help my son and other kids learn baseball IQ, and 2) Streaming app to compete against GameChanger. It's been refreshing to say the least. :)
Forgot to mention: I built my personal finance app. I've been using a spreadsheet for almost 12 years now. Different versions over the years, but the same concept. It took me 3 days to get a web app that works better than the spreadsheet, and it's been life-changing!
Not tools but my Quickshell config. Of course AI made a ton of mistakes so I cleaned it up a lot myself. But I was able to go from not having ever written a line of QML nor reading the docs to having a working top bar pretty quickly.
https://hiddensignal.app - newsletter aggregator and digest. I have a few users but I’m the power user and love it.
I’m a UK teacher. I have built a custom GPT that marks essays for the subject I teach in a repeatable and reliable way. It gives actionable feedback to students.
I use it, and have given my students access to it too - they use it to help their revision.
Students use AI to write essays and teachers use it to grade. What a wonderful system
Kids making mud cakes, climbing trees, and taking shots at each other with shanghais. Teachers lounging on a beach somewhere. Meanwhile in classrooms, bots.
The Dead Classroom Theory.
UC Berkeley just banned the use of AI for conceptualising, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing student work.
How about critiquing? Like, the moral equivalent of an editor pointing out issues and/or suggesting alterations? I think it would still be the student doing all the things you pointed out, but I suspect there's a fair amount of leeway in the interpretation of each of those.
https://github.com/stefanhoelzl/codehydra
Allows me to efficiently work on multiple tasks in multiple repositories concurrently.
I'm building a replacement for TablePlus: a TableAI database client, because the latest releases of TablePlus have gone down in terms of user interface quality. You can find it on the Mac App Store(TableAI - AI database client)
I made yek for myself because I realized unless I give models the entire relevant code I wasn't getting good results
https://github.com/mohsen1/yek
Built a app to manage my finances - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.silicn.kas...
Ive made some tools after "the advent of AI"
But I dont use "AI" to make them
I use a code generator
I like to use the smallest possible "toolchain", using the least possible resources, to build software tools
Ideally I want the tools to compile quickly on underpowered hardware
What code generator?
Claudette: A Sublime Text package that adds a Claude AI chat interface to the editor.
https://packagecontrol.io/packages/Claudette
I always was frustrated by link shorteners and predatory approaches. So I built https://slsh.me
Fun to build again, host on bare metal and all. Learned a lot!
Looks really cool, its nice to have an alternative to the big players.
The only criticism is that, in the UK at least, "slash" can mean urinate, and that's all I can think of when I read through the website. Probably a me issue though!
Aahah very clear oversight on my end :D
I really like the design, are you a designer? Or did you hire someone?
I spent days iterating with Claude Code cli tool.
Spent a lot of time initially with asking it to generate me radically different approaches. Then I cherry pick what I like, iterate over and over again.
It's still something I ask of it regularly.
Thank you for the kind words. I've always struggled with UI as I have a backend engineer background, now more on the CTO sides of things. I've always lacked the creativity IMO, and this gave me a very good opportunity to practice and try to build something ""unique"".
I made a sandbox to productively work with agents while restricting files they can read and write: https://github.com/wrr/drop
i made a tool thats a combination of 2.5d cad and smart stylus for making things i can print for leather making, with embroidery patterns on top.
ive made some wallets, a incredible pair of ear muffs, and a bunch of key tags.
i keep being asked if im selling anything, and when i get the next piece together of building/buying an embroidery machine that can work on leather, i might
i still dont want to buy a proper fabric cad system, so im trying to figure out a minimal version for making glasses cases for everyone's christmas gifts. its handy being able to draw inputs for claude, but its also nails-on-a-chalkboard
A ninteneon3ds game explorer where i can look at games and bookmark them with comfortable screenshot preview so i can check what i would like (i never knew what game i should play on it and there are hundreds)
Many, recently:
- I coded myself a portfolio manager to manage all the projects that I have
- secrets management tool to avoid accidental leaks of tokens by AIs
- tool for automatic creation of training/product presentation videos for web apps
- sales training app
this thread is crazy.. hackers are clearly hacking, myself included. A lot of what I've built I've already seen here:
1. home automation, access point management, solar/battery health monitors
2. family week management with schedules, todo's, scripture of the week
3. page-to-pod (browse, click one button, TTS to podcast episode on my phone)
4. daily summary of AI news to a new pod episode on my phone
5. easy theme switching from light to dark on my mac
6. and more....
what does this mean about the future of software? looks like consumer software will be "instant and on demand".
These are all very neat things and I’m very pleased to see the hacker spirit move into AI, but I gotta admit - some of this just comes across as “what did you print with your printer?”
Another recent thread mentioned that AI has helped devs build better “shop jigs.” This seems to be where the rubber is meeting the road for AI-powered development. So maybe more people will be developing custom tooling for their own little problems but you still need reliable, deterministic, interchangeable tools to realize the value of all these shop jigs.
how did you do the family week management stuff? i am building out a knowledge base/communication layer first to be able to access more info through claude voice mode, but debating architecture still.
created https://github.com/frontman-ai/frontman, not exclusivly for myself but something i'm passionate about(might turn into a paid product).
basically trying to see what a vertically integrated agent looks like, where the agent has deep access inside a framework and it operates from within a framework, so like, instead of reading files, opening processes etc - it gets a bunch of framework specific runtime tools(logs are the easiest example)
A local-first, obsidian-inspired Grimoire that writes its own md files https://grimnotes.lovable.app/
https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ – Suite of skills, agents, and tools that make general SOTA models actually good at building and/or auditing iOS/macOS apps. Built for myself initially, I FOSS'd it once I determined how generally helpful it was. It's helped me learn a lot about doing sophisicated things with LLMs in a token-efficient way.
https://charleswiltgen.github.io/TagLib-Wasm/ – Also built for myself initially, I FOSS'd it because there was nothing like Mutagen for TypeScript/JavaScript runtimes. (I don't dislike Python, but think it's a bit of a mess.) This was my first serious project to leverage LLMs for coding.
https://pwascore.com/ – Built because I wanted to quantify how bad Safari was at PWAs. Learned that, objectively, Safari is as bad as PWAs as Firefox (which is to say, not terrible, and not to blame for why PWAs continue to be mostly-irrelevant).
I’m building an agent-native deployment PaaS. I’ve done a lot of DevOps work and I keep starting side projects, and deploying with AI agents has been one of the most painful parts.
I made a calculator for DIY endurance gels. I think it’s pretty sweet. https://www.theinstant.cc/gel
An attempt at an artificial unconscious. Turns out it’s pretty hard to inspire an LLM to be creative.
https://sisuonspeaks.com/
Do you have a write-up on how it works under the hood or is it meant to be more mysterious?
Sure! I wanted to mimic the process of daydreaming on a car ride, where external input and inner monologue can mix.
I wasn’t planning on posting it yet, so I’ll have to get you a thorough follow up, but in a nutshell it’s: a continuously running 448-concept space (philosophy, cognition, art, nature, math) that occasionally “crystallizes” a group of 4 concepts via Hebbian learning and stochastic noise. Those concepts get sent to the LLM with minimal guidance beyond some safety guardrails and encouragement to be creative. It has access to a sandbox to produce essays, stories, music, “art”, and small python scripts. Self-updating memory system. Notes, essays, and artifacts can also be discussed with me through some outbox channels.
On top of that it’s got a separate academic philosopher + psychiatrist llm that critiques its work and has a regular cadence of “sessions” with it, as well as a research assistant bot who I talk to (but doesn’t interact with Sisuon) who has full project context and memory access. The sisuonspeaks site is a VERY abridged collection of Sisuon’s essays, along with analysis, commentary, forum posts, and a podcast…all created by, you guessed it, more LLMs.
That's pretty neat. Thanks
Here’s the more detailed writeup: https://gist.github.com/adromero/e6a776e6a6100d53116f4053677...
Credit card break even calculator (US based) https://platmath.com
It updates itself in a day or 2 when card benefits change
Code review tool that breaks up diffs and regroups fragments based on runtime execution paths and/or architectural boundaries. I find it useful sometimes to see changes organised that way.
Can you share it? Would love to try it out! github/linkedin: adityamwagh
a tool that helps me work in hallucination-sensitive contexts
https://github.com/dvelton/eyeball
I wish I had time, but I would definitely make some Android apps to sideload onto my phone. They would be very bespoke and probably only relevant to me, but they would be streamlined to my life.
You mean ..to install.. right?
I built a tiny tool to help decide the seating chart for my small wedding. It was a cute GUI on top of a simple constraint solver.
It wasn't perfect, but it helped me feel confident in the final result.
I've created about 20 Obsidian plugins, little tools, websites, a new storefront, etc
https://tools.dsebastien.net/
I made https://slowso.io/ : a tool for myself (and anyone) to consume social media asynchronously.
Tabular Eye. Aligns code without modifying it.
https://github.com/ericfortis/tabular-eye
I built https://sdocs.dev and use it daily. It’s a CLI-driven markdown reader which (privately) renders Markdown in the browser.
When you install the CLI, it (with your permission) asks to update your base agent prompt files (e.g. `~/.codex/AGENTS.md`, or `~/.Claude/CLAUDE.md`) with info about how to use the tool.
This means all your agent chats know about SDocs, and it’s nearly always your agent which invokes the tool: “Hey Claude, sdoc me a list of all my open MRs”, etc.
I did a ShowHN about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47777633
I made a minimal news aggregator for dev sites I regularly visit this weekend: https://n3ws.dev
Mods! I've written mods for a couple of games that I've always wanted to but never had the time to learn the SDK for. Most recently for Project Zomboid.
Android browser wrapper that can download any video, audio, text
Share link?
I made a simple tool to find gaming buddies based on your schedule and language - https://broop.id
https://github.com/sktguha/android-joystick
Will improve the read me
Always curious about which llms perform best in specific scenarios, so I built a local desktop app to benchmark and evaluate prompts and llms side by side.
I made a modal editor, like Vim and Helix, in Rust that has some prose features I wanted, and with a keybinding system I find more logical and consistent.
I stopped paying for Wyze subscription after replacing the camera backend service. Saving me about $30/m and a much finer tuned OpenCV to Claude API vision model.
What were you getting for $30/month from Wyze? We have a package that is a flat $99 per year for a dozen cameras (plus however many more we want to add for no additional cost), unlimited recording, etc.
Built an Apple Watch app that streams music from Plex. It’s more stable than Spotify and Apple Music and it’s been a blast running to my own music collection!
html snippet playground - for testing html/react snippets
token speed calculator - for estimating tg/s of ai based on ram speed and model size/params this helps in comparing different hw, estimating likely speeds i will get on hardware
prompt assembler - to create prompt and context once and reuse it in different ai's, picking and choosing context in a prompt, creating agent.md etc.
dashboard builder - for viewing gsc, ga, stripe data in one place
I made a typing game for my kids that has Middle English, right-hand word and left-hand word modes. And makes darkly funny comments between levels.
I wired up a stream deck to perform long-running tasks. Very much tailored to the kind of HCI that I prefer, so I can be interrupt driven versus checking on status all the time.
Eg: push a button, it shows that it's working for a while, then strongly flashes when it's done (success/failure). When you have it right under the monitor, it's like a macro pad for long-running things.
This reminds me of some of the very early peripherals you'd see on the Alto and other computers. I was surprised something like this didn't seem to exist, but maybe I'm just terrible at searching.
Lots of fun toys. Nothing productive :D
Revamped my blog to have a funky 3d background and animated cursor after years of minimalism: https://bdickason.com
A little screensaver inspired by After Dark: https://bdickason.com/static/experiments/flying-stuff/
A little toy using (mobile) screen tilt: https://qwertle.bdickason.com
A funky RTS designed for mobile: https://chasm-nine.vercel.app/
A start of a little 3D RPG: https://misty-woods.vercel.app/
Note: all experiences in varying states of completion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hey brad. Love your blog's layout. The neon sign headings are so catchy! And I'm going through some tough times in my life, and I can totally relate how cathartic the process of 'creation' is. Thanks for sharing!
I'm glad it was helpful! Sorry you're going through some tough times :( Hope you can find a way through and find the support you need from friends and family. Share your creations would love to have a look!!!
Thanks. Besides stories, music was once a great avenue for me to express. Some of my tracks are here - https://soundcloud.com/karthikeyan-kc.
I created a realtime lead generator that scraps Reddit and then looks for the people that seem like they would like to buy something that im selling.
Nice. I'm curious about Reddit scraping. Did you have to do anything special for that?
Also curious if you know anything about scraping Twitter.
Looking into twitter right now, it seems like the way to do it is with headless browsers, but they usually cost money.
For reddit there used to be the json endpoints that you could just fetch, and you can batch your subreddits, so its nice end easy. They have just killed those...old.reddit still works, but i fear like the days are numbered there as well.
Image hosting built for AI agents: https://pixelvault.dev/
I've most recently used it to build a system design interview simulator and a job board crawler which sends the best roles to my email every day.
A gym app for logging workouts and exercises. Plenty of apps exist but I wanted a specific UI/UX that made logging fast while I’m at the gym.
www.propelcode.app - cursor on my phone. www.propelagent.app - voice agent for my home health care agency, but it also tells bed time stories to me and my daughter a few times a month.
I also built a new web framework we use internally which is amazing. We might open source it soon. It has a postman clone that has a bunch of features I wanted. It really is the case that we can just build tools any time we want.
Automatic self hosted transcription service. So nice to be able to get my thoughts all down as context for projects. Really accelrates things.
Have you open-sourced this? I am intrigued!
A todo list to track different learning sources, resurface things like online courses or long videos, and log my learning sessions.
I built a tmux clone in Rust:
https://github.com/TrevorS/rmux
I made a simple electron app to download podcast files. I needed an easy way to sync with a mp3 headphones that registers as a usb drive.
I created a realtime reddit lead generator. It scrapes reddit and looks for people that look like they would like to buy what im selling.
I made a streak/goal tracker that tracks the things I want to work on like being more grateful, working out more, and learning.
magpie - extracts book recommendations from reddit threads. I had a bunch of saved threads from 'books' and 'suggestmeabook' and 'printsf' etc., and I realized I could pull them down and do a semantic search.
https://github.com/clashleyca/magpie
A local search indexer that indexes every page I visit (with tools for obvious exceptions) and lets me full text search them.
https://dartsva.com/ - a darts training plan app.
oh boy, lots. i made a trainer that coaches you in nondual philosophy by quoting from the Upaniṣad; a Vedic Aspectarian that calculates your chart and analyses your transits; a better I Ching program that utilizes a time variable to throw the hexagrams; and then there’s our research software. none of this would have been possible without AI.
highly interested in these. Can you share if they are public? Cheers and good luck with your practice :)
I custom Zed to get a better markdown preview, every time when I see the beautiful rendered markdown file, I feel very happy.
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 useful tool that I'm using on a daily basis.
Go-micro.dev - Totally revamped the open source project, docs, etc with Claude.
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 obvious. kuddos.
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).
A tool to manage Claude Code conversations based on my typical workflow which integrates with my desktop OS and terminal app.
After losing to quickly allotted amount in Las Vegas decided to vibe code a console traning program for playing 21...
nowplaying.cjlm.ca - CFUV radio station song identification, basically shazaming every few minutes from a fly.io instance
https://jaicast.com for fun.
Currently working on a Gmail clone.
Made a fully autonomous Facebook marketplace scraper so that I get telegram notifications of car deals
I've been really into local llms and trying to create self healing/self evolving codebase architecture
I made a SaaS platform that automatically generates a customer support and lead gen bot using clients' website!
None of my tools use AI in any way, shape or form. And building them didn't make use of AI either.
created a chrome extension to sync linkedin messages to my crm (pipedrive) rather than being charged 30$ a month
- https://www.yourfriendly.ai/. a desktop pet that lets me have an ai chatbox readily available
Hi HN, I built (yet another) webapp (PWA) for looking up guitar scales and a bunch of other tools.
https://guitar-tools.eejalab.xyz/
There are plenty of other tools already that do this but hopefully this one adds some quality of life niceties such as dark mode and a mobile responsive design that seems nicer to use than the others out there.
Hope the colours look ok. I'm a colour blind person (deuteranomaly) and I've optimised it for what looks good to me. Am open to adding a mode in line with what regular vision people might prefer.
No frameworks used, vanilla JS. No sign ups. Data/state persistence is purely local storage.
Absolutely no commercial interest here. Built this purely for the love of it. Will forever be free.
A terminal thats prettified and has a dashboard with affirmations and a feed of trending design posts.
nothing groundbreaking but this little tool cleans up build artifacts automatically so my hd frees up every once in a while.
https://github.com/kavehtehrani/devprune
https://offmetaedh.com
Art search for magic cards
Finally got my glove 80 split keyboard to work the way I want. Love typing on this thing :D
Tell us more! Did you create a tool to change keymaps?
I replaced the router supplied by my ISP with a MiniPC running Arch Linux and an Alfa AWUS036AXML.
I have always been interested in computers, building my own, playing pc games, etc. However, I never learned to program. LLMs have given me the ability to bring things to life that would have otherwise been impossible. I have a lot of pent-up software I have wanted for a long time.
https://github.com/frankieg33/fade - A program that minimizes screens inspired by Marco Arment's Quitter https://marco.org/2016/05/02/quitter
https://github.com/mxpv/podsync - a personal video podcast feed through podsync
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spaced-math/id6770719584 - ios application for my kids to learn mental math.
a daily newspaper for my 3 kids with themes around what they are into, jokes, and today in history.
https://github.com/frankieg33/MewgenicsBreedingManager - mod for the game Mewgenics. it had ~600 users which feels amazing.
I build a lot of data pipelines, and I've had to deal with too many inconsistent "source to target mapping specs" (usually Excel files) in integration and data projects in my life. They're too opaque for AI coding tools to get consistent results for generating implementations, suggesting tests, making test data etc. So I made "Satsuma" (https://equalexperts.github.io/satsuma-lang/)
At first glance, it's just a nice version-controllable, parseable DSL. But I also made succinct prompts with the grammar that lets LLMs produce and reason about Satsuma, a language server, CLI tools for the AI tools to use to navigate specs token-efficiently, reason about lineage, pretty viz in vscode plugins/syntax highlighting, some agent skills etc. There are metadata conventions for succinctly representing a lot of quirky formats and capturing common analytics conventions (scd2/Kimball/datavault/etc c.)
Yes, yes, I may have gotten carried away.
But I'm finding it really useful as a specification tool in projects for reverse engineering mappings from code/workflows, generating new code (dbt, Spark etc.)
This definitely isn't something I would've had the bandwidth to push this far before AI!
i'm start to develop a linear algebra tool to run in a cli for study and research https://github.com/cecinuga/lacli
macOS app that auto joins my Zoom meetings. Few hours later I found out I made a mini version of https://meetingbar.app/
A bash script to build my eleventy website with qrencode batched for qr generation.
Started making Agentikus as a way to manage my -back in the day- multiple OpenClaws. Soon enough realized that many will have the same problem soon. And started adding features that I was missing on Codex and C. Code. It’s a fun ride.
Side note: before coding agents I would not get passed the branding and login page.
i built a program that watches wifi traffic and if it sees my phone connected to the office wifi; it marks me as in the office on our internal chat tool (Zulip).
And the inverse as well, of course.
Runs on a raspberry pi that I was otherwise using to take backups periodically… has been working pretty good honestly.
I also built a program that fills/submits my time reports, and does the same for all of my subordinates - then signs them off… Saves everyone like 5 minutes if we remember to do it, or 12 minutes and frustration if we’re reminded by HR about it (which happens because who the hell cares about time reports?)
i created a “simcity for logs” to generate synthetic test logs and simulated data sets https://logsim2.vercel.app/
A port of the open epaper lib used in home assistant, but cli based, and an mqtt interface to allow it to run on a different computer to.HA
https://github.com/mretallack/OpenEPaperCliTool
----- 3d printer pipeline, so its can print stuff directly without having to use the computer to set it up.
https://github.com/mretallack/3dprinter
----- Experiment with creating a Abdroid Auto app for phones that cannot run real AA. (WIP)
https://github.com/mretallack/AndroidAuto
----- A android 3d clay modeler to create models for 3d printer, with stl export.
https://github.com/mretallack/ClayModeller
----- Uk Fuel finder python lib and Home Assistant intergration for showing fuel stations from UK gov api.
https://github.com/mretallack/ukfuelfinder https://github.com/mretallack/ukfuelfinder-ha
---- Reverse engineer cheep drone video feed, from drone found in charity shop
https://github.com/mretallack/DroneCamera
---- App to send voice to camera using mqtt.
https://github.com/mretallack/CameraSpeaker
---- Added ONVIF to an oss rtsp android app.
https://github.com/mretallack/cams
---- Added Home Assistant to Dicio Assistant.
https://github.com/mretallack/dicio-android
---- Added telegram bot interface to kiro, with group support.
https://github.com/mretallack/kiro-remote
azpect, a TUI for azure
I needed to see health of many Function Apps and Container Apps in a single page
https://github.com/RobbertH/azpect
Something to help me remember the order of my jokes when doing stand up.
SAT>IP scanner with S/C/T and LCN support in <1kLoC Python
- a youtube/podcast summarizer webapp. Summaries are getting synced with readwise reader. Example: https://toolong.stream/v/a7g5p6PkWH4JwwtKloXhlw/keynote-linu...
- a slop detector / browser extension that filters slop replies from twitter/hackernews/reddit: https://slopsieve.com/
- tweethoarder ( https://github.com/tfriedel/tweethoarder ), saves my liked tweets and makes them searchable
- mattermost_archive - syncs all my mattermost channels and makes them searchable via an MCP in claude
- https://github.com/tfriedel/asana-exporter - same thing for asana
- https://github.com/tfriedel/dynalist-archive - same thing for dynalist
Has anyone used AI to manufacture entire physical gadgets of some sort?
Came here looking for some examples, i tried some pcb routing, its horrendous. But you inspired me to maybe just run with it? Like design a alarm clock and see what abomination ‘it’ will come up with and just run with it/produce it anyway? Would be fun!
Yea only a matter of time before it’s really really good at PCB routing
macOS spotlight like command generator for terminal https://github.com/64bit/commandOK
Can this be a quarterly Ask HN?
I wrote a Mac typing tool to speed up typing
hotpot: google authenticator but for the command line
https://github.com/yen223/hotpot
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.
You can make your own presets (which nnc looks for in ~/.config/nnc/presets) or use one from the standard libraryhttps://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.
I made my own webclipper - dont trust browser extensions
1. A personal dashboard that is gloriously incongruent, but solves almost every problem where I have to glance at my phone: my home and car battery charge levels, my failing github actions, planes overflying my house, medication tracking, Life360 integration so I can ensure my kids charge their phones, sports and finance tickers, birthdays, fuel prices, public transport, integration with my bathroom scale....the list goes on and on. It has ticker mode, card mode and alert mode and lets me add features via a Github and Claude API integration.
2. A shopping list app that allows me and my partner to coordinate on our shopping
3. A recipes app that includes AI scanning
4. A standalone home battery dashboard/app
5. A fuel prices app that is tailored for the closest fuel stations and is ad-free
6. A tool to draw classroom supervision maps for my partner (thrown away already, I didn't want adware/bloatware so I built it, she used it, then I threw it away)
7. A quiz website, cos the one I used to play on was overrun by ads.
8. A time tracker that I'll throw away at the end of the tax year
And more, and that's just what I did for making my life easier, there are other more "enterprisey" things I am working on. They're web apps that I add to my iphone desktop or run on otherwise junky old tablets or on TVs.
The point is that they do exactly what I want them to do instead of relying on downloaded apps that get me 80-90% of the way there, even if they'd be classified as "AI slop". I know enough about security and caching that they aren't full of holes and don't kill upstream, but I don't really care about the code, and it's literally easier for me to build something new than to go to Google or an app store to find software that's full of ads.
retro-inspired fully custom, swiss army knife style notepad --
https://convert.neocities.org
a scrapper / browser mcp with camoufox. plug a vision llm to that bad boy and you can defeat any google / cloudflare captcha.
I wrote a tool to give agents signal on what is and isn't clean code. I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time reviewing agent code.
After asking agents to make the same types of changes over and over again, I decided to make a tool that would just tell the agent that its code needs improving. I figured that if I could get the agent to self-review and improve the code it writes, that it would save me time when I finally come around to reviewing it.
Tool: https://github.com/thempatel/mdlr Blog: https://www.thempatel.com/2026/06/06/slop.html
Oh man - I've created more than I can count at this point, but here's some of them:
- A chat-based web app for ad-hoc telemetry data visualization. - A firefox-extension meeting transcriber - A personal chief of staff - A web-based personal finance budgeting tool (no AI at runtime, obviously) - An iOS and Android app for solo work with a dead man switch if timely check-ins don't happen - A custom dotfile/machine config manager that works the way *I* want - A bookmarking tool/web clipper that puts together daily content-only collections from what I've been clipping and send them to my Kindle. This one I actually intended to make a SaaS, but meh. Being able to put together quite big projects by myself for myself in a reasonable amount of time is such a joy.
An on device iOS ad blocking podcast client
German tax preparation command line tool
Not really a tool but converted a hobby swift app to a webUI animated showing mexico city and london when there's rain https://tlaloc.cloud/
The one tool i noticed could be helpful given the volume of screenshots i share with the agents is screenshotter: just a simple script that watches my screenshot folder and compresses the images so i can save some bandwidth and hopefully some tokens https://github.com/mgranados/screenshotter
I vibe coded two apps, I program but not in the languages used in the apps. I'm utterly clueless about Lua and Python. Both apps work fine and I use them all the time myself.
1. A Mecrisp-Stellaris Forth LSP for the Helix editor (Python) 2. A CMSIS-SVD Sqlite3 search and paste pop-up window for Neovim when editing STM32xx embedded Forth programs. (Lua)
https://mecrisp-stellaris-folkdoc.sourceforge.io/
scratched my own itches related to OCPP, latency, git, ssh and JMX. none involved AI
As another post pointed out, AI as a field of research started about the time I was born (LLMs are another matter of course). So everything I've created has been since that time. Some of my software tools are listed at https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Colin+Macleod - no form of AI was involved in any of them.
https://getaivo.dev/
Over the past few days I have been making a spell checking TUI app. I used AI (meaning: free Gemini web interface) to discuss various aspects about the apps and debug compiler errors ang suggest useful rust crates for various problems.
Just a more helpful discord chat generally. It also gaslights you too!
Here is the tool: https://git.sr.ht/~asibahi/hoopoe
Mostly for myself (stripe isn't actually even hooked up anymore afaik), but a Mandarin language learning app: https://nextword.app .
Deepseek v4 pro does a pretty good job of actually adhering to the word restrictions.
Most language learning content is "slop" anyway -- so might as well generate slop that's at least a little interesting.
I'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.
I made an absolutely essential tool which is a “Trump bingo” game.. makes following his tweets more tolerable https://wtf-fantasy.com/
I get annoyed that existing tools have limitations so I fix them or build my own:
- I didn't like that I can't use my newsreader on my laptop and my phone as easily so I built https://github.com/mjc/nntp-proxy. that turned out to be really hard to benchmark once it got fast enough so I am working on an nntp benchmark tool https://github.com/mjc/nntpbench. both can do request queuing because the nntp RFC says servers have to accept as many requests as they can, and then process them in order. so if your client doesn't do that, you can use more connections to the proxy and it will queue for you. it also routes stateless commands to whatever server is least-loaded, and will switch to stateful mode if your client needs it.
- I didn't like how expensive AWS Transfer Family is, so I built this https://github.com/elixir-ssh/sftpd and then rewrote it in rust (alpha) https://github.com/mjc/sftp-s3-rs. this shook out a bunch of bugs in russh, which was fun. - didn't like that there's no par2 implementation in rust so I built this https://github.com/mjc/par2rs (I'm too lazy to move to tape backup so it works pretty ok for dvd/bluray parity), unfinished but good enough for my use. - same deal for 7zip in rust. https://github.com/mjc/r7z - a medication tracker thing that uses claude/codex/copilot to scan the bottles and parse them as well as identify pills etc. works better than you'd think but I'm not planning on releasing it for a while.
fixed or fixing bugs in: - exqlite (it should not crash anymore and should return busy a lot less often.) - russh - swift-nio-ssh (this might be why codex's remote can't connect to your ssh box) https://github.com/apple/swift-nio-ssh/pull/236 - NanoKVM (working on making the streaming for this a lot more fluid)
A website that tracks when we last went on a weekend trip and other kinds of things, and reminds us with a cute friendly (not AI written) email when it's time to plan something again!
It really helps us to not forget to spend significant time with each other when life is busy.
A rant follows.
I've generated probably as many lines of code by this point as I've written myself over the past 5 years or so.
I found AI generated code mostly very frustrating, kind of low quality in its own way, and too complex. I have pages and pages of instructions to guide the agent(s) to do a better job at this, and it has gotten better, but the fundamental limit of this technology is tangible.
Like, okay, CPUs still get faster every year, and every now and then someone makes a breakthrough and we get a bump in speed from something. But when you write high performance code, you very quickly run into hardware constraints, like how fast information can move and how far away components are from the CPU cores themselves. People keep saying performance isn't THAT important, and that modern hardware is so fast and amazing, and that they struggle to even find a way to use all of their CPU cores and RAM with their little app or program or game. Yet here I am, writing code that will noticably speed up if I run it on a CPU with a little bit more L1 cache.
This is similar to how it feels to program with AI when you're reasonably competent (to put it mildly; I avoid the 10x developer label because comparison to others is very silly). Everyone keeps saying it's getting so much better, and it's so good, and worrying about code quality and architecture is dumb because we can move so fast it doesn't matter. Yet here I am, writing code by hand because I tried doing it with AI a couple times and it just doesn't hit the mark.
I'm not doing anything special, I just have high standards and a good amount of experience when it comes to software quality, performance, and maintainability, which is why I keep getting hired. I'm convinced that people who think their AI generated software is good are the same people who write short variable names and think it makes their software faster (hyperbole, but you get what I mean).
I can feel when I hit the limits of the hardware, and I can feel when I hit the limits of LLMs, and I know for both of them that a 2x increase in performance will not change what is and isn't physically possible.
cross-platform apps with data sync that breaks frequently
Thanks for the reminder, I made a very simple and small mac os guitar tuner and intonation app (all others are either paid, have in app purchases or are outdated) that I still need to publish!
CodeMerger: https://codemerger.nl I've never liked the lack of control I feel using agents or tools like Cursor or Antigravity. I found myself having much better results simply pasting full source code in free chat, so I built a tool around that philosophy and I've been exclusively developing with it for a year now. It includes a Project Starter and code architecture analysis tool.
Presentable: a photo library sorter with Ai powered organization assistance, a compare canvas with various viewing modes and customizable folder sorting shortcut templates (wip).
AlwaysWhisper: a tool that let's me attach STT to my entire OS, with custom wrappers for different programs, adding theoretical voice control to any software (wip).
ScreenLoader: an Electron based tool that can load any web source as a kiosk app, full of useful features like keep-alive, covering multiple screens and tracking output logs.
Inputboard: a unified all-inputs hardware board, that transfers input data to any prototype I want to work on using an optocoupler, so I won't have to fiddle around with setting up clean and reliable inputs from cheap Chinese components every time I just want to test something.
Squire: an agentic board game helper, that can ingest a manual and will hopefully help decrease the time spent on endless discussions about seemingly conflicting rules. It should also be able to help me play a game when I don't fully understand the rules myself yet (wip).
NodeRunner: an agent that plays the WikiGame, focusing on speed, efficiency and token usage (the result of a fun competition with a colleague).
Sonic Bloom: more of an experiment than a tool. It's a wireless piece of custom hardware, that listens to conversations, sends data to an LLM through fast STT and returns a color choice that matches the topic being discussed to the hardware, which then controls an LED ring. It also has a small display that explains the logic behind the color choice.
Image-to-story: a VLM tool that kickstarts a written story using an image and has some rudimentary tools to expand on it based on user instructions (wip).
At-work-or-not: and Android app/website where colleagues can check if I'm working from home, if I'll be at the office or if I'm not working at all. Also doubles as a private record for tracking transport expenses.
SharedMaps: a Maps based website where groups of people can share custom categories of geo locations and drop comments on them.
VMG: an image format that includes audio with images and offers TTS input to easily add narration.
Who wants Coffee: a small Android app to help me remember who wants to drink what when I go for a round at the office.
And a pile of Python scripts for smaller useful tasks.
Workflow:
Built a meeting-intelligence pipeline that turns raw, error-prone transcripts into a structured, queryable knowledge base. Meetings get auto-transcribed by Krisp, whose speech recognition mangles the things I most need correct, like colleague names, customer names, internal product and architecture terms. I hand each transcript to Claude alongside a hand-built context document, and it works a fixed routine: read the context file, read the transcript, then reconcile every uncertain name or term against a master error table before drafting anything. Only the genuinely unresolvable handful surface as questions; everything else is corrected silently. Once I confirm those, it emits a cleanly formatted markdown summary in a manner I describe as a template: overview, topical notes, decisions, action items — and pushes the work items into Todoist so commitments don't get lost.
What makes it more than transcription cleanup is the back end and the feedback loop. Each summary hits Obsidian with YAML frontmatter and live Dataview queries, so open action items and meeting metadata behave like a database rather than static notes. In Cowork the whole accumulated Obsidian folder becomes fully queryable rather than merely searchable — instead of grep-ing for a keyword, I can ask questions that reason across months of meetings ("what were Todd's table-stakes asks, and has anything shipped against them"), with the model able to look across separate conversations. The other half is self-improvement: every clarification I resolve gets written back into the context document: its people directory, terminology glossary, and especially the ASR error table, so a garble I corrected once is corrected automatically from then on. Over time that one document has become a domain-tuned lens, and each meeting both draws on it and sharpens it, which is why the summaries keep getting tighter and need less of my intervention.
Beyond that: I use a Netatmo weather station which has a RESTful API (or sends to a cloud server that has one) - I pull that information (which I can see on the web and their apps) into my own VictoriaMetrics / Grafana set up on Kubernetes, via a Go app Claude built.
This app above was when I had my little aha moment: Netatmo's OAuth is slightly broken (issues with the different tokens and refresh). But I'd written a dog-ugly app which managed to work a while ago. Claude kept trying and strugglign to understand why its OAuth code wasn't working, and was asking me "are the credentials right?" etc. "Yup, I'm able to get data from my old app", then it said "If you have the source code to that app, I can figure out what's up", it looked, identified the issue, tried to work around it and then we "agreed" - "Hey, this should work this way, but it doesn't, and whether my old OAuth code should work or not, it does, so drop that in, and keep going". "Great, let's do that."
Vibed a ton of small projects, mostly for my own usage, to understand what agents could do, or just to satisfy my curiosity. Most are rough around the edges, and a bunch quickly became obsolete as agents got better and I stopped using them.
Browser emulators / games
https://nesvibes.tsilva.eu/ — Browser JavaScript NES emulator in ~2.5k LOC
https://scummweb.tsilva.eu/ — Run ScummVM games directly in the browser
https://github.com/tsilva/REFramework-chill — Anti-nausea improvements for Praydog’s Resident Evil VR mod, specifically for Resident Evil 7: movement vignette, snap turning, etc. WIP.
AI / ML browser experiments
https://llame.tsilva.eu/ — Run small LLMs in the browser with WebGPU
https://aipit.tsilva.eu/ — Debate simulator: pit simulated personas against each other
https://aigrounds.tsilva.eu/ — Playgrounds for experimenting with math, AI, and ML topics. WIP; lots of slop and most are unreviewed.
https://modelviz.tsilva.eu/ — ONNX model graph visualizer
https://modelarchviz.tsilva.eu/ — View model architecture diagrams, codebase, and paper side by side. Includes a chat bot that can see selected content and select content itself. WIP.
https://embeddingviz.tsilva.eu/ — Visualize model embeddings and/or layer activations for different content with PCA, UMAP, or t-SNE. WIP and poorly tested.
https://github.com/tsilva/dlab — Workbench for deep learning experiments. Open the repo in Codex, pick a training target, e.g. maximize validation accuracy on CIFAR-10, and ask it to start a research track. Then collaborate on training runs, evaluations, sweeps, and iteration toward the goal.
Datasets / visualization
https://minariviz.tsilva.eu/ — Minari dataset visualizer: https://minari.farama.org/
https://github.com/tsilva/gymrec — Record and replay gameplay from Gymnasium environments as Hugging Face datasets. Supports stable-retro environments such as NES, SNES, Genesis, etc.
https://github.com/tsilva/youtube2datasets — Convert YouTube videos to Hugging Face datasets.
Agent / coding workflow tools
https://github.com/tsilva/runbook — Run Jupyter notebooks on Modal through a CLI, with streamed outputs.
https://github.com/tsilva/agentpong — Run coding agents in VSCode/Cursor terminals, one per Aerospace window. Agents trigger desktop notifications when done; clicking a notification sends you to the correct desktop. I haven’t used this in a while, so I’m not sure it still works.
https://github.com/tsilva/agentbox — Run agent CLIs inside Docker sandboxes. Project-level config defines sandbox access. I stopped using this once agents got better built-in approval mechanisms.
https://github.com/tsilva/agentbridge — Use an agent CLI subscription as an OpenAI-compatible API server.
https://github.com/tsilva/claudesk — Agent coordinator for Claude, built before decent agent orchestrator UIs existed. Stale and probably broken now.
Personal workflow / GTD
https://github.com/tsilva/gmail2obsidian — Flush labeled Gmail messages to Obsidian.
https://github.com/tsilva/thunkd — Quick idea-capturing mobile app built with React Native. Sends notes to Gmail, which is my main GTD inbox.
https://github.com/tsilva/capture — Quickly capture thoughts to Gmail using an Alfred shortcut, for my GTD workflow.
File / document utilities
https://dedrive.tsilva.eu/ — Client-side Google Drive duplicate finder. Lets you choose which files to keep. Poorly tested; use with caution.
https://github.com/tsilva/pdfpress — Misc PDF tools: split, merge, compress, unlock.