Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

- Kvile ( https://kvile.app ) — A lightweight desktop HTTP client built with Rust + Tauri. Native .http file support (JetBrains/VS Code/Kulala compatible), Monaco editor, JS pre/post scripts, SQLite-backed history. Sub-second startup. MIT licensed, no cloud, your requests stay on your machine. Think Postman without the bloat and login walls.

- Mockingjay ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mockingjay-secure-recorder/id6... ) — iOS app that records video and streams AES-256-GCM encrypted chunks to your Google Drive in real-time. By the time someone takes your phone, the footage is already safe in the cloud. Built for journalists, activists, and anyone who needs tamper-proof evidence. Features a duress PIN that wipes local keys while preserving cloud backups, and a fake sleep mode that makes the phone look powered off during recording.

- Stao ( https://stao.app ) — A simple sit/stand reminder for standing desk users. Runs in the system tray, tracks your streaks, zero setup. Available on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.

- MyVisualRoutine ( https://myvisualroutine.com ) — This one is personal. I have three kids, two with severe disabilities. Visual schedules (laminated cards, velcro boards) are a lifeline for non-verbal children, but they're a nightmare to manage and they don't leave the house. So I built an app that lets you create a full visual routine in about 20 seconds and take it anywhere. Choice boards, First/Then boards, day plans, 50+ preloaded activities, works fully offline. Free tier is genuinely usable. Available on iOS and Android.

I built a TUI sampler which cherry-picks my favourite features from modern & vintage hardware samplers, DAWs, plugins, outboard FX gear, and DJ equipment.

If you know what an AKAI MPC Live, MPC 3000, SP404, SP1200, BOSS RC-202, Alesis 3630, Serato Sample, S950 filters, and stem separation does, then you'll love seeing these "greatest hits" up in a terminal interface.

Last year while on vacation in Costa Rica, I started scratching my own itch for locating and organizing samples, which quickly evolved into adding more and more features while keeping it tactile and immediate. It was too fun to stop so I kept going. After a few days I was happily making beats in it, and since then it's only gotten better.

It's live and totally free to use, and works in macos & Linux (Windows soon). I'm about to launch v1.0 now, just working with folks in the community to round out the Factory Kits a little more for users new to beatmaking.

Turns out, making beats with no mouse and a terminal interface strikes the perfect balance of hardware feel and software power, and I'm loving the result. Been sharing it with folks in my beatmaking sphere and have plans to continue expanding its reach through more collaborations, contests, and in-person events.

Hope it brings you as much joy as it does to me :)

We've been using it with friends and family semi-successfully (hashbangs work for edge cases we're still working on).

It's really difficult to get bigger indexes other than Mojeek and Marginalia to want to work with us and improve the results further, so that's something I've been researching more, lately. EUSP (the new Ecosia/Qwant-effort-related index) has finally replied to me last week, but I'm still waiting on an API key.

If you're interested in trying it for a few days and are a human, reach out with your account number and I'll give you a couple of weeks for free. We're pushing improvements daily.

[1] https://uruky.com

[2] https://kagi.com

P. S. It's weird to see this duplicate (posted less than a week ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46874385), but this post has a lot more comments!

It's a lightweight screen recorder for macOS that lives in your menu bar. It's built with SwiftUI and ScreenCaptureKit, uses the native Content Picker to select what you record, and supports ProRes 422/4444, HEVC, and H.264 — including alpha channel and HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. System audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.

No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac.

https://github.com/Fingel/gelly

I thought it would be pretty simple, but here I am almost 6 months later still adding features. The positive feedback has been nice, though! People seem to appreciate (like I do) that its fast and doesn't use Electron or some other cross platform toolkit. Learning a lot.

It's not vibe coded. Sad that I have to make that qualification these days, but here we are.

A broke kid wins a spot at a high-tech genius school and finds out the “cool” project is really mind control for the whole world. Now he has to out-hack teachers, drones, and a traitor friend using only his brain, his DIY skills, and the outlaw Mesh. Readers get wild gadgets, sneaky pranks, and fast chases—plus the chance to ask what they would do if adults tried to control every thought in their head.

Final edits from the editor are arriving this week - then I'm off to find a lit agent, hopefully get a publishing deal by the end of 2026. More info below.

https://inkican.com/mesh-middle-grade-scifi-thriller/

Laboratory.love lets you fund independent plastic chemical lab testing of the specific foods you actually buy. Think Consumer Reports meets Kickstarter, but focused on detecting endocrine disruptors in your yogurt, your kid’s snacks, or whatever you’re curious about.

Find a product (or suggest one), contribute to its testing fund, and get full lab results when testing completes. If a product doesn’t reach its goal within 365 days, you’re automatically refunded. All results are published publicly.

This project was inspired by Nat Friedman's PlasticList.org and we use the same ISO 17025-accredited methodology they did, testing three separate production lots per product (when possible) and detecting down to parts-per-billion. The entire protocol is open.

I just published new results today! Turns out Muir Glen's caned Fire Roasted Diced Tomatoes are incredibly low in plastic chemicals. Yay!

Browse funded tests, propose your own, or just follow along: https://laboratory.love

I have created a usb-uart converter board with the CH340 chip. The complete schematic was coded with Circuitscript and then imported as a netlist into kicad pcbnew to do the pcb layout. The design was produced with JLCPCB and after receiving the boards I tested them and they do work! The design files are here https://github.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge. The circuitscript code file is here https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge/re... and the generated pdf from the circuitscript code is here: https://github.com/liu3hao/usb-uart-bridge/blob/main/usb_uar...

The motivation for creating Circuitscript is to describe schematics in terms of code rather than graphical UIs after using different CAD packages extensively (Allegro, Altium, KiCAD) for work in the past. I wanted to spend more time thinking about the schematic design itself rather than fiddling around with GUIs.

Please check it out and I look forward to your feedback, especially from electronics designers/hobbyists. Thanks!

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

Unlike most tools based around autogenerating colors, this is more of an editor that lets you fully customise all the tint/shades to your liking with a focus on accessibility. This is important when you've got existing brand colors to include and want to find accessible color combinations that work together.

Would love feedback in general and especially from designers/devs who have different needs in how they go about creating branded palettes!

Makes your regular's lives easier, and you take regulars out of your queue.

No stupid loyalty apps, no QR Codes, no sign ups.

More "How are you?" and less "Flat White, please"

Here is an article I wrote about it

https://wherethereisawill.substack.com/p/coffee-shop-loyalty...

It is integrated into our coffee shop POS: https://www.beanpos.co.za

https://www.zookeeperapp.com

https://www.mikeayles.com/#zookeeper-wip

It lets you take photos of all the animals you see to collect them, when you 'capture' a new animal, it gives you fun facts about them.

I seeded it with UK zoos, but there's no reason it can't work elsewhere.

It was built because the signage at a zoo we went to was terrible and we had no idea what some animals were, so it matches your photo with the list of animals to the best of its ability.

It's an infinite canvas that runs SQL.

I've been working with data my entire career. I feel like we need to alt+tab so much. What if we just put it all on a canvas?

Currently very WIP, but there's a simple titanic demo available!

Built with tldraw and duckdb wasm, running on cloudflare durable objects

Each game adds more building blocks to the editor: multiplayer, event systems, NPC behaviors, pathfinding, etc. I build a system once, and then anyone using the editor can use it in a click. For game logic, I recently added a visual event system I’m really excited about. It’s kind of like Unreal Blueprints, but focused on 2D. You pick a trigger, wire conditions, and chain actions in a node graph [1].

Big challenge right now: most people who want to make games needs assets, and don't know how to get/make them. So I’m building a marketplace where pixel artists can upload tilesets/characters, and unlike itch.io, assets are usable directly inside the engine. No ZIP downloads or import setup, just browse and drop into your game. A preview here[2].

Also, if you want to use the editor but ship elsewhere, you can export terrain, animations, and hitboxes to Godot 4. Nothing is locked in.

The engine/editor is at https://craftmygame.com if anyone wants to poke around! And you can test a games here[3][4], and 1 multiplayer game I've tested IRL in a bar [4]!

[1] https://youtu.be/8fRzC2czGJc

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hScOK_naYnk

[3] https://craftmygame.com/game/e310c6fcd8f4448f9dc67aac/r/play

[4] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WOIUmOVvaZM

I’ve been shipping AI-written code for 2 years now. I can build something amazing in 40 mins but then spend 4+ hours debugging because the agent has no idea how the libraries it’s calling actually work. Docs are stale, StackOverflow is dead, training data is outdated. Every engineer I talk to has the same problem.

So I built Instagit, an MCP server that lets your coding agent understand any GitHub repo in depth so it can get it right on the first try. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, etc.

No API key or account needed to try it out. Just need to share these instructions with your coding agent to get started:

curl -s https://instagit.com/install.md

My retirement treat was to spend three months learning OpenGL and 3D game programming by porting a classic Java RTS game, Tribal Trouble, to more modern OpenGL and Java. I learn much better working with real code and this was a great experience. It was certainly a different experience than it would have been without an LLM teacher, reviewer, helper, assistant. The app was beautifully designed and very cleanly implemented back in Java 1.4 days of 2004 so it has been a joy to modernize it while attempting to preserve the clean design. The OpenGL work and the necessary math was a lot different than what I have been doing for most of my career so it was a lot of fun. I will probably continue tinkering with Tribal Trouble occasionally as I still enjoy playing the game. I want to learn Blender to edit/improve the 3D models. (https://github.com/bondolo/tribaltrouble)

For now I have mostly moved on from gaming and am instead working on improving the accessibility (#a11y) of the Wireshark network protocol capture/analysis tool. There are a lot of blind and low vision IT folks for whom this tool is a job requirement. The current accessibility is unfortunately poor. I've submitted my first PR and am relearning the Wireshark source after last contributing 20 years ago. It's also been 15 years since the last time I did anything with Qt so that has been a refresher as well. I don't enjoy working in C++ but the goal matters so I will suffer through. (https://wireshark.org)

I plan to work on Wireshark for a couple of months at least and then look for something else to contribute to, probably also accessibility related. I have some ideas already about next apps. I'm currently tempted to build an NFC app for iOS in Swift but haven't decided yet. After having built in the last year both Kotlin Compose and TypeScript React apps, none of which I enjoyed very much, I am somewhat curious if Swift and SwiftUI will be more fun.

What I'm most excited about right now is DB Pro Studio: a collaborative web-based version I'm building on top of it.

The idea is simple: databases are a team activity, but every DB tool treats them as a single-player experience. Studio adds either a self-hosted or managed hosted data browser, real-time collaboration, dashboards, visual workflow automation, and enterprise features like audit logging and role-based access. Think "database command center" where your whole team can inspect, query, and build on your data together.

The desktop app acts as the execution engine (your data never leaves your infrastructure), while Studio provides the shared dashboard layer.

I've also consistently posted devlogs on YT throughout the journey, which has helped build a community of ~1,400 subscribers who've shaped the product along the way.

Site: https://dbpro.app YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dbproapp

Would love feedback from anyone who's felt the pain of sharing database context across a team.

Instead of another social network, it’s a bundle of small, practical community tools under one umbrella, combining of the shelf-software with purpose-built projects of our own.

Our current areas of focus are

- help! a neighbor-to-neighbor help board (rides, errands, PC help, garden/handwork)

- hubs! for shared spaces / tool-sharing / events / social hubs

Right now I’m building the integration surface (claims, roles, provisioning), polishing onboarding, and trying to design help!/hubs! so they’re useful even with low activity.

If anyone’s done (hyper-)local community platforms: I’d love to hear what actually drove adoption and what did not work out for you.

Hi HN, I built this because I got tired of fighting with integrating payments in Africa.

M-Pesa processes over $300B annually, it's how 50+ million people in Kenya pay for everything from groceries to rent. People don't have bank accounts, but rather pay straight from their cell phone nummber. But integrating it into your app? That's a different story. Most developers spend weeks on what should take hours, it's almost impossible. And existing solutions for Mastercard, Paypal, Apple Pay etc are useless because most don't have bank accounts.

Micropay is essentially what Stripe did for credit cards, but for mobile money.

That's why people leave their jobs, and magically find they are 100% more productive without a boss. No BS, and they are inspired.

I think you could get further faster by being a human, being inspiring, being a leader. I think you could learn more from Nelson than whatever nasty dehumanising theory most bosses have been reading.

I'm struggling to find the motivation to write up my notes (neurodiversity both helping me see the problem and stopping me do anything about it). I'm struggling to name the theory. I am struggling ( with some limited success) in noticing what I do differently. I'm also struggling with recovering from a major burnout from succeeding creating highly motivated teams in really tough organisations.

I thought all along that I would be better with a collaborator watching me and noting the differences between what I do and what everyone else is doing, then interviewing me about it.

Maybe I could publish bits of it, little tidbits of blogs (who would find them?) or social media videos (I really don't want to have to record and edit videos). Not sure how to get progress.

I would really like people to try it out and report bugs, failures, and successes.

https://github.com/Vibecodelicious/opencode/blob/surgical_co...

I'm currently trying to get the LLM to be more proactive about removing content that is no longer useful in order to stay ahead of autocompaction and also just to keep the context window small and focused in general.

Supports VS Code, Neovim, IntelliJ/JetBrains Family, Zed, etc.

About to do the first beta release this later this week.

The protocol is "srcuri" (pronounced, "Sorcery")

This site is: https://srcuri.com/

Source code: https://github.com/browserup/sorcery-desktop

A high-performance 3D game engine and editor in Rust. It has the ability to deploy to WebAssembly and WebGL2, delivering console-quality visuals and near-native performance right in the browser.

Currently building a multiplayer cozy farming game, inspired by Animal Crossing. Reach out to our discord if you are interested in learning more: https://discord.com/invite/mHsQayQNdp

Some stats so far:

- 200 users

- 378 startup jobs

- 500+ posts

- 2800+ funding rounds

- 1700+ startup companies

- 5000+ investors

The next part of the project is Tech Posts Intel: a lead gen tool using statistical methods to predict which companies should have a funding round coming soon. I'm hoping to soft launch it this week.

I'd love to hear anyone's feedback on the website. Advice on how to get inbound links in 2026 would also be greatly appreciated!

Tech I'm using: Sprites, Cloudflare Workers, SQLite, Litestream, React SSR

The idea is you take a book you want to read, and it gets translated but also rewritten to match your current learning level. And as you read/listen it introduces new words to learn, reinforced by spaced repetition.

We're taking a trip to France this summer and I'm hoping to have something usable for at least a couple months before we go.

Currently working on the mechanics of extracting content from ebooks.

I train BJJ and kept hearing the same pain points from academy owners regarding attendance tracking, communications, missing payments, etc.

So I built a tool for martial arts academies in 2024 with belts progression, automated payments, attendance tracking, and a tablet check-in system. Nowadays I'm still onboarding new academies every week and working a bit more on the marketing side to keep growing.

I'll admit it's terrifying to share this here because I don't know how to keep costs under control. For now only myself and my friends have used it.

Also trying to make a podcast out of it, which I enjoy listening to while I do some road trips: https://open.spotify.com/show/1fFwWMWJBJYIZmyz9cnrKB

https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs

It was inspired by 2025 by thomaswc, a 45x45 connections-like puzzle. Globs jumped off from there and it's been very fun to make. I have AI generating the puzzle groups and it keeps surprising me everyday with what it comes up with. I've got demos up for over 20 different languages, and many different sizes of puzzle. Just recently, I got the puzzle to be generated daily for American English, British English, High German and European Spanish. It can also do custom theme puzzles like the following:

Big YC https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=big...

Jumbo HN https://threeemojis.com/en-US/play/globs/en-US/demo?size=jum...

There is still some bugs I am tracking down (open the page in a private browser if you hit stale data) but the game has really come together lately and been a lot of fun, I hope you all like it!

I've decided to do it simply because of my grandmother: she dislikes bracelets and smartwatches because they’re uncomfortable and she often forgets to wear them. A contactless device could be much more practical for her and for many people like her.

Multi-threaded WebAssembly in action for route optimization, all bundled with geocoding, OSM maps and routing, and provided world-wide.

We're adding driver's PWA, saving and sharing of route optimization projects, editing of optimized routes, sharing it with others either for execution or for approval, integrations and AI-assisted data imports, auth flows, support prompts, sales automation and all that boring stuff.

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - map of the Internet domains

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds - database of RSS feeds

- https://github.com/rumca-js/yafr - very simple RSS reader

- https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy - crawling project

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive - another RSS reader

I just published the first episodes today and have zero listeners or subscribers, so it can only grow from here!

https://historyofthemajorityworld.com

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4qJh2jNwMvWcLP1J1EMXxr?si=dcc7...

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/rw/podcast/history-of-the-majorit...

https://memory.store

The problem: if you use multiple AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, etc.), none of them know what the others know. You end up maintaining .md files, pasting context between chats, and re-explaining your project every time you start a new conversation. Power users spend more time briefing their agents than doing actual work.

Memory Store is an MCP server that ingests context from your workplace tools (Slack, email, calendar) and makes it available to any MCP-compatible agent. Make a decision in one tool, the others know. Project status changes, every agent is up to date.

We ran 35 in-depth user interviews and surveyed 90 people before writing a line of product code — 95% had already built workarounds for this problem (custom GPTs, claude.md templates, copy-paste workflows). The pain is real and people are already investing effort to solve it badly.

Early users are telling us things like one founder who tracked investor conversations through Memory Store and estimated talking to 4-5x more people because his agents could draft contextual replies without manual briefing. It helped close his round.

Live in beta now. Would love feedback from anyone who's felt this pain! :)

After one year of development, it's going better than I expected, so I'm considering building a demo to gather feedback and see if there's enough traction for working towards a Steam release.

Even if that's not the case though, it's been a blast learning about game dev in Unity/C#, as well as 3D modeling and animation in Blender!

Currently it has:

- Accurate recreation of Windows shell with start menu, taskbar, windowing system.

- Full desktop themes customization (color, cursor, sound, wallpaper, screensaver). All Win 98 default Plus! themes are included.

- Persistent local file system & mounting local folder as removable disk with ZenFS.

- Support playing Flash games and run DOS games (save game persisted). Yes, you can play Doom and copy your savegames to continue.

- Some accurate remakes of Windows 98 apps, some made by me (Solitaire games, Minesweeper, Notepad) some are existing ports (Pinball, JSPaint, Webamp, etc).

- Some other fun stuff

If you're interested in Windows 98, this is for you. You're also welcome to contribute or fork it to create your own version: https://github.com/azayrahmad/win98-web

https://www.fastpause.app/

Offline first, no tracking PWA for intermittent fasting and mindful eating. It helped me lose another 3 kg in January. Spiked a native iOS version, but I really like the simplicity of just the PWA. Not sure what's next!

--

https://reposit.bot/

Having done a lot of back and forth with LLMs and at the end throwing away learnings from a conversation felt so wasteful - reposit allows you to /share a summary of the valuable learning from your LLM chat for others to discover.

At the beginning of researching a problem, your agent can search reposit just like Context7 for docs. This way, even if you opt out of sharing your data with your LLM provider (as it's all or nothing), you can choose to publicise a solution to your problem with very little effort.

I'm working on extracting valuable learnings from open-source community projects as a starting point now (with attribution), as it probably needs a larger database to be valuable for users to install and use.

You can also self-host it and share privately within the company.

https://metricme.app/

Over two decades ago I was diagnosed with high blood pressure (for which am I have been on meds for about 15 years). I also have low platelets (red blood cells, basically means that I bruise easily and that small cuts don't heal fast). At any rate, I do blood tests on a regular basis to keep things in check. I have been keeping track of test results, weight and blood pressure result for nearly 20 years, but the data lives in a text file on my desktop. I wanted to build something more substantial for this for quite some time now, so, this is it.

Started building it about a year ago after dealing with the same problem across multiple companies: circuit breakers scattered across dozens of services, each configured slightly differently, no single place to see what's happening when things go sideways. The existing options are either libraries you embed in every service (Resilience4j, opossum, etc.) leaving every server stateful, or going full service mesh which is overkill for most teams.

Openfuse gives you a central control plane for circuit breaker policies across your stack. You define your reliability rules in one place, get visibility into breaker states, and can react without redeploying anything.

Been a great project and I'm genuinely happy with where it landed. If you're running microservices or an integration-heavy monolith and have ever cursed at a cascading failure, I'd love to hear how you're handling it today! :)