Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Side projects in August 2024 range from highly technical AI agents, CI/CD platforms, niche SaaS tools and open source infrastructure to indie games, scientific visualisation, robotics and custom hardware. Many contributors are using modern LLMs, Rust, Go, Elixir and WebGPU to rework familiar problems (search, observability, education, error tracking, auth, dev tooling) with a local‑first or privacy‑preserving bent, while others are building very practical applications in domains like finance, real estate, healthcare and sports. Alongside the coding, a notable thread is people investing in personal well‑being and creative pursuits—writing, music, fitness and mental health—as deliberately as they invest in their software.

AI and ML Projects

  • Many are building LLM-powered tools: on‑call copilots, desktop/QA agents that control UI, “autopilot” for OSes, RAG → Graph RAG upgrades, multi‑agent cognitive architectures, and SMS/phone “firewalls” using small models on-device.
  • Several focus on information extraction and summarization: email/download/search tools, podcast/audio analysis platforms, “AI newspaper” and news aggregators, video/audio → text “ChatGPT for video”, and site chatbots.
  • Others explore deeper research: graph reasoning, agent ethics layers (e.g. Stoic-inspired), representation learning (V‑JEPA on chess), reinforcement learning beyond Gym, and ML-on-microcontrollers (MicroPython).

Developer Tools, Infra, and Data

  • New CI/CD and build systems emphasize local-first runs, DAG definitions, caching, and easier debugging; some compare to Bazel and Dagger and worry about scaling and “abstraction ceilings”.
  • Numerous libraries: LLM-as-function call wrappers, property-testing for TypeScript, Bun-based stacks, serialization formats, open-source OAuth2, CLI frameworks, Nim hot‑reloading, multi-cloud observability pipelines, and “virus‑scanner style” deepfake detection.
  • Infra tooling includes: k8s-style protocols for complex RPC, GUIs for Postgres on mobile, Git-based task and issue tracking, OpenTelemetry-like observability for traditional environments, and tools to detect relicensing risk and CLAs in OSS.
  • Several build personal or hybrid data stores: out-of-memory dataframes, personal knowledge bases spanning email/calendar/files, and self-hosted encrypted password+key directories for the fediverse.

Apps, SaaS, and Productivity

  • Many small SaaS: incident management, API monetization and billing, self‑service CI, lending platforms, payroll for specific verticals, error debuggers, AI job‑application agents, screening tools for applicants, and pricing/lead scrapers.
  • Productivity/PKM is a strong theme: note-taking and journaling apps, blogging-by-email, RSS readers, email downloaders with search and labeling, to‑do/“text yourself” tools, and digital gardens.
  • Niche consumer apps include: real estate search with commute/park filters, city‑walk/tour generators, speech‑to‑speech translation, language learning games, fashion/style analyzers, microfinance-style bill consolidators, and local event finders.

Games, Creative, and Hardware

  • Indie games and engines: strategy and roguelike titles, NES emulators and engines, deck‑builders, automation sandboxes, VR concepts, plus tooling for table‑top RPGs and backgammon.
  • Creative tools span: CSS masterclasses, UI/UX courses, audio players, shader/SDF playgrounds, 3D art systems, and platforms for podcasts and interactive video.
  • Hardware and physical builds include: EV batteries and right‑to‑repair projects, IoT meters, CAN bus reverse‑engineering, drones and simulators, CNC/lithography experiments, fingerboards, 3D‑printed braille cells, and home labs.

Learning, Careers, and Personal Life

  • Many are learning new stacks (Astro, SwiftUI, Unity, RL, materials science, Go, Rust, gnuplot) or writing books and tutorials (Git, coding edtech, AI agents, CSS, Lisp).
  • Several posts focus on mental and physical health, burnout, therapy, and rehab; commenters emphasize exercise, PT, and self‑care as legitimate “projects” alongside tech work.