Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Accessible design & frontend tooling

  • Several projects focus on design systems and accessibility: e.g., an advanced HSLuv-based color palette builder for WCAG-compliant UIs, with feedback that it needs clearer onboarding and tutorials.
  • Other tools target photo galleries, static-site generators, and small JS frameworks, often emphasizing minimalism, self‑hosting, and better developer ergonomics.

Developer infrastructure, observability & security

  • Many are building logging libraries, incident dashboards wired to IaC, Go/Vim/Rust tooling, performance profilers, and job orchestration platforms.
  • Security projects include a “platform of platforms” for running open‑source security tools, coding‑agent‑style vulnerability scanners, cryptographic protocols, and PAM/JIT access agents.
  • There’s interest in simplifying Kubernetes, GitOps, NAT traversal, and making Postgres, Kafka, and Redis easier to monitor or deploy.

AI/LLM products and agents

  • A large cluster centers on LLM applications: coding agents and ACP‑compatible runtimes, multi‑agent orchestration frameworks, Text2SQL, eval tooling, news digests, AI email clients, and browser extensions.
  • Several projects experiment with AI for learning (course generators, readers with interactive visualizations), whiteboard explainers, website critique, and game-like prompt‑injection challenges.
  • Some tension appears around trust and privacy (e.g., a privacy‑proxy chat service asking what it would take for users to trust it: open source vs audits vs reputation).

Finance, business tooling & productivity

  • Tools for invoicing (often open source, EU‑aware, with e‑invoice plans), CRM‑lite features, property‑tax appeals, job-board aggregators, budgeting connectors, and portfolio managers.
  • Simple personal trackers appear often: migraine and health journals, habit/self‑tracking apps, personal finance dashboards, and reflection tools.

Games, media & creative tech

  • Many indie games and engines: city builders with deep, “brutally honest” simulations, voxel engines, CHIP‑8 emulators, horror chatbots, rhythm games using AirPods, and trivia/word games.
  • There’s also tooling for music/audio (DSP libraries, Go allocation visualizers, 3D asset workflows) and content platforms for icons or app art.

Health, biology & environment

  • A major thread discusses a crowdfunded lab‑testing platform for plastics in food, covering:
    • Demand from individuals vs manufacturers.
    • Confusion over how to interpret raw chemical measurements and desire for clearer “good/bad” visualizations and regulatory comparisons.
    • Questions about funding sources, potential lawsuits, and expansion to other contaminants.
  • Other projects reduce PCR/enzyme costs, build computational biology toolkits, food‑safety resources, and endocrine‑disruptor awareness.

Local community, social & civic projects

  • Efforts include community radio, landlord/agent review platforms (with concerns about libel), local event discovery, digital democracy visualizations, VR/XR hiring platforms, and “no‑clout” social networks.
  • Several people focus on real‑world logistics and sustainability: repairable e‑bike batteries, cargo‑bike delivery, low‑power mesh networks, city-mapping for housing decisions, and LPFM station funding challenges.