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

Hacker News Discussion ↗

AI agents, coding assistants & dev tools

  • Many projects wrap LLMs into agents for coding (multi-session CLIs, MCP hubs, plan reviewers, deterministic “agent OS” runtimes, local MCP dashboards).
  • Strong interest in orchestrating multiple agents, preserving long‑term memory, and structuring context via graphs or Zettelkasten-like stores rather than pure RAG.
  • Several people are replacing or augmenting tools like WandB, MLFlow, Neptune, Backstage, or remote dev setups with self‑hosted alternatives.
  • Heavy use of Claude Code / other models for “vibe coding”; some projects are almost entirely AI‑authored, but closely supervised.

Web, infra & data engineering

  • Many build self‑hostable platforms: job orchestration on VMs, DevContainers-based remote dev, WireGuard meshes with eBPF, Postgres-native workflow engines, local‑first auth, printing/scanning stack cleanup, Talos home labs, serverless WASM platforms.
  • Others focus on observability and analysis: OpenTelemetry UIs, query cost analyzers, security scanners that auto‑generate unit tests, code quality leaderboards, cloud cost tools, local DuckDB-WASM data explorers.

Productivity, knowledge & personal tools

  • Numerous note-taking, PKM, and reading tools (incremental reading queues, local PDF search, clipboard search, Tailwind-accessible color pickers, calendar and workout apps, context-aware clipboards).
  • Financial and business tools: accounting auto-coding, unified SaaS monitoring, AWS cost analyzers, simple invoicing (with EU e‑invoicing aspirations), small‑business CRMs and job tracking for trades.

Games, media & creative software

  • Many hobby and commercial games, engines, and tools: voxel engines, party-game platforms, city explorers, music trackers, font editors, film/VFX tools, 2D game languages, no‑code multiplayer engines.
  • AI imagery and video tools raise both excitement and ethical concerns (e.g., about AI assets in games and film).

Security, privacy & identity

  • Work on PKI-style trust chains for age verification, penetration-testing agents, responsible disclosure tools, SL5‑style AI security frameworks, and CAPTCHA alternatives.
  • Some skepticism about always‑on screen‑watching trackers and central AI memory layers; users worry about data control despite technical mitigations.

Physical, scientific & hardware projects

  • Projects span spectrometers, SLAM camera modules, battery health PCBs, flight‑control systems for homebuilt airplanes, floppy‑disk magnetic visualizations, yeast engineering for flavored bread, robotics for agriculture, and IoT greenhouses.

Meta: AI and the future of software work

  • Ongoing debate: will AI wipe out software jobs or just flood the world with “vibe‑coded” apps while increasing demand for true experts?
  • Several compare this to digital photography: easier creation raises the bar for what counts as professional quality rather than eliminating professionals altogether.