Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall themes

  • Extremely wide range of projects: AI agents, dev tools, games, education, personal productivity, homelabs, finance, health, and physical making.
  • Many tools are “built for myself first,” then opened to others; lots of indie/bootstrapped SaaS and open source.
  • LLMs (Claude, Gemini, etc.) are heavily used as coding assistants and even co‑architects, but several people explicitly resist letting them “do all the work” to retain learning and joy.

AI, agents & automation

  • Dozens of projects wrap LLMs into agents, skills, sandboxes, IDEs, CRMs, analytics, or document workflows.
  • Strong interest in agent safety: sandboxed execution, syscall‑level policy engines, granular email access, secure plugin systems, and prompt‑injection defenses.
  • Multiple “OpenClaw / Claude Code–style” coding environments, often adding orchestration, plan/review loops, or multi‑model coordination.
  • Some push beyond chatbots: AI‑driven product analytics, observability/RCA tools, tax classification, app UX evaluation, and API monetization via HTTP 402.

Developer tooling & infra

  • New databases, Redis‑compatible stores, task runners, Kubernetes/Heroku bridges, internal‑tool platforms, and DevOps abstractions.
  • Many tools focus on “boring but hard” problems: CODEOWNERS management, SQL query builders, Docker/K8s app deployment, cert monitoring, event‑driven frameworks, binary compression, model package managers, and log/search utilities.
  • Several users run substantial homelabs or even personal anycast networks, ASNs, and colocation racks.

Consumer, productivity & niche apps

  • Numerous personal apps: RSS readers, ebook readers, note‑taking, habit trackers, journaling, meal planners, health and finance trackers, calendaring, and “buy later” tools.
  • Vertical SaaS for restaurants, gyms, salons, law firms, freelancers, charities, and real estate; often with explicit anti‑VC or EU‑hosting positioning.
  • Many side‑projects are tiny single‑purpose utilities (cron translators, email‑to‑Drive, subtitle bots, DNS/IP tools) aimed at being fast, ad‑free, and privacy‑respecting.

Games, education & creative work

  • Many solo or small‑team games (city builders, word games, io games, RTS/FPS, MUDs, kids’ coding clubs) plus tools for game dev engines.
  • Strong educational focus: math and language‑learning platforms, Latin/Greek tools, urbanism newsletters, interactive visual explanations, and kids’ reading/logging apps.
  • Non‑software making is prominent: printmaking, 3D printing, CNC, home repair, custom pedals, woodworking, early aviation/vehicle projects.

Reflections on process

  • “Vibe coding” and agent‑assisted development are common; people note huge speedups, but also new failure modes (model drift, slop, over‑engineering).
  • Several express concern about AI‑generated “slop” content, cognitive erosion, and the need for explainability, citations, and better media literacy.