Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Types of Tools People Built

  • Personal productivity: custom dashboards, task/goal trackers, habit and time trackers, personal finance/budgeting tools, invoicing and timesheet automation.
  • Developer tooling: agent harnesses, sandboxes, CLIs, Git helpers, TUI SQL and calendar clients, code visualizers, tmux replacements, debugging helpers.
  • Domain‑specific apps: CRMs for niche sales, scouting/volunteering organizers, education tools (language tutors, music theory, system‑design simulators), research/meeting summarizers.
  • Media tools: podcast and YouTube summarizers, RSS and news aggregators, music players/Spotify/YT replacements, image upscalers and background removers, audio editors and TTS pipelines.

AI’s Effect on Individual Development

  • Many say AI made them finally tackle “someday” projects (own language, CAD kernel, databases, static site generators, complex dashboards).
  • People with little or no experience in a language/framework shipped substantial apps (e.g., 300‑file Go CLI, SwiftUI/macOS apps, Rust tools).
  • A common pattern is “vibe coding”: letting agents write most code, then manual review/patching. Others deliberately push against this with strict harnesses, tests, and spec‑driven workflows.

Agents, Sandboxes & MCP

  • Heavy experimentation with local or containerized agent environments: podman/docker/VM‑based sandboxes, permission gates to prevent destructive commands, rootless container orchestrators.
  • Growing ecosystem around MCP and tool APIs: personal knowledge bases, search over logs, Obsidian/notes, business metrics, and email; some build general MCP servers and proxies to compose many tools.

Personal Data, Search & Knowledge Management

  • Strong interest in self‑hosted search and recall: indexing visited web pages, local files, ebooks, tweets, calendars, Slack/Mattermost/Asana/Dynalist archives.
  • Many tools export/import to Markdown, Obsidian, org‑mode, or SQLite so agents can operate over a consistent local corpus.

Home Automation & Physical World

  • Projects tie AI and scripting to Home Assistant, lights, blinds, HVAC, 3D printers, radios, drones, ESP32s, and CNC machines.
  • Some emphasize non‑digital tools (ceramics, woodworking, farm automation), using AI mostly to learn or prototype.

Attitudes & Skepticism

  • Enthusiasm: “personal app store” feeling; bespoke tools beat ad‑ridden SaaS; AI as “exoskeleton” for solo devs.
  • Concerns: hallucinations in legal/compliance contexts, fragile agent behavior, code quality slop, proliferation of low‑effort paid apps, and over‑reliance on opaque models.