Regardless of "AI" being good or bad (it's not even just one thing as many of you know), I feel like the "What are you working on?" posts are drowning in things that use AI for something and/or are clearly "AI slop".
I'd like to look at things other humans have been doing (even if they used a bit of some kind of AI for assistance), that aren't a product or tool that uses AI for something.
I know it exists (and I use and build some), but it's incredibly hard to find nowadays. Can you help me?
Thank you.
https://fillvisa.com/form/usa-ds160/
The State Department's CEAC portal times out constantly. Session expires, you lose progress. Every tool that solves this charges some money, or bundles you into an attorney service.
So I built a free interface to fill your DS-160 comfortably at your own pace - then a one-click bookmarklet autofills the CEAC portal for you. No account. No data leaving your browser. 100% free.
~10M+ nonimmigrant visa applicants file this form every year.
For some people, getting a US visa denied can ruin their lives (job loss).
The insight: these people don't need "websites" in the traditional sense. They need specific functional pages - a digital waiver, a booking page, an intake form, a bio link. But every existing tool (Wix, Squarespace, even Linktree) assumes you want to "design" something.
So I'm building something where you describe your business in plain text and get back a functional page in seconds. No templates to browse, no drag-and-drop, no color picker decisions.
The most interesting technical challenge has been making the AI output actually look professional without giving users any design controls. Turns out constraining the design space makes the average output much better than giving people unlimited freedom.
None of this is of any real interest to HN but I just didn't want to be entirely off topic by mentioning how disappointing it is that even though this thread is marked as explicitly for non-AI projects, a number of people posted AI projects anyway and one person is saying we need to just accept that AI will eat everything and to not even bother trying to avoid it.
Sad state of affairs, the degree to which AI is being forcefully normalized, and how much of "hacker culture" simply accepts it as inevitable. To the point that simply having a space explicitly for non-AI projects won't be permitted.
[0] https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47298655
[2] https://kennethrapp.net/pages/links.html
[3] https://kennethrapp.net/posts/housekeeping-2-electric-boogal...
The main goals are to support: - Instant save (i.e. saving and restoring the whole JVM and native state) - Deterministic replay (mainly cycle counting and deterministic thread scheduling, for TASing). Also no JIT to possibly bring it to Apple platforms.
The standard class library is also written in C++. I'm using templates heavily for native interface boilerplate, ensuring type correctness, etc.
Started because I noticed that all current J2ME emulators (or runtimes?) are written in Java. They are generally just providing the missing classes for the games to run, and relying on the system JVM. I wanted to write it like other console emulators (e.g. NES), to have full control of the execution.
Have been doing this since the last year. Current the VM part is almost done (run classes correctly) but for class libraries there's still a long way to go.
You can star the repo if you like the project. I am still working on cloud version which will have lots of features.
Also the main MOAT of Devlens is not the visualizer but the blast radius feature. Which essentially tells you if I change this file/function where it will affect my Codebase which is specially useful for PR review.
Adaptive TDEE Tracker
Get personalized recommendations on when to lean bulk, cut, or recomp.
It helps people lose weight especially when they see how their TDEE (maintenance) calories changes with time.
It also helps people run precise surplus (necessary for lean bulking), to maximize muscle gain while minimizing fat gain.
The tracker estimates your real TDEE by analyzing your calorie intake alongside your weight trends over time.
It's a free app: https://macrocodex.app/
It all started as series of fitness guides (on lean bulk/cut/body recomposition): https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidecompound/comments/1omfgx...
When people started sharing the guide, we thought about automating it all.
I'm building a recipe editor online, one where you could enter in the details, and then get a printable file [to become an index card, for example]. I just started so I still have some ways to go but progress is good so far.
I work with Newspeak every night building all kinds of crazy stuff, from the raycasting tutorial to an IndexedDB interface. Currently, I have the IDE running as an Isolated Web App for access to TCPSockets [1][2][3].
I'm implementing ancient TCP protocols bringing them to the web.
[0] https://newspeaklanguage.org
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/iwa
[2] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/iwa/direct-sockets
[3] https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/telnet-client (example IWA)
Current stats: 365M+ domains in 1580+ zones
On top of this I built a library for email that listens to Resend webhooks and stores the email (with thread information) directly in the user’s database. This is a more complete package than what Resend themselves could provide with their backend-only library.
https://github.com/rejot-dev/fragno https://fragno.dev/fragments/resend
There's a new undocumented version of the board with surface mount parts that rhymes with the old known through hole version.
Ps : never had an interview at yc but, it's ok.
The open source version is live at https://github.com/devlensio/devlensOSS
You can star the repo if you like the project. I am still working on cloud version which will have lots of features.
Here is the link: https://www.spenrol.com/ If anyone wants to try webapp, and join waitlist
We have our own index now, and yesterday we released image search (beta).
[1]: https://uruky.com
After that I want to spend the weekend just closing out Pion bugs/relaxing :)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/openinfrared/openinfrar...
We help admins to manage ssh access (using certificates & ouath) for sme and hobbiests.
In Moveable Feast, Hemingway talks about being opposed to ski lifts (which were probably fairly new at the time). He thought, if you're fit enough to hike up the mountain, you're going to be fit enough to ski down without getting injured; it opens skiing up to people who maybe shouldn't be skiing. I deeply prefer ski lifts. :-) And I love agentic AI coding.
I guess what I'm saying is that we shouldn't compare it to the past, because that's gone. And yet, each month the number of comments breaks 1000, so "drowning" is a fair word for just number of projects alone. And I don't have any answers.
Anyway, you (and anyone reading this) can feel free to email me. My email in my profile.
Writing code to coax computers into doing specific things in specific ways is a craft, trade, and art form older than pretty much anybody alive today.
Writing prose instructions to direct LLM's to generate that code also produces software, but it's essentially a different craft/trade/art altogether.
Whatever success the latter claims in commerce or mindshare, both of these arts will coexist for longer than anybody will be around.
It's completely natural to carve out spaces where people who appreciate the process or character of hand-crafted projects can discuss those projects without people talking about a whole different thing crowding out their conversations.
