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

290 points| david927 | 19 days ago | reply

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

1135 comments

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[+] YesBox|19 days ago|reply
I changed gears and moved into the video games industry at the end of 2021.

I started developing a city builder called Metropolis 1998 [1], but wanted to take the genre in new directions, building on top of what modern games have to offer:

- Watch what's happening inside buildings and design your own (optional)

- Change demand to a per-business level

- Bring the pixel art 3D render aesthetic back from the dead (e.g RollerCoaster Tycoon) [2]

I just updated my Steam page with some recent snapshots from my game. Im really happy with how the game is turning out!

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

[2] The art in my game is hand drawn though

[+] iknowstuff|19 days ago|reply
So pretty. But:

> Both adults in a family will now own a car. This is required since there are not other transportation options, and sidewalks are optional.

Is this temporary or are you planning to release it like this? SimCity leaned into euclidean zoning (separate industrial/residential/commercial zones) and pocketable cars which needed no parking, and thus failed to properly showcase how ugly car-centric cities actually are. I’m sure they did it because it made for an easy gameplay loop/balancing but I’d hope we could come up with more realistic and interesting mechanics in 2026

[+] smusamashah|19 days ago|reply
I have been following you on twitter since I saw it. It looks amazing. Recently tried the demo. It is like under 50MB (the demo at least) which is insane these days. Placing building required construction of the building room by room which was tedious. I am sure some people will enjoy that. Will that be the core part of final game?
[+] zelphirkalt|19 days ago|reply
Can you tell more about your background? Making a sim like this also crossed my mind many times, but I learned in the past, that without much of any art skills, I would have to use resources of others or hire someone to make the graphics and so on. In the times of me playing around with RPG maker it was the missing story that was the problem. So it seems often that one core aspect is missing, when wanting to make a game. How did you learn to fill that gap, learn how to get that skilled with making the graphics?
[+] tarokun-io|19 days ago|reply
Metropolis 1998 looks beautiful! (and addictive!)

Will you do a native Linux release, or has it been tested with Proton?

Also, just from watching the video and screenshots in the Steam page, it seems like a crazy amount of work. Are you doing everything by yourself?

[+] nanders|19 days ago|reply
I am one of those who grew up with Sim City/Transport Tycoon. I will definitely try this when it's released and go back into nostalgia but with a modern touch. Adding it to my wishlist right now. Good luck with wrapping this up towards a release!
[+] 2muchclout|19 days ago|reply
This looks awesome! From the isometric perspective, how did you do the walls or vertical stuff in general? I have done a few game like that and always find it to be a struggle in 2D.
[+] _el3m3n7|19 days ago|reply
Love the concept! I would love it even more if you could add support for SteamDeck/proton
[+] herpdyderp|19 days ago|reply
I came across your game last year! Can't remember how. Any hopes of macOS support?
[+] pjc50|19 days ago|reply
The aesthetic is so incredibly 1998. Reminds me not just of SimCity 2000 but the lesser played "A-Train", with its gentle day-night cycle.
[+] nickzelei|18 days ago|reply
Awesome! I’ve had this game on my wishlist for a while now. Just saw there is a demo, will have to check it out!!
[+] badpun|19 days ago|reply
I get a lot of "UFO: Enemy Unknown" vibe from the art.
[+] zorked|19 days ago|reply
I only had to look at the first screenshot to think "yup, this was made for me, I am buying this".
[+] Folcon|19 days ago|reply
Awesome to see your progress YesBox!

Didn't realise you'd swapped to isometric, it's looking fabulous!

[+] tr3ntg|19 days ago|reply
Logged in to agree with all the other comments: this is so, so pretty. Will try the demo soon.
[+] 999900000999|19 days ago|reply
Very very cool!

Did you roll your own engine, I know Godot has issues scaling past a certain number of simulations.

[+] gunju84|19 days ago|reply
Curious, What u used to do earlier ? before changing gears?
[+] jmole|19 days ago|reply
Any chance you'll release on macOS/Linux?
[+] asimovDev|19 days ago|reply
The visuals are stunning, great work!
[+] Aeolun|19 days ago|reply
Cool! Isometric for the win :)
[+] keithnz|19 days ago|reply
Vibe-coded a YouTrack CLI tool in < 1 hour:

https://github.com/keithn/yt

Also working on a language for embedded bare-metal devices with built-in cooperative multitasking.

A lot of embedded projects introduce an RTOS and then end up inheriting the complexity that comes with it. The idea here is to keep the mental model simple: every `[]` block runs independently and automatically yields after each logical line of code.

There is also an event/messaging system:

- Blocks can be triggered by events: `[>event params ...]`

- Blocks can wait for events internally

- Events can also be injected from interrupts

This makes it easy to model embedded systems as independent state machines while still monitoring device state.

Right now it’s mostly an interpreter written in Rust, but it can also emit C code. I’m still experimenting with syntax.

Example:

    module WaterTank {
      type Direction = UP|DOWN
      let direction = UP
      let current = 0

      [>open_valve direction |> direction]
      [>update level |> current]

      [
        for 0..30 |> iteration {
          when direction {
            UP   -> !update level=current + 1 |> min(100)
            DOWN -> !update level=current - 1 |> max(0)
          } ~
          %'{iteration} {current}'
        }
      ]

      [>update level |> when {
          0..10  -> %'shallow'
          11..15 -> %'good'
          16..   -> %'too much!' then !open_valve direction=DOWN
        }
      ]
    }
[+] tomwojcik|19 days ago|reply
Since subreddits related to identifying AI images/videos got very popular, my wife started to send me cute AI generated videos, older family members can't distinguish AI videos at all, I've decided to code a weekend side project to train their Spidey sense for AI content.

https://IsThisAI.lol

The content is hand picked from tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and other AI generating platforms.

Honestly I don't know where I'm going with this, but I felt the urge to create it, so here it is.

I learned how to optimize serving assets on CloudFlare.

Feedback welcome.

[+] paulhebert|19 days ago|reply
I'm still having a lot of fun releasing daily puzzles for my game Tiled Words: https://tiledwords.com

It just won an award! It was awarded Players' Choice out of 700 daily web games at the Playlin awards: https://playlin.io/news/announcing-the-2025-playlin-awards-w...

Right now around 3,500 people play every day which kind of blows my mind!

It's free, web-based, and responsive. It was inspired by board games and crosswords.

I've been troubleshooting some iOS performance issues, working on user accounts, and getting ready to launch player-submitted puzzles. It's slow going though because I have limited free time and making the puzzles is time consuming!

Here's an article with more info about the award: https://cogconnected.com/2026/03/tiled-words-crowned-the-pla...

[+] popupeyecare|19 days ago|reply
Im building https://trypixie.com to legally employ my 7 year old child, save on taxes and contribute to her Roth IRA.

Im also building https://www.keepfiled.com, a microsaas to save emails (or email attachments) to google drive

I almost forgot, I also built https://statphone.com - One emergency number that rings your whole family and breaks through DND.

I love building. I built all these for myself. unfortunately I suck at marketing so I barely have customers.

[+] dataviz1000|19 days ago|reply
I'm using TimescaleDB to manage 450GB of stocks and options data from Massive (what used to be polygon.io), and I've been getting LLM agents to iterate over academic research to see if anything works to improve trading with backtesting.

It's an addictive slot machine where I pull the lever and the dials spin as I hope for the sound of a jackpot. 999 out of 1000 winning models do so because of look-ahead bias, which makes them look great but are actually bad models. For example, one didn't convert the time zone from UTC to EST, so five hours of future knowledge got baked into the model. Another used `SELECT DISTINCT`, which chose a value at random during a 0–5 hour window — meaning 0–5 hours of future knowledge got baked in. That one was somehow related to Timescale hypertables.

Now I'm applying the VIX formula to TSLA options trades to see if I can take research papers about trading with VIX and apply them to TSLA.

Whatever the case, I've learned a lot about working with LLM agents and time-series data, and very little about actually trading equities and derivatives.

(I did 100% beat SPY with a train/out-of-sample test, though not by much. I'll likely share it here in a couple weeks. It automates trading on Robinhood, which is pretty cool.)

[+] marginalia_nu|19 days ago|reply
Cooking up a NSFW filter for marginalia search.

Pipeline so far has gone like this:

* Use the search engine's API to query a bunch of depravity

* Use qwen3.5 to label the search results and generate training data

* Try to use fasttext to create a fast model

* Get good results in theory but awful results in practice because it picks up weird features

* Yolo implement a small neural net using hand selected input features instead

* Train using fasttext training data

* Do a pretty good job

* for (;;) Apply the model to real a world link database and relabel positive findings with qwen to provide more training data

Currently this is where I'm at

  Accuracy:   90.90%
  True  Positive: 1021
  False Positive: 154
  True  Negative: 2816
  False Negative: 230
  Precision:  0.8689
  Recall:     0.8161
  F1:         0.8417
There's a lot of vague middle ground and many of the false positives are arguably just mislabeled.
[+] nhatcher|19 days ago|reply
Well, I just jumped full time on IronCalc[1] a fully open source, light and fast spreadsheet engine designed and build from the ground up.

I have been working on it as side project for over two years and now, with funding from the EU for the next 2.5 years, I hope I can make of it a real product for everyone to use that can compete with the likes of Excel and Googl;e Sheets.

I can oly say, I am overly, off the Moon excited

[1]: https://www.ironcalc.com

[+] BrunoBernardino|19 days ago|reply
My wife and I continue to work on Uruky, a EU-based Kagi alternative [1]. Since last month we got deals with a couple more search providers but we’re still waiting for EUSP/STAAN to provide us with an API key (we have progressed through a few more forms and signatures and legal stuff, though).

We’ve continued to get some paid customers and have exited beta last week, given everyone seemed to be quite satisfied and there hadn't been requests for changes, only some specific search providers.

Because of bots there isn’t a free trial easily available, but if you’re a human and you’d like to try it for a couple of days for free, reach out with your account number and we’ll set that up!

Thanks.

P.S.: Because people have asked before, our tech stack is intentionally very "boring" (as in, it generates and serves the HTML + bits of JS to enhance settings and such — search can be done without JS), using Deno in the backend (for easier TypeScript), PostgreSQL for the DB, and Docker for easier deploying.

[1] https://uruky.com

[+] asciimoo|19 days ago|reply
I'm working on a self-hosted search service called Hister with the goal to reduce my dependence on online search engines.

Hister is basically a full text indexer which saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface & query language to explore previously visited content with ease or quickly fall back to traditional search engines.

Here's a little summary of the background/motivation/beginnings: https://hister.org/posts/how-i-cut-my-google-search-dependen...

Project site: https://github.com/asciimoo/hister

Website: https://hister.org/ Read-only demo: https://demo.hister.org/

[+] djb_hackernews|19 days ago|reply
I live in an old house.

The front bump out leaks when we get driving rain. I installed some flashing but that wasn't enough, it's still leaking. So I'm working on that so I can close up the big hole in the ceiling some day.

The prior owners filled in the old coal chute with literal bags of cement sort of artistically placed in the hole in the brick foundation. So I'm trying to figure out what masonry tools and skills I'll need to close it up proper.

I'd like to build my kids a playhouse of some sort, sketching out some designs for that.

[+] jsattler|19 days ago|reply
https://github.com/jsattler/BetterCapture

I'm building a lightweight screen recorder for macOS. It supports lots of features you'd expect from a professional screen recorder such as ProRes 422/4444, HEVC/H.265, and H.264, capturing alpha channels and supports HDR. Frame rates from 24 to 120fps. Can capture system audio and mic simultaneously. You can also exclude specific things from recordings, like the menu bar, dock, or wallpaper.

No tracking, no analytics, no cloud uploads, no account. MIT licensed. Everything stays on your Mac. Still early, but happy to hear feedback!

[+] zabi_rauf|19 days ago|reply
One month ago, I purchased this small eink reader (Xteink 4) and I've been loving reading on that device. It made me read much more in the past month (already more than 50% through Fall or Dodge in Hell).

The stock firmware is horrible but the community has this firmware called CrossPoint. I wanted to be able to upload, manage files etc. from my iPhone on the go and also send over web articles. So I build this app CrossPoint Sync https://crosspointsync.com to do just that.

I've already published it on App Store and pending publishing on Android. The community is niche and has also been using the app, so its been fun building for my use and in turn also getting good feedback from community.

If you are using the Xteink and CrossPoint firmware, then give the app a try.

iOS App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/crosspoint-sync/id6758985427

Android Beta: https://crosspointsync.com/android/join-beta

GitHub: https://github.com/zabirauf/crosspoint-sync

[+] rahimnathwani|19 days ago|reply
When GPT-4.5 came out, I used it to write a couple of novels for my son. I had some free API credits, and used a naive workflow:

while word_count < x: write_next_chapter(outline, summary_so_far, previous_chapter_text)

It worked well enough that the novels were better than the median novel aimed at my son's age group, but I'm pretty sure we can do better.

There are web-based tools to help fiction authors to keep their stories straight: they use some data structures to store details about the world, the characters, the plot, the subplots etc., and how they change during each chapter.

I am trying to make an agent skill that has two parts:

- the SKILL.md that defines the goal (what criteria the novel must satisfy to be complete and good) and the general method

- some other md files that describe different roles (planner, author, editor, lore keeper, plot consistency checker etc.)

- a python file which the agent uses as the interface into the data structure (I want it to have a strong structure, and I don't like the idea of the agent just editing a bunch of json files directly)

For the first few iterations, I'm using cheap models (Gemini Flash ones) to generate the stories, and Opus 4.6 to provide feedback. Once I think the skill is described sufficiently well, I'll use a more powerful model for generation and read the resulting novel myself.

[+] joelcares|19 days ago|reply
After more than a decade of developing various websites under the brand https://anoa.ca I am pivoting the brand entirely to a creative niche: portfolio websites for the film industry. I created a new, general brand for the rest of my front end development work: https://lodewell.co

It feels like a small change, but it really makes sense in my brain and I'm glad I finally made it happen. My services feel properly positioned under these distinct brands. Now of course when I get time I need to redesign both of my own websites.

Ideas wise... I like the static website world. I use 11ty, but there are others moving in this direction. Clean, performant, simple html / css / js websites that should last for decades. I like the idea of publishing them to IPFS, creating an indie web with some permanence to it.

We just launched a portfolio for Director of Photography Joel Honeywell: https://joelhoneywell.com/

This is a simple static site, no CMS, built with 11ty.

[+] TheAceOfHearts|19 days ago|reply
I vibe coded a tiny MUD-style world sim where LLMs control each character. It's basically a little toy sandbox where LLMs can play around. There's no real goal to this, I just thought that it would be fun, like a more advanced tamagochi.

One of the issues I encountered initially was that the LLMs were repeating a small set of actions and never trying some of the more experimental actions. With a bit of prompt tweaking I was able to get them to branch out a bit, but it still feels like there's a lot of room for improvement on that front. I still haven't figured out how to instill a creative spark for exploration through my prompting skills.

It has been quite exciting to see how quickly a few simple rules can lead to emergent storytelling. One of the actions I added was the ability for the agents to pray to the creator of their world (i.e. me) along with the ability for me to respond in a separate cycle. The first prayer I received was from an agent that decided to wade into a river and kneel, just to offer a moment in stillness. Imagining it is still making me smile.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to enough compute to run a bigger experiment, but I think it would be really interesting to create lots of seed worlds / codebases which exist in a loop. With the twist being that after each cycle the agents can all suggest changes to their world. This would've previously been quite difficult, but I think it could be viable with current agentic programming capabilities. I wonder what a world with different LLM distributions would look like after a few iterations. What kind of worlds would Gemini, Claude, Grok, or ChatGPT create? And what if they're all put in the same world, which ones become the dominant force?

[+] factsperiodt|7 days ago|reply
I just claude coded a a decision journal that uses the Choose Your Own Adventure style of mapping out different pathways and outcomes. I've been dealing with a lot of major life decisions lately and I had some inspiration to use the CYOA format to help me work through different scenarios. It's actually really fun, and super useful to get AI to generate some potential outcomes too.

You can either use your own Anthropic/OpenAI key to play, or buy credits. I also have a free non-commercial version on my github you can fork.

Check it out here: https://yoursaga.cc

[+] spudlyo|19 days ago|reply
I'm writing an essay where I get into how I use GNU Emacs along with gptel (a simple LLM client for Emacs) and Google's Gemini-3 family of models to turn a 1970s-vintage text editor into a futuristic language-learning platform to help me study Latin. I want to show how I liberate poorly aligned, pixelated PDF image scans of century-old Latin textbooks from the Internet Archive and transform them into glorious Org mode documents while preserving important typographic details, nicely formatted tables, and some semantic document metadata. I also want to outline how to integrate a local lemmatizer and dictionary to quickly perform Latin-to-English lookups, and how to send whole sentences to Gemini for a detailed morphological and grammatical breakdown.

I also intend to dig into how to integrate Emacs with tools such as yt-dlp and patreon-dl to grab Latin-language audio content from the Internet, transcode the audio with ffmpeg, load it into the LLM's context window, and send it off for transcription. If the essay isn't already too long, I'll demonstrate how to gather forced-alignment data using local models such as wav2vec2-latin so I can play audio snippets of Latin texts directly from a transcription buffer in Emacs. Lastly, I want show how to leverage Gemini to automatically create multimedia flash cards in Org mode using the anki-editor Emacs minor mode for sentence mining.

[+] mohsen1|19 days ago|reply
Wanted to see if AI could figure out how to compress executable binaries better than existing generic tools without me actually knowing much about compression engineering or ELF internals.

The result is an experiment called fesh. It works strictly as a deterministic pre-processor pipeline wrapping LZMA (xz). The AI kept identifying "structural entropy boundaries" and instructed me to extract near-branches, normalize jump tables, rewrite .eh_frame DWARF pointers to absolute image bases, delta-encode ELF .rela structs with ZigZag mappings, and force column transpositions before compressing them in separated LZMA channels.

Surprisingly, it actually works. The CI strictly verifies that compression is perfectly reversible (bit-for-bit identity match) across 103 Alpine Linux x86_64 packages. According to the benchmarks, it consistently produces smaller payloads than xz -9e --x86 (XZ BCJ), ZSTD, and Brotli across the board—averaging around 6% smaller than maximum XZ BCJ limits.

I honestly have no idea how much of this is genuinely novel versus standard practices in extreme binary packing (like Crinkler/UPX).

Repo: https://github.com/mohsen1/fesh

For those who know this stuff:

Does this architecture have any actual merits for standard distribution formats, or is this just overfitting the LZMA dictionary to Alpine's compiler outputs? I'd love to hear from people who actually understand compression math.

[+] ciju|19 days ago|reply
https://finbodhi.com — It's an app for your financial journey. It helps you track, understand, benchmark and plan your finances - with double-entry accounting. You own your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit (we do have your email for subscription tracking and analytics).

Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custom sheet/calculator to operate on your accounts (calculate taxes etc) and much more. Most recently, we added support for benchmarking (create custom dashboards tracking nav and value chart of subsets of your portfolio) and US stocks, etfs etc.

We also write about like:

How fund performance explain part of returns, rest is explained by timing. And ways to tease those out: https://finbodhi.com/docs/blog/benchmark-scenarios

Or, understanding double entry account: https://finbodhi.com/docs/understanding-double-entry

[+] jonasmst|19 days ago|reply
Hey, this sounds like exactly what I've been looking for (household tracking of finances). FYI images are currently not loading on your webpage:)
[+] domh|19 days ago|reply
Hey! The demo didn't work in Firefox. It said something about setting up the database then it crashed the tab.
[+] deepvibrations|19 days ago|reply
Nice, what front end charting library are you using? Looks very slick!
[+] MarceColl|19 days ago|reply
This looks perfect, Ill give it a go today