alt.hn

5/13/2026 at 2:07:52 PM

Ask HN: What are you working on (non-AI)?

by BrunoBernardino

5/13/2026 at 2:41:39 PM

I built a free DS-160 filler - the only one I could find thats 100% free

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.

by junaid_97

5/13/2026 at 6:02:47 PM

I understand the frustration with dealing with the constant log outs, but I am too paranoid to try anything automated in case they have bot detection.

For some people, getting a US visa denied can ruin their lives (job loss).

by EduardoBautista

5/13/2026 at 6:59:54 PM

[flagged]

by junaid_97

5/13/2026 at 6:16:31 PM

I continue to work on my general-purpose object store; which is a 'multi-modal' data management system. Using it, you can create and manage millions of files in a traditional hierarchical folder structure; create relational tables that can be queried and analyzed quickly and easily; and manage semi-structured data normally handled by nosql systems.

https://www.didgets.com

by didgetmaster

5/14/2026 at 3:39:19 AM

I'm currently working on a custom Java VM for running J2ME games. Like KVM[1], but in modern C++ and without the memory footprint constraint.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_virtual_machine

by AlexGuo1998

5/14/2026 at 6:04:21 AM

Alright, after so many incredibly interesting posts (thank you!) I'll also share my own thing (which I'm building with my wife), an ad-free and privacy-first search engine, Uruky (a simpler and EU-based Kagi alternative)! [1]

We have our own index now, and yesterday we released image search (beta).

[1]: https://uruky.com

by BrunoBernardino

5/14/2026 at 4:37:55 AM

I am currently building a budgeting app, which warns you before you pay. So basically I am creating a payment app, which helps you control your spend as well, by giving you warning. Currently I have launched its website and the waitlist is also live.

Here is the link: https://www.spenrol.com/ If anyone wants to try webapp, and join waitlist

by ShreyashM17

5/13/2026 at 5:54:50 PM

Working on a little DSP (digital signal processing) macOS menu bar app. I've got one of those typical bedroom producer setups (Focusrite Scarlett 4i4, Shure SM57), but no hardware for real-time stuff like compression, eq etc that would help me polish my audio in calls. I used to run OBS to host free VSTs (audio effects) and then hijacked the monitor output with a loopback driver to route it into Zoom etc, but it was a janky workflow. So I made a little app, with AI assistance. I made it just for myself, but it's open source - https://github.com/JyrgenSuvalov/klaar/.

by jyrkki

5/13/2026 at 4:38:06 PM

Building a website that helps patients to find clinical trials that are actually looking for patients right now. 70% of contacts listed on governmental website for studies that should be active, do not respond to patients. It’s AllClinicalTrials.com

by nazarh

5/13/2026 at 8:17:17 PM

Did you measure the 70% via sampling by contacting listed coordinators yourself or pulling from an aggregator?

by sebakubisz

5/14/2026 at 5:06:31 AM

An alternative to instagram and facebook. No ads and a focus on your friends instead of an explore feed that keeps you endlessly scrolling.

by matthewwolfe

5/13/2026 at 9:18:30 PM

I'm working on a toolkit for building "full-stack" libraries. I.e. libraries that bundle frontend hooks, backend routes, and a database schema into a single package.

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

by WilcoKruijer

5/13/2026 at 9:30:29 PM

My startup is a 3D editor that turns any indoor place to FPS immersive game. In one hour.

https://free-visit.net

Ps : never had an interview at yc but, it's ok.

by tmilard

5/13/2026 at 10:55:37 PM

Trying to bring modern typed dependencies context DX to Python https://github.com/alexdrydew/inlay. Had a lot of fun with implementing efficient solver for this. It has rough edges (e.g. supporting only 3.14+), but I already migrated my other project to use it and love how it turns out, threw out huge piles of boilerplate

by alexdrydew

5/13/2026 at 3:05:20 PM

I bought $5 worth of Claude API tokens the other day because Newspeak [0] is implementing an API interface in the IDE.

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)

by goodthink

5/13/2026 at 6:18:24 PM

Helping a friend repair the internal oscilloscope control board on an IFR-1200 Super-S communications service monitor.

There's a new undocumented version of the board with surface mount parts that rhymes with the old known through hole version.

by mikewarot

5/13/2026 at 6:51:55 PM

Currently Working on https://devlens.io which is an Open source Intelligent Codebase Visualizer for javascript, Reactjs, nextjs and nodejs for easy onboarding and easy PR review.

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.

by shivang2607

5/13/2026 at 6:53:10 PM

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.

by shivang2607

5/13/2026 at 4:11:50 PM

Good timings on this. I think a lot of people are quietly building useful things and just not posting about them because it doesn't get traction next to AI announcements. would love to see more of these threads.

by Leena-ch

5/13/2026 at 4:53:21 PM

Good to see this post, a simple non AI tagged post would make it more easier to find useful projects that are not focused on AI, while keeping the community together.

by farwaabbas

5/13/2026 at 5:02:40 PM

Thanks! Do you mean a [Non-AI] tag or something on the answers to the WAYWO post? That could make it easier to search indeed, if it's somehow standardized.

by BrunoBernardino

5/13/2026 at 5:58:53 PM

I have been working on making streaming cheaper/more private/lower latency (via WebRTC) in OBS. Been working on this site to get people excited https://webrtcforthestreamer.com/ after it is done want to record a YouTube video for it.

After that I want to spend the weekend just closing out Pion bugs/relaxing :)

by Sean-Der

5/13/2026 at 6:55:52 PM

I used claude to rebuild a simple mobile math game I had previously prototyped in GDevelop. the rebuild is ai assisted but the original game had been created entirely in GDevelop with the use of its visual programming.

https://www.mathabito.com/

by UansaS

5/13/2026 at 9:00:43 PM

A non interpretive non authoritative temporal recording of institutional publication. I wrote a grammar to build long horizon , non founder dependent, capture resistant systems.

by ibrahimuyaradua

5/13/2026 at 5:27:21 PM

working on a crossword tool that leans on qxw [https://quinapalus.com/qxw.html] for the grid filler and borrows some UI ideas from it, but adds integrated clue management, as well as experimenting with some UI features that are perhaps too idiosyncratic for qxw to add. I will contribute features back to qxw wherever that makes sense too - largely, the latter focuses on being rock solid, stable, and bug free, and I want to take more of a "let's toss in a bunch of features and see what ends up being useful" approach.

by zem

5/13/2026 at 10:06:39 PM

What I've enjoyed recently: someone building a mechanical watch movement from scratch. I find it facinating and so skillfull.

by iamakrt

5/13/2026 at 5:38:15 PM

Vibe coding allowed me to build a couple of map-related things I geek out about: - a map with all direct train destinations from a given station https://trainconnections.ai-tigers.com/ - a navigation app which avoids traffic jams even it takes longer (I like to stay in flow state) - a bicycle navigation app which avoids traffic lights (for the same reason as the traffic jam app)

by jorisboris

5/13/2026 at 8:42:31 PM

Post it somewhere else, this is for non-AI projects.

by cinntaile

5/13/2026 at 5:42:10 PM

Working and getting crazy good results in compression algorithms :)

by ENIAC-85

5/13/2026 at 7:11:27 PM

yea trying to get beta out for an online game. using deepski and its cheap af rn discount 75% im still at $4 usage after a week of it chugging, and ppl say its not as good as the other models but we are at point where they all distilled off each other and are within margins such that u just pick cheapest one and it works ok as the others, eg none of them are gonna give u anything novel by default if u dont know what ur doing anyway but they can just autocomplete stuff pretty well and explain / find bugs answer questions etc well enough so idk what that means

by lerp-io

5/13/2026 at 6:20:39 PM

If you must know, I'm writing a real-mode 16-bit x86 assembly to C translator in Common Lisp to be able to run that 3-sector inference engine, which was posted the other day, outside of QEmu, currently I'm debugging it. I'm doing this because it's fun but I can rationalize it as follows: It allows me to simultaneously learn Common Lisp, as I'm otherwise an OCaml & Scheme guy; 16-bit x86 assembly, since I grew up learning 68k assembly and segments are otherwise disgusting; and also slop generator architecture, right now I don't feel like reading a summary paper, those always leave out details. This is 100% hand-written in Emacs in Evil mode, and with SLIME. I guess that counts as a coding assistant, and it's written in LISP and LISP=AI, so that I can claim that I am familiar with generative AI technologies for coding when applying to jobs.

by rho_soul_kg_m3

5/13/2026 at 10:09:38 PM

I recently added a links page to my site for links that use the human.json protocol[0,1] to denote actual human created (non-AI) content, and added metadata parsing that adds title, description and fediverse link where available[2,3]. I'm also working on some game projects. Yes I know my site is terrible and half-assed and my Python skills leave something to be desired.

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...

by krapp

5/13/2026 at 8:31:28 PM

Here to read all the comments!

by eddy-sekorti

5/13/2026 at 6:43:45 PM

[flagged]

by adam_thede

5/13/2026 at 2:20:24 PM

[dead]

by datagrasp-grcs

5/13/2026 at 7:19:20 PM

[dead]

by CanopyCoder

5/13/2026 at 6:06:34 PM

[flagged]

by n11348745

5/13/2026 at 5:18:37 PM

[flagged]

by OutrageousTea

5/13/2026 at 2:44:32 PM

Hi, I'm David and I run the "What are you working on?" posts. I hear what you're saying and yet I think it's just the new reality. There will be more projects and some of those will be quickly-made vibe-coded projects. I'm not against it.

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.

by david927

5/13/2026 at 3:17:44 PM

It doesn't seem like you hear what they're saying at all.

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.

by swatcoder

5/13/2026 at 4:25:28 PM

I heard what they're saying, and while I don't personally agree with it, I can see it's shared by a lot of people.

Personally, I'm not sure a separate thread makes sense. What if people mark their project as "[ARTISAN]" like they do with [Remote] in Who's Hiring? Any other ideas?

by david927

5/13/2026 at 5:03:46 PM

I would also prefer it to be on the same thread. I think "[Non-AI]" or "[NO-AI]" might be more obvious, though.

by BrunoBernardino

5/13/2026 at 5:41:04 PM

I had only ever known ski lifts.

One day, way before the lifts had started, I hiked up the mountain, snowboard under my arm. Trudging, my breath heavy, lungs filling, oxygen, snow, blue sky, cold but my body warmed. There was not one track in the fresh powder. My snowboard was slower in the powder, and I felt safe in the knowledge. I had to work a little harder. Carving.

by mmphosis