Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?

austin-cheney

I am building something similar to Windows Task Manager but it also works on Linux, launches/monitors web servers, and provides a visual dashboard for docker containers. https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio This project makes no use of AI.

dejv

New programming language. Took some good ideas of Pascal and making it more modern. Minimal runtime, manual memory management, single (small) executable, no dependencies. Compiler itself is written in Swift and I am using QBE as a backend ATM.

recursivedoubts

I am working towards a big new release of my web scripting language, hyperscript: https://hyperscript.org Hoping to release next Monday

yuppiepuppie

Ive been working on the HN Arcade :) https://hnarcade.com Its always fun to see what games people are building - and some of the lesser known ones are amazing!

WalterGR

“Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2026) (Non AI)” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679021 18 points | 1 day ago | 37 comments

BrunoBernardino

This seems a little bit of a duplicate of [1], but I can repeat my answer here as any views help! My wife and I continue to work on Uruky, a EU-based Kagi alternative [2]. Since last month we finally got our production API Key for EUSP/STAAN (it was certainly the slowest and most complicated search provider to adopt, so far), and that brought us to 5 search providers you can choose from and sort as you prefer. We already have got over 40 paying customers (excluding family and friends, we’re guessing these paying customers came from some privacy listings and HN comments) and have exited beta last month! Customers seem to really enjoy the simple UI (search can be used without JS) and search personalization (from choosing the providers to the domain boosting and exclusion). We also have hashbangs (like "!g", "!d", or “!e”) when something doesn’t quite give you what you’d expect, though. You can see the main differences between Kagi and Uruky in the linked page, but one huge difference is that with Uruky, after being a paying customer for 12 months, you get a copy of the source code! One thing we’re struggling with is outreach because we want to do it ethically, and it’s hard to find communities or places to sponsor which are privacy-focused and don’t require €5k+ deals. Ideas are welcome! 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), using Deno in the backend (for easier TypeScript), PostgreSQL for the DB, and Docker for easier deploying. P.P.S.: Because this has been also brought up before, the name has no special meaning but we read it like "Euro-key" in English. Names are hard, and we’re aware it can remind people of Uruk and Uruk-hai. That’s OK. P.P.P.S.: Another frequent question here is “how does it work?” When you search, we query the first search provider on your list, and if it yields less than X results (only Mojeek really gives us a total count, we have to try + estimate for the others), we try the second, and so on. We then merge the results in a round-robin fashion (first of first, first of second, second of first, second of second, and so on). There’s a bit of more nuanced logic to also properly rank the results with the pin/exclude/raise/lower preferences, because it works differently across providers and not all of them support that, for example. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47679021 [2] https://uruky.com

austinjp

A crossword puzzle generator, just for fun. Grid generator in Python because it's easy to hack around and grid generation doesn't need to be particularly fast. Go for populating the grid with words because with large grids there are combinatorial explosions, and Go's speed is beneficial. Not source-available yet because it's a bunch of hacks (particularly the Python) but maybe one day.

richarlidad

https://SupplementDEX.com - helping people find out if their supplements work

doppp

A family. Hope to have a little one in the next year! Wish me luck!

ambewas

still working on https://stringscales.com - fun sideproject to visualize guitar scales on a configurable fretboard, with interactive note highlighting to a backingtrack. The backingtrack is what I'm actively improving right now. It's just a pad running now, but it will turn into a full track with bass/drums/piano/... and will feature a comprehensive chords based editor so you can add and save your own progressions with a logged in account.

kunley

Working on an audio streaming platform powering an indy internet radio. Looks like Icecast & friends show its age and a similar product can be easily built with the functionality cast down to simply robust streaming & handling "timed playlists". I enjoy every bit of knowing exactly what happens in the code. It's not open source atm, but will be. It's in Go, is a pleasure to write and the deployment takes minimal amount of resources. Other project is to continue a bit stalled progress of a configuration language BCL - add functions, more structures and fix some hidden scoping issues. Making languages is an endless fun. https://github.com/wkhere/bcl

thevaultdj

MusicLibrarian, a macOS app that deep-cleans Apple Music libraries. iCloud sync duplicated my playlists up to 540x (77,542 ghost entries). Built it in Swift, uses ITunesLibrary framework + AppleScript. https://thevaultdj.com

barryvan

I've been working on a super-straightforward volunteering platform -- https://handsup.barryvan.com.au/ . Mainly because I got frustrated with my kids' school and sailing club activities being (mis)managed across WhatsApp, Google Forms, pieces of paper, and the like.

richard_shelton

I am building educational 16-bit game console for low-cost FPGA chips. https://github.com/true-grue/Brus-16

zygentoma

I'm currently working on a small tool that helps me setup new personal computers in a purely descriptive way. A little bit like ansible, but then totally not like ansible. It generates SSH-Keys. It clones repositories, installs uv and rust. It removes Snap from my Ubuntu machines and installs firefox from the mozilla repositories.

lewisjoe

1. Reviving an old project that lets users sync their google docs as blog posts. 2. Writing a rich text editor library powered by pretext for cheap pagination 3. A layout engine that understands html/CSS subset for lightning fast pdf generation Although AI is the main reason why I'm able to work on all these projects concurrently.

alfanick

LEGO. I build LEGO, because I like it and it puts a smile on my face :)

axegon_

Since the moment "AI" became a thing, I've been rolling my eyes and looking the other way since I know it's just a half-assed hype buzzword. With that in mind, pretty much everything I work on is not AI related. As a hobby(and to a degree to be prepared for WW3), building a ton of drones and drone equipment, flying them and finding more and more ways to push their range to the absolute limit. I don't think it qualifies as AI in the modern day and age but NLP in general. It's truly amazing how easy it is to spot troll farms online and no one is doing anything about it, be it individuals, private sector or even on national level, given that those should be considered a risk for national security.

dhuan_

I have been working on two opensource tools: https://dhuan.github.io/mock/latest/examples.html ^Command line utility that lets you build APIs with just one command. https://github.com/dhuan/dop ^JSON/YAML manipulation with AWK style approach.

siddhant

I’m building ATProto Alternatives ( https://atprotoalternatives.com ). I started looking into AT Protocol recently and find it very interesting, so I started collecting a list of decentralized products built on top of AT that are alternatives to mainstream (popular) products.