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

I've made a number of ceramic molds for slumping fused glass into bowls. As well as wooden templates for ceramic mugs. I've devised a few carrying tools to move glass frit paintings from my studio down to my barn where the kilns sit without spilling the glass. Or were you only asking about digital tools? I haven't really made any of those. Making physical tools feels much more satisfying these days. A weight lifting app. I’ve paid for, and used, others over the years, but I always wanted to customize them in some way just for me. So, I just decided to create one the other day (used antigravity CLI) and I’m hosting it on Vercel as a PWA. I’m enjoying it so far and see a lot of potential with making hyper-personal software moving forward. A self hosted web archiving tool with support for extendible processing pipelines (eg. extract article -> translate -> summarize -> generate tags, download video -> split audio track -> transcribe -> summarize), which led me to make a managed chromium browser with extensions and warc support for archiving, and a RSS feed synthesizer (take random article listing page that doesn't have RSS and generate a feed for it) so that I can plug it into my archiver. An active learning loop for a model to clean up articles by removing junk like native ads and sponsored blocks. A tabbed terminal with project management features like launching the database, app server, and claude code in different tabs with one click, and split browser/terminal panes (eg. opening a browser automatically at the correct URL when the terminal reads http://localhost:4000/). A modular MCP server with a MCP proxy and OAuth2 dcr so that I can easily add new random ideas for MCP servers in a few minutes with Claude and deploy them such that it's available to Claude by refreshing the tool list. A small tool to render Claude conversations so that I can link to them from my obsidian vault with something like convo://claude-code/-home-jfim-projects-foo/ And overall just deploying docker containers for my self hosted setup Most of it is on GitHub, in various states of readiness. I'm building an app that generates lifting mesocycles and tracks every set and rep. Each week, it uses feedback from the previous workouts to adjust training volume and intensity. It's replacing an app I currently pay $25/month for. The team behind Gel got acquired by Vercel and I already experienced falling in love with a dead database (RIP RethinkDB) so I decided to fork the concept to a TypeScript port with Svelte as the UI instead of React. It'll live at disc.sh in a few months. Early dogfooding is promising. I've always wanted my own VW diagnostic tool suite, and between tooling that was released in public on GitHub (https://github.com/kartoffelpflanze/ODIS-project-explorer) and my own research from years ago, it always seemed straightforward but too tedious to execute on. Claude did a great job making something useful, https://github.com/bri3d/mcd-diag-rs , and now I don't have to find a Windows machine or remember a specific diagnostic cable to replace my brake pads. I also build a ton of household glue stuff; I was never really passionate enough about the whole "homeserver" thing to spend the effort in going beyond basic video recording for my security system, but now I have all of my local-only home automation stuff wired together, mostly into HomeKit, and have been able to ditch a ton of cloud services. Built a tool to help design cs/science inspired jewelry in CAD. I wrote a DSL to describe the jewelry, and had an LLM write the interpreter to generate a CAD file using cadquery (note to self: LLM suck at 3d reasoning). I would not have had the time to do this without AI. Also used AI to design an online store (I'm not a front end dev). It's amazing to see my wife (non-technical background) tweak the web-site using claude code. End result: an online store where we sell jewelry pieces that actually are lambda-diagrams (Tromp diagrams) that compute Graham's number, or of the Y-combinator (well, technically it's just a fixed point operator, one beta reduction away from the Y-combinator. But Y-combinator was not aesthetically pleasing from a jewelry point of view) store: Built a tool to help design cs/science inspired jewelry in CAD. I wrote a DSL to describe the jewelry, and had an LLM write the interpreter to generate a CAD file using cadquery (note to self: LLM suck at 3d reasoning). I would not have had the time to do this without AI. Also used AI to design an online store (I'm not a front end dev). It's amazing to see my wife (non-technical background) tweak the web-site using claude code. End result: an online store where we sell jewelry pieces that actually are lambda-diagrams (Tromp diagrams) that compute Graham's number, or of the Y-combinator (well, technically it's just a fixed point operator, one beta reduction away from the Y-combinator. But Y-combinator was not aesthetically pleasing from a jewelry point of view) I've found that Gemini Pro is surprisingly good at 3d reasoning. To back that claim up, I've had it create: A WebGl program that takes input like X123 Y123 Z123 via WebSerial every 100 ms and builds an object out of the resulting path. Required some performance optimizations (just had to tell it what to do). Also asked it to make the corners nicer and it did. (To be fair, I'd already asked a lesser model and put some things in the prompt to nudge it the right way.) Various OpenSCAD models. E.g., remote control holder with 5 slots, staggered heights, slight slant because it looks cool, and the slots all have different depths. One shot. It implemented the slant/tilt using a shearing matrix. 100 points. What I often ended up doing is asking it to draw 3 labeled arrows X,Y,Z. So I could tell it to orient along the XY labeled arrows (which are in reality YZ, but whatever). Many, really, but there are few I'm especially proud of: - https://github.com/exlee/pikchr_pl - DiagramIDE (diagram amiga-style workbench where you can script Pikchr diagrams using TCL, Prolog, Pikchr or - recently mruby). Note: you need to navigate to actual crate for description. There are binaries built in case someone wants to try it. - https://svg.axk.sh - semi manual SVG fitter so that I can easier vectorize AI-generated pseudovector images (who doesn't like 30kb SVG versus 1.8mb PNG?!) - https://github.com/exlee/rik - this one makes me laugh every time I use it - it's an AI harness with text editor as an UI (i.e. it reacts to comment strings) - I gave it personality so it makes wacky comments but other than that it's very constrained agent (limited edition ;)) These are not vibe coded but AI made it much easier to slide through major friction points (e.g. for SVG fitter I really didn't want to reinvent fitting algorithms) A voice memo app, quite like the actual voice memo app from Apple. The thing is: now I can put my voice memo's on iCloud put Claude Code on it and make my transcripts into structured notes that my app then also displays. So basically a way to just go on an hour long walk with myself, spit everything from the top of my dome stream of consciousness style, and then have Claude structure whatever I said. It's nice to have something that structures my thoughts by just thinking out loud. I vibecoded it (it's approaching 20K lines including tests). It works quite well but there are some bugs, so will have to do some actual engineering. But the UX is working quite well. I wrote a pen-plotter GUI and gcode sender in Rust. By hand. Like an animal. I am the only user. Sometimes it's the process that matters, and exercising your brain is important too. I get that there is a lot of existential dread around AI taking our jerbs, and excluding humans from the process of creative work, but... you can still just write code, just for the personal satisfaction. I vibe coded myself a simple little Home Screen-installable webapp that tells me when my first meeting is the next day (I am in a lot of meetings, and they're constantly in flux). That way, I don't need to be logged into anything work-related on my phone, or even mentally engage in that world. I just want to know when I need to wake up. All it shows me is the time, and I can tap on it if I want to see the title. It adjusts the font and color according to how early the meeting is (earlier than 8a gets Nosifer). Could I have done this myself? Of course. Would I have tho? Prob not. This kind of simple, hyper-specific bespoke utility is the perfect thing for vibe coding IMO. https://github.com/Opfour/warfare - A modern HTML5 remake of Warfare 1.0 (1995) by Carric Moor Games. Turn-based hex strategy with city management, unit recruitment, tactical combat, and AI opponents — all running in the browser with zero dependencies. Playable but still building in additional features https://github.com/Opfour/coeus-ci - Named after Coeus (SEE-us), the 100 eyed Greek Titan of the inquisitive mind — whose name literally means "querying." CI stands for Competitive Intelligence. A business intelligence OSINT tool that builds company profiles from free public data sources. Give it a domain — get back a scored report covering stability, growth, tech maturity, financial health, security posture, and transparency. https://github.com/Opfour/op4 - Op4 is a terminal-based encrypted messaging application written in Rust. It provides end-to-end encrypted private messaging with post-quantum cryptography, routed entirely through the Tor network so that neither the content of your messages nor your IP address is exposed to anyone — not even the person you are talking to. So many! I manage a fund that buys small e-comm brands, and at this point the whole thing runs on a combination of AI and tools created with AI. My favorite is one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/WhatsApp/email supplier convos daily and uses that to build a dashboard tracking the status of my orders. Blocks the computer for x minutes. Agents keep on working. AI doesn't need a break, but I do. And honestly, at least for me AI has made my desktop as addicting my social media feed. This is awesome idea. Thanks for sharing. I extensively track my ScreenTime cross devices (phone, laptop) and try to reduce it under 6 hours a day. This would be helpful! Recently I made Vocast (https://github.com/cnrmurphy/vocast) - a cli driven tool that uses local TTS models to convert articles to "podcasts" and expose them via RSS feed. I wanted a way to listen to articles without having to pay for an app. I convert the article on my PC (which gets added to a managed library), run a web server, run Tailscale on both PC and phone, then I can use a podcast app to access my library. Nice way to consume some articles while out for a walk or anything else and has worked reasonably well for me so far. The tool I'm most proud of is "Hex Flex" (https://seidleroni.github.io/Hex-Flex-Web/). It is a tool to view and compare the contents of Intel Hex files. Should be useful to other people who work in the firmware field. Not exactly a tool, but I also made pelohard.com which ranks the most recent Peloton classes by difficulty. Updated twice daily. HN Chrome Extension for dark mode and a few other styling tweaks I wanted. Jira Chrome Extension to add some notes and links to dashboard pages that I wanted for ease of use. Small application which takes a CSV and turns it into a Registered Server List for SSMS in order to keep my list of servers updated for queries across all our databases. Honestly one of the good use cases for AI. Small low complexity scripts and tools for assistance is a great use case. I'm amazed at the folks that are doing huge monolith rewrites with Agents and such, but I've never had good results for that. Small time saving scripts gets me a much more direct return on investment. I also have a local zsh autocomplete macro that let's me type things like "git rename annotated branch" and ctrl-g and it will get me the actual command. There's also a ctrl-r mode that searches my history using natural language. This is connected to a locally run ollama so my keys don't leak. I made a tool that creates sandboxes (docker, podman, orbstack, seatbelt, tart, containerd, kata, firecracker) and then sets up an agent (claude, codex, gemini, aider, opencode) inside it with max permissiveness (no prompts to call sed, etc). It creates its own copy of your workdir for the agent to play in, and then you pull changes out ala git diffs or commits. It's a MASSIVE time saver, and I use it as my daily driver. I recently posted Show HN for https://www.useorganizer.com/ which helps organize stuff using timelines and stores data in a local folder not the cloud. Open source. I built a complete clone if fly.io infrastructure: VMs, networks, etc. so I have my Vercel on bare metal machines to maintain full-stack apps on https://playcode.io. It took more than a year. Why? Cloud infrastructure is too expensive. - a proprietary camera library that communicates with industrial-grade digital cameras. - a full on self-hosted lab management system (journal articles, obsidian-like notes, lab notebook, kanban, embedded dna editor, LIMS), obviously this builds on all of the above items I wrote a tui sql client to replace DataGrip (which is really slow). https://github.com/keithn/sql It's quite customized to what I wanted, I haven't really checked it works with other things.... only thing is, I don't really use it much anymore, I just get claude to do all my querying. Most of the tools I write now are bridges to various SaaS products that have APIs but no CLIs. I built a browser extension to create podcasts from HN stories in French (and English), I created it for myself in first, then I released it with a shared quota for the community but no one else uses it as it was forbidden for me to post show hn. I have made a TUI tool for organizing and authoring sermons written by myself. It also has a third mode for reading one or two bible versions in parallel. I love the interface and keep adding features to make it easy to navigate in and something that actually helps me to organize and write sermons. Some features are to have notes at specific places in the bible, summaries, notes, exports to html/pdf, metadata for each sermon and autofocus on widgets when changing between the three modes. Happy to work in the terminal this way. :-) It's not just for myself, but I'm primarily creating it for myself - it's a browser for designers. I work in code but I often want a figma-type interface to explore different ideas without having to branch or litter my codebase with a bunch of demo components/files. Normal browsers have built-in dev tools - this has built-in design tools. so I can visit my app, open up a surrounding canvas, pull fragments into the canvas, do some design-ish stuff, and merge it back into code. All in the same UI. It was cool enough that I'm going to release it, but for now it's very useful for myself. https://github.com/haydenk/homestead - another Go project, working on a better uptime dashboard that can also be the main homepage for accessing homelab resources. I also used AI to find and create issues and milestones to for me to get the project to 1.0.0 https://probplanner.com/ - I never had the time to dedicate to building a Monte Carlo simulator for project estimates. It was always something I just couldn't justify given my short commute. I used this project to teach myself how to use Claude Code and Codex over last summer. I've done a lot of little things in Emacs since. Just minor things to improve my workflows or build up Chief of Staff type information flows. Lookup or modify selected text using AI (chrome extension). I just select any text and click the tiny popup button "what's this" and get an answer right there on the page. Made it mainly to explain terms and abbreviations I come across on HN often. Can also ask any other question about selected text. Can even modify the selected text the same way. [1] OneNote to markdown/obsidian canvas converter. It did that using interop api to read the actual XML of the onenote files. Work time tracker as 1px line on edge of monitor. Shows thin line at the edge of the display which fills up based on what i am doing. Plaintext bookmark chrome extension that save links to local markdown file, Dynalist, Workflowy, Github Gist and import export between them. Was originally for Dynalist when AI couldn't do much 2-3 years ago. Recently added these other end points. [2] A heart rate monitor with finger on camera. It's bit crappy though. Had to make it because many trackers, including google fit, couldn't detect 200bpm. https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/heart-rate I've made a harness to discipline it and get consistent output regardless of model. Using it daily. Is the opposite of vibe coding, it delivers great planed code with my engineering taste. I had it open sourced for a while then I've closed it. Just a month or two after closing it, I read an article about this "clean room" thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design I wrote myself a little CLI app for generating 2FA codes because I got tired of the hassle of opening my phone and typing them in. So now I can just do 'toof nas' and get a code for my Synology account in my system clipboard. It supports nicknames for accounts, in case I'm thinking of "nas", "synology", or the hostname of my nas. It still needs a bunch of polish, but I use it a few times a week. replaced some paid apps with local - google reader rss replacement and send web to kindle. most ambitious was browser extension to automate booking reservations since captcha and timing were critical. swamp/evaporative cooler controller that monitors rate of change of relative humidity and sends RF signal to cooler to turn water on for x seconds to keep humidity lower than just leaving set to cool all the time. Does a great job but need to work on edge cases and ultimately replacing remote with my controller. financial models for retirement planning pen plotter gcode creator for old 3d printer to make labels. food monitor to track what i ate with AI analysis based on symptoms recorded as well as interactive follow up questions inventory app for electronic parts that now is inventory for all kinds of stuff like tools/plumbing etc that uses photo/ai to fill in data. A terminal-native agent multiplexer built on tmux. Similar idea as herdr but wraps tmux in an outer TUI instead of replacing it entirely: https://hmx.dev A desktop markdown editor for design docs in git repos with markdown diff highlighting. Has been a time consuming but super fun experience https://github.com/emrul/md I've been building a tool aimed at better web annotations for teams and AI collaboration at https://viewall.io/ Having worked with web facing teams there are always vastly different methods any individual uses to capture their feedback. If you or anyone you know on Mac that has 100s of screenshots on their desktop, this is aimed at bridging the gap. Clipboards are optimized with context for LLM markdown ingestion and for use in work suites like Jira/Confluence. Still fairly early, but I've been using the tool to help build the app itself which has been an enlightening experience. A ninteneon3ds game explorer where i can look at games and bookmark them with comfortable screenshot preview so i can check what i would like (i never knew what game i should play on it and there are hundreds) Hister is a full text indexer for websites and local files which automatically saves all the visited pages rendered by your browser. It provides a flexible web (and terminal) search interface with offline result previews & detailed query language to explore collected content or quickly fall back to traditional search engines. It can provide a privacy-respecting search experience for serving "recall" type searches where users retrieve previously visited content, but falls short in "discovery" type searches (yet). This was the first AI project I ended up working on as well, except I approached from building a meta-search first. I only added support for a local index recently (via SQLite FTS 5). But I haven't shared my project, whereas you have a truly fantastic webpage for yours. Plus going the extra distance with a terminal interface and MCP server too. Much kudos. I hope more people discover how powerful even a local search index of previously visited content can be. And I hope more people can build large indexes as well, so we're not just relying on Brave & Mojeek & Marginalia (and EUSP) to rescue us for the fallback discovery searches. Code review tool that breaks up diffs and regroups fragments based on runtime execution paths and/or architectural boundaries. I find it useful sometimes to see changes organised that way. llm-consortium: prompts multiple models in parallel, loops until confidence_threshold, and iteratively refines a response. This was inspired by a karpathy tweet [0] and the prototype created using another tool of mine: The LLM Plugin Generator plugin (essentially a curated collection of plugins for simonws llm cli as a few-shot prompt) The llm-model-gateway companion plugin lets you serve models from the LLM cli as a an openai API. This allows you to use saved consortiums in your various clients as if they where a regular model. Bringing massive parallel reasoning to any workflow. It occured to me at some time that an collection of parallel LLMs was not really a consortium. A consortium is a group of organizations. A group of groups. To rectify this I added for actual consortiums, where each member of an llm-consortium can itself be a consortium of models. e.g. llm consortium save cns-glm-n3 -m glm-5.1 -n 3 --arbiter mercury-2 llm consortium save cns-k2-n3 -m kimi-k2.6:3 --arbiter mercury-2 llm consortium save cns-meta-glm-k2 -m cns-k2-n3 -m cns-glm-n3 --arbiter cns-k2-n3 Yes, even the arbiter/judge can be comprised of a consortium of models, bringing parallel reasoning to the task of judging parallel reasoning chains. Consortiums can also now contain groups of specialists. These custom user-defined expert characters address the prompt from a different perspective. And a Westworld style Attribute matrix can be randomized to inject some more entropy into the process. classifai generates labels with approximate confidence derived from logprobs llm-alias-options saves inference parameters such as reasoning effort with a model alias. (good for setting the provider in openrouter or creating a consortium of high temperature models) llm-prompt-json adds a --json flag to return the llm logs object (good for getting conversion_id, or reasoning output in scripts) llm-jina adds support for all jina AI specialised models and tools like web fetching, embedding and reranking. I wrote a note taking app that synchronizes across iOS/iPad/MacOS and stores my notes in markdown files so that my agents can summarize them each morning, delivering me to-dos, etc. I’m a UK teacher. I have built a custom GPT that marks essays for the subject I teach in a repeatable and reliable way. It gives actionable feedback to students. I use it, and have given my students access to it too - they use it to help their revision. Kids making mud cakes, climbing trees, and taking shots at each other with shanghais. Teachers lounging on a beach somewhere. Meanwhile in classrooms, bots. - app to help buy/find books for my wife - app to help manage my climbing wall - app to help finding good films/series - app to track weight - app to manage my board games and find the right ones to play - app for planning wood builds (e.g. climbing volumes) - telegram bots for: - picking restaurants for weekly lunch with friends - managing our 5-a-side football games, make teams, elo ladder - fantasy football leagues In 2023 I wrote from scratch a iOS native app using SwiftUI. This year I used AI extensively to improve and add many features to it in a span of couple months. The app is free and there are at least 2 users of the app - myself and one complete stranger (not a family or a friend) that is using this app. It evolved out of some weird interaction someone was smartassing me that the moon wasn't full when I was pointing to how pretty the full moon was. After that, between a friend and myself, it became a bit of a running gag how full (or not full) the moon actually was. This was my first real project I kind of "vibe coded": https://moon.masca.teide.cloud/ - showing you how full the moon is to the 10th decimal I am building my self-hosting llm-wiki system (https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519...). My approach is to start with a theory of how such systems could work. Then since llms can interpret theory - this theory becomes an executable llm-wiki system itself. * Auto-Birthday - if you have a contact in your android contacts that has both a mobile number and a birthday in their contact info, you can choose to send them an automatic "Happy Birthday" message on their birthday at a specific time. Can do it with hundreds of contacts. Doesn't use hardly any battery or resources. * Wrecker - stupid simple "throw a ball at a tower of bricks and try to clear the board" game. High score tables. Made in unity. High battery when in use, No battery use when not playing. Will use internet for high score data. * GeoNote - Create Geo-fences to generate a notification when you enter a location with your custom text in the notification. My wife is always telling me, "Next time we're here, remind me to only order one piece of toast" or something like that, so I make a note, it pops up the next time we're there and we're both happy. Notes are stored locally. No internet access required. Uses Geo-Fencing which is more battery-friendly than always-on GPS access. All my apps are free, very privacy-focused and as battery-friendly as possible. No information leaves your device (other than the high score data in Wrecker). You have to side-load my apps though. I'm not putting them on the Google Play Store. They're so annoying to deal with! OMG Nothing says "I don't care about neurodivergence" more than someone complaining when I build tools and processes to help me interact with the world better. Somewhat related - I wish there was some local thing I could give my 100 holiday videos and it made something fun with the highlights to a specified duration. A github client / dashboard that can pull 20 of so repos for all internal and client projects in one UI so I can stay on top of project delivery and long standing bugs. It has global search, bookmarking and text based / minimalistic ui for maxium space utilisation and information density. It's read only so to comment on issue i click a link to open GH in new tab but helped me a lot to have this birds eye view on my company. Don't get me started on GH Project. I tried Linear many times but multi project / multi repo is just not their core focus and it shows. - a personal and private webpage for: health: garmin metrics, apple health metrics, blood tests, rx.. - a kind of readitlater and bookmark index - personal finance: wip - in my homelab only available within tailscale. The final idea is to own all my data, but I’m still on it. Dictation tool which works better than the built-in Apple functionality, for my use cases. Bc my version uses simple copy/paste rather than deeper OS integration, it works more reliably in the Claude Code terminal (has to do with active windows or cursors or something). And bc it uses local Whisper, I also find it transcribes technical words such as “git” more accurately. Nothing technically challenging but practical for me. https://gitlab.com/grepular/foxcage - Runs Firefox inside podman to isolate it from the host. Has some interesting features that I wanted and nothing else gave me. Currently working on a tool for sanitising email. Will be blogging it up at https://www.grepular.com/blog/ when it's ready for others to use. Does things like applying policies to html/svg/calendar/vcard parts to whitelist or blacklist tags/attributes/css/url schemas, clean URLs, fetch remote content at delivery time and attaching to the email to prevent tracking, pgp and smime auto encryption/decryption and a million other features. Starting making hyprwhspr because no other stt library was quite there for performance and model availability. After that I started writing opub.dev because even minimal success in recent oss showed me just how much has changed, and I’m worried about how expensive everything will get for maintainers. So, now I’m trying to GIVE people compute so they can start building a helpful filter layer above their projects. All kinds of random stuff really, but to filter it down to only the noteworthy ones: Tuber[0] - this is my favorite, use it multiple times a week. It's just a little CLI wrapper around yt-dlp for my most common use cases - downloading the video, or the audio, or the subs. And then, if you've got the Claude CLI installed, it can also shoot the subs through Claude for a summary. I use it all the time, it's a great little thing! Scrapio[1] - this is really specific but I was so pleased with how it turned out. You give it a list of "hacks" ("mods" for Super Mario World) and it goes out to SMWCentral, grabs each of the patch files, and patches a clean ROM. I think I only used it twice but it was just a nice way to chew through a list of hacks and get a few ROMs ready, made quick work of something that would have otherwise taken a bunch of annoying schlep work. Lotus Eater[2] - calling this a tool is a bit undersell, but I'm still really pleased with it. It's a fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus that scrapes Nugs.net for setlist data and lets you do some mildly interesting analysis on things like song frequency and co-occurrence. Also has a per-user "shows I've attended" thing, Setlist Bingo. It's been fun to hack on. Lastly, less a tool, more just a toy: last week Google released their Magenta model for doing live music generation. I thought it was really neat, and it's open source, so I opened it up with Claude, and after a few passes and some extremely annoying toolchain issues, I was able to add a spectrograph which does key / chord analysis to the "Collider" app, so you get a live readout of "what the band is playing" and you can pull out your guitar or whatever and join the jam with some info at your disposal. It's the kind of thing that would have taken way too much effort to be worthwhile in the past, but with AI, it's a really neat result of a fun night of weekend hacking. See the README I added in my fork for a screenshot:[3] This one converts a basic chunk of OpenStreetMap data to an SVG so I can mark it up (by hand) in Adobe Illustrator to make specifically-styled print/PDF maps, such as what get installed at trailheads: https://github.com/c0nsumer/osm_to_ai And all of this has been put together to make the custom, local, specific-use-case maps that are at https://trailmaps.app (which, via local curation, are overall better mobile/online maps than many of the bigger auto-generated systems such as Trailforks, Gaia, RideWithGPS, etc, for visualizing local systems). It's neat stuff where I understand all the inputs, outputs, and how most of it works, but AI tooling (Claude, mostly) has allowed me to bolt it together much faster than I would have writing it myself. I built a half-baked CRM that has a lot of custom fields and visuals for statistics that are relevant to my potential customers. I'm selling primarily to registered data brokers, so being able to pull up their self-published compliance stats (gleaned from their own privacy pages or public filings) and contextualize them in terms of the rest of the industry ("your deletion request volume has been in the 95th percentile year over year") has been extremely helpful when starting conversations. I also gamified it a bit by giving myself targets for cold outreach and gathering hard numbers on my cadence for outbound calls and emails per lead. I also built this site for educating potential customers and other privacy professionals about the increasing tempo of CCPA enforcement actions driving compliance: https://ccpa.world/enforcement I could have probably coded this from scratch quicker considering that it took me two weeks to remove all of the hallucinated imaginary enforcement actions against real companies and also the citations to non-existent California law that the models kept injecting into my enforcement summaries. i made a tool thats a combination of 2.5d cad and smart stylus for making things i can print for leather making, with embroidery patterns on top. ive made some wallets, a incredible pair of ear muffs, and a bunch of key tags. i keep being asked if im selling anything, and when i get the next piece together of building/buying an embroidery machine that can work on leather, i might i still dont want to buy a proper fabric cad system, so im trying to figure out a minimal version for making glasses cases for everyone's christmas gifts. its handy being able to draw inputs for claude, but its also nails-on-a-chalkboard Scrobble tui to track vinyl record listens on last.fm, sourced from collection on Discogs Calibre web UI 2.0 to replace Calibre's mediocre web interface. Used for browsing ebook catalog, searching and cataloging with a simple list feature. Project Gutenberg local mirror UI to browse my local copy of Project Gutenberg books A couple of MCP servers for self-hosted services to give access to OpenClaw. Currently working on a daily digest that Claw will generate that includes feeds from these: what news stories were popular in my feed reader, did my baseball team win, etc. LockIn - Beautiful scriptable terminal countdown timer that can block time waster apps. Enjoy fun visualizations and improved productivity that your agent can trigger to start a focus session. Install today with brew. 1. A dashboard that tracks my personal metrics (github, strava, todo completion, flossing) 2. A eink display for that dashboard 3. A realtime node graph that shows a codebase (and/or its diffs) in a way that I can visualize what functions call which, and under what conditions 4. A agent that automatically fills out government forms and creates invoices for my friends brewery based on the delivery notes in their google calendar. I like the capabilities of C++ and imgui but didn't want to deal with C++ anymore so I had AI do it. imping - PingPlotter-like app. They didn't have a Linux version and I'm a paying customer, so I vibe coded this one: https://github.com/zenakuten/ImPing A dashboard to see what my local commercial free radio station (89.3 The Current) in Minnesota is playing. It shows how often tracks are played, track and artist play history as well as some other fun lookups and visualizations. I made a Safari extension with Swift that automatically suggests using Fastmail masked email addresses on login forms. Never published it, instead just using an xcode dev build on my phone. Works flawlessly. Most of it has been to maximize productivity with AI 1) Use chatgpt pro from codex cli, opencode, claude etc as you can't get it via API. This has been the biggest boost in productivity for me as I don't have to copy and paste. - ticketing system with Stripe payments and QR scanning at the door - Instagram/media ingestion for the club site - genealogy tool with GEDCOM import - scripts for downloading/archiving public-domain film material - playlist/library tooling for DJ use - music collaboration/sync tool for Ableton projects - normal work stuff in a much larger existing codebase I have become a lot more strict about process after being burned a few times. Mostly: make the change small, be clear about what it is supposed to do, check the assumptions before coding, use tests/logging/manual checks as evidence, and don’t merge anything I can’t review and explain myself. I love how there's users here saying they're "proud" of software they had an AI generate for them. What exactly are you proud of? That's like saying you're proud of a painting you had someone commission - there is not any personal accomplishments to be had here. Could we please stop putting price tags on 15-commit repos? It's just crazy that every idea, created with ai, now costs 10$ or more per month, despite it costs 5$ to create. A few, but the one I use regularly and am quite proud of is https://mediaden.ca - iOS app for storing encrypted photos/videos on storage I (the user) exclusively owns, with zero servers, zero telemetry, and a host of other privacy related features. www.propelcode.app - cursor on my phone. www.propelagent.app - voice agent for my home health care agency, but it also tells bed time stories to me and my daughter a few times a month. I also built a new web framework we use internally which is amazing. We might open source it soon. It has a postman clone that has a bunch of features I wanted. It really is the case that we can just build tools any time we want. After coming back from paternity leave, I found that my team had really leaned in to AI driven development. This project was half catching up and half attempting to solve the burn out from the repeated books my wife and I were experiencing. I'm building an app that uses cosign similarity across a bunch of vectors to derive team productivity metrics. To be honest the maths is trivial; the hardest part is gathering data and normalizing it in a vaguely sensible way. I've also built a release notes app for my QA teams, a DORA metrics app, a thing to map UX journeys with Playwright, and a ton of games and stuff. AI got me back into enjoying building things again. I stopped paying for Wyze subscription after replacing the camera backend service. Saving me about $30/m and a much finer tuned OpenCV to Claude API vision model. What were you getting for $30/month from Wyze? We have a package that is a flat $99 per year for a dozen cameras (plus however many more we want to add for no additional cost), unlimited recording, etc. We used AI to build our AI platform and now we are using the AI platform to build the tools that we need for AI. :) But no honestly, unfortunately most tools I did for myself are not for hobbies but something that I needed for work... like this one (https://github.com/crmkit/crmkit) most recently. I'm close to releasing a memory safe programming language, with a declarative concurrency model, that runs on a Go-like runtime. It has "levels" of compilation, with EASY mode being about as easy as Ruby, and the compiler can present you with options to get that as strict & performant as Rust/Tokio. I'm going to need at least a month to finish all the documentation, though. I use agents to do most of the tedious admin for my hire business, and I built www.vessels.app to run them on the go because there was no native solution to talk to my agents. I’ve started working towards releasing this to the public because it’s so much better than setting up agents via telegram or slack. It essentially uses youtube as the music source, I think I heard somewhere that playing through embedded videos skips ads but I'm not really sure, in all my time testing it I never noticed ads, but I'm also on premium so that may have been why. by all means critique, I don't know that I have a ton of time left for it and I'm sure there's bugs here and there. I was having issues getting it to autoplay on desktop when the window itself wasn't the active tab. I never really tried it on mobile. I was trying to get some DB of artist/song info but doing that was proving to be complicated. I'm working on a recommendation service (which, to me, it's the piece I'm missing when I play my local mp3 collection) I collect song metadata from various places (genre, instruments, track credits, rating). I also scrape charts by year, genre etc. Then I run an ETL job on the json data I have downloaded, pre-building queries for extremely fast lookup tables. This gets saved to Duckdb, which is used by my go web ui/api. It's very early days, and I only spend one or two hours a week on it, but right now it's amazingly useful. It had roughly 80k song metadata. To preview the suggested songs I ended up building a very cut-down YouTube music player, except that the playing song has all the metadata right there, and everything is a link that can take you to the artist, composer, instrument, genre, album etc. It's a great way to "wander through your collection". Unfortunately this is only useful to me, because I targeted the music I listen to. Next step is to download lyrics and extract song meaning, keywords etc. Then use MusiCNN, (or CLAP,OpenL3, HTSAT) to extract embeddings. Finally train my own model for nearest-neighbor retrieval based on a mix of metadata, giving the user the ability to tune it on the fly. Did you ever have to pass Appstore review process? How do they look at copyright and stuff when you are publishing an app that plays your local mp3 collection (how does your mp3 collections ends up on your phone?) Started making Agentikus as a way to manage my -back in the day- multiple OpenClaws. Soon enough realized that many will have the same problem soon. And started adding features that I was missing on Codex and C. Code. It’s a fun ride. Side note: before coding agents I would not get passed the branding and login page. I was able to create a CLI (https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli) without knowing Go. Like 0% Go knowledge. It is currently over 300 files (266 Go files). Built a quant system that reads earnings transcripts for what management is trying not to say. The model is surprisingly bad at this. Turns out management is too. https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ – Suite of skills, agents, and tools that make general SOTA models actually good at building and/or auditing iOS/macOS apps. Built for myself initially, I FOSS'd it once I determined how generally helpful it was. It's helped me learn a lot about doing sophisicated things with LLMs in a token-efficient way. https://charleswiltgen.github.io/TagLib-Wasm/ – Also built for myself initially, I FOSS'd it because there was nothing like Mutagen for TypeScript/JavaScript runtimes. (I don't dislike Python, but think it's a bit of a mess.) This was my first serious project to leverage LLMs for coding. https://pwascore.com/ – Built because I wanted to quantify how bad Safari was at PWAs. Learned that, objectively, Safari is as bad as PWAs as Firefox (which is to say, not terrible, and not to blame for why PWAs continue to be mostly-irrelevant). basically trying to see what a vertically integrated agent looks like, where the agent has deep access inside a framework and it operates from within a framework, so like, instead of reading files, opening processes etc - it gets a bunch of framework specific runtime tools(logs are the easiest example) I built https://sdocs.dev and use it daily. It’s a CLI-driven markdown reader which (privately) renders Markdown in the browser. When you install the CLI, it (with your permission) asks to update your base agent prompt files (e.g. `~/.codex/AGENTS.md`, or `~/.Claude/CLAUDE.md`) with info about how to use the tool. This means all your agent chats know about SDocs, and it’s nearly always your agent which invokes the tool: “Hey Claude, sdoc me a list of all my open MRs”, etc. I wish I had time, but I would definitely make some Android apps to sideload onto my phone. They would be very bespoke and probably only relevant to me, but they would be streamlined to my life. i built a program that watches wifi traffic and if it sees my phone connected to the office wifi; it marks me as in the office on our internal chat tool (Zulip). And the inverse as well, of course. Runs on a raspberry pi that I was otherwise using to take backups periodically… has been working pretty good honestly. I also built a program that fills/submits my time reports, and does the same for all of my subordinates - then signs them off… Saves everyone like 5 minutes if we remember to do it, or 12 minutes and frustration if we’re reminded by HR about it (which happens because who the hell cares about time reports?) Well, I've been pretty active in our rec baseball team for the past few seasons, so: 1) App to help my son and other kids learn baseball IQ, and 2) Streaming app to compete against GameChanger. It's been refreshing to say the least. :) I schedule reminder calls to myself before some important appointments. It keeps calling me until I receive the message which it reads me (I set the message when scheduling the reminder call) and I have to say "message received" which marks the notification as delivered. (I use Twilio to place the call.) I find a phone call is more likely to get through to me than a reminder or alarm, which I can ignore or forget; an ordinary reminder is not as interactive. Claude built it all and although there's a script for it, I just set the reminders in an interactive Claude code session in the directory. (Like I'll open a claude code session there and say "using the script in this directory, call me tomorrow at 7 a.m. with the message 'dr's appointment'." Over the past few days I have been making a spell checking TUI app. I used AI (meaning: free Gemini web interface) to discuss various aspects about the apps and debug compiler errors ang suggest useful rust crates for various problems. Just a more helpful discord chat generally. It also gaslights you too! A custom harness backed by dagger, gives diff, time travel, forking of both files and env. Building a harness is a good learning project. I'm now using other tools to see what they are like. (OpenCode is quite good out of the box) Currently working on a markdown search and wiki backed by Typesense, also has good web search, fetch, crawl. This will power my personal knowledge base system as an important step towards more leverage and better outcomes. magpie - extracts book recommendations from reddit threads. I had a bunch of saved threads from 'books' and 'suggestmeabook' and 'printsf' etc., and I realized I could pull them down and do a semantic search. At work, I've created a few convenience scripts in bash and Python - the second of which I am not fluent with. So, I used anonymized LLM access to create boilerplate/simple scripts with a bit of argparse and NumPy, which I then adapted to do what I actually wanted. Would have made them without UI with a bit more elbow grease invested in web-searching for some examples, maybe even a StackOverflow question. Generally, I'm not a fan of LLMs and their social effects. It's a user daemon that runs on my machine and exposes a unix socket, and then a bunch of hooks in claude, zsh, vim, etc, that report directory and commands I've run and all that, pipes it to claude Haiku for summary, and then stores context in sqlite. It also exposes that data as MCP so I can use claude to say "hey what was I doing yesterday," or any arbitrary time range. I find that in the age of using AI agents, "Wtf was I working on yesterday" is an even harder thing to remember for me, so this helps me kind of track everything with a database that a) has AI summaries already and b) can be accessed by AI as well as a CLI. I've vibe coded multiple helpful apps and websites for recording data. But longer term, I'm building with its help an internal research system to organize, search, compare, analyze, and esp reuse all the large amounts of data my firm produces, with the public materials without constantly starting over in separate ChatGPT or Claude conversations. Similar to you, the things I have truly vibe-coded (having looked at <5% of the code) are largely data focused. Data labeling, organization, etc. These applications are extremely janky, I'd never ship them to users. The UI is mediocre at best. The functionality hardly better. But the point is to get data out of them. The code is a means to an end and not a product in itself. Building a custom dataset builder in just a couple hours of work is really powerful. Reminder.dev - Quran app and API that includes RAG search to provide a more authenticated source of summarisation. The first thing I dabbled in with AI. Micro.mu - Rebuilt my entire product idea from 10 years ago as a super app for daily digital habits. Something I use everyday for myself. Aslam.org - An islamic knowledge base that uses sources of data as a way to ground AI chat and make notes. Very useful tool that I'm using on a daily basis. Go-micro.dev - Totally revamped the open source project, docs, etc with Claude. Micro.mu looks interesting, your description of daily digital habits made me think it was a productivity app, when it really is more of a dashboard for different channels of content on the internet (social, video, chat, etc.) what was your original vision? I am curios. Also I really like the design, its so clean, Ive never seen anything quite like it and yet it seems like such a good aesthetic that should have been obvious. kuddos. Originally I felt there should be an alternative to Google and Facebook. It felt like our lives were being ruled by tech giants even ten years ago..and then all the advertising and algorithms really messed with us. I personally wanted an alternative way to use the web. So it's based around what I'd use on a daily basis. And then the idea of being able to extend it with a native app builder. The big stuff I continue to build with Go but ad-hoc things I can knock out with some JS in the app itself.