Posted by david927 2 days ago
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)
There's an agent monitor which intercepts requests either using a LLM proxy or hooks, that gives you full telemetry into the agents + MCPs used. And a MCP gateway that enables centralized deployment and securing of MCP.
It's been going well for a side project and now I'm thinking of expanding to have a directory of urbanists on a map so you can easily find people involved in the local discourse and how to get involved.
There’s a companion website: https://iwillnotdrinkwithyoutoday.com
I wrote the book in markdown, stuck it in a SQLite DB and wrote a parser to put all the data in static JSON so it loads very fast.
I also created a new personal homepage to update my presence on the web as a published author and experienced leader and technologist: https://davidbyrondrake.com
Book was released less than a month ago—growing it organically like a startup has been fascinating in terms of marketing, sharing, building, and measuring success.
Have been utilizing my acting skills again with readings from the book on my Instagram and TikTok.
Having a really good time with it!
It's a need I have for myself and the teams I run – It offers direct PR's, 360º reviews, recording of wins and lessons (something often overlooked), and aims to be a platform for team and individualised growth, that is accessible to small and large businesses alike.
You can try it yourself at https://playground.keyframelabs.com/playground/persona-1 and there's a (semi)technical blog post at https://www.keyframelabs.com/blog/persona-1
The main use case we designed for was language learning, particularly having a conversational partner -- generally we've found that adding a face to the voice really helps trigger the fight or flight response, which we've found to be the hardest part of speaking a new language with confidence.
But in building out the system around the model to enable that use case (tool use on a canvas for speaking prompts and images, memory to make conversations less stale, etc.), we think there's potential for other use cases too.
You need to know "does this guy look hurt"? The enemy HP bar can be set to either an actual percentage, or set to have cracks in the bar to signify a range of damage. Does only person take notes? Personal notes are shareable and there's a section for community notes. Do you have enough perception to notice a hidden door? The UI can be set to go off passive perception and give you those notifications automatically.
It's still in early alpha testing with friends, but it should eliminate general GM pain points to encourage more groups to form.
Loads of similar products out there, but non that did all of: open source code with attested releases, recorded mic and system audio to work with any meeting app and used Apple Intelligence for private summarisation. In beta, and also just released a experimental version with self hosted Ollama support.
I think there's a lot of potential for AI to improve the way we organize and manage our inboxes, while still letting us keep control over it.
What I've learned is that there are a lot of little features that make up a good email client that you may not even think about when using one, like threading, quote blocks, even what email address(es) to autofill when you reply to an email. For an app you use potentially for hours a day, the polish and "last 20%" makes a huge difference - and takes a while to build!
If you have any feedback, especially on what features are most important to you in an email app, I'd love to hear it :)
I don't like the idea of a centralized system to flow all of my email accounts through. I think this would work better as a localized agent that runs against my account (more like an email reviewing system vs a centralized email monitor). That would be less of a privacy concern, in my opinion.
I have a model trained on publics datasets tied to brainwaves and/eye tracking and text comprehension (have this working well enough to experiment). Now I am training an adapter for various llm architectures to generate text steered to certain neural oscillation patterns (let's call them "states of consciousness" for brevity). I also have a 'rephraser' that rephrases text to elicit these certain states of consciousness. Overall experimenting with creating an suite of tools off my findings with how text relates to the eigenmodes of consciousness. My theory is once I do this I'll be able to do some...interesting things with "AI" agents. lmk if you want to talk about it if you're someone with knowledge in neuroscience/ML. My background is as a Software/ML Engineer so I could use additional thoughts. I do wish I could send a Github/docs which I will soon but this is currently a private project seeking investment for various research/public/private sector applications.
(1) For one product I am working, I have been working on a custom reporting language for producing high quality PDFs. I used hy.py as a basis to make it LISP-like.
(2) I need to make a Django postgres site that I am running more reliable. Earlier I was experimenting with making static HTML renderings of the pages. That is certainly nice, but it took several hours to reproduce the site. I am currently prototyping making read-only replica of the database in SQLite (the database is only 1 MB) and hosting it on CDN, and then pulling that for the read-only replicas. The database export takes only some seconds.
(3) I vibe coded a iOS app using that same SQLite database that fetches it from the same location. It was surprisingly simple. It seems much simpler than using Flutter or React native.