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Posted by david927 22 hours ago

Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
215 points | 801 commentspage 6
AsmaraHolding 15 hours ago|
I’m developing X/D Loom (https://xdloom.com), a tool that helps car enthusiasts create automotive wiring diagrams.

About a year ago, I engine-swapped my Nissan D21 hardbody from the Z24 petrol to a TD27T turbo diesel and also installed a whole bunch of accessories, like spotlights, a winch, and an air compressor. But being lazy, I didn’t write down any of the wiring changes I made while doing all of this. So fast forward a year, and now I can’t remember how all the wiring works.

My current project car is a Jeep Cherokee FSJ, and for it, I want to build a completely new loom from the ground up. So to try and avoid making the same mistake I made with the Nissan, I Googled “create automotive wiring diagram”, but all the results were for complex enterprise grade solutions charging $200/month. That’s why I created X/D Loom as a project car guys' tool for creating wiring loom diagrams. It allows you to drag different electrical components onto a canvas, connect them with wires, and export them to a PDF or PNG.

Loughla 12 hours ago|
My son and I are about to tear into a 1987 Wrangler. This is going to be very helpful when we're undoing 40 years of modifications on this thing.
AsmaraHolding 11 hours ago||
Awsome. I'm planning on adding the Edelbrock Pro-Flo 4 EFI system to my AMC 360. One feature I really want to add to the app is prebuilt templates for popular aftermarket EFI, ECU, and Digital Dash setups from Holly, Edelbrock, Haltech, and Dakota Digital.
schipperai 13 hours ago||
A better permissions layer for coding agents. The tool works like auto-mode for Claude Code, so you can stay in the flow and only get prompted to allow or deny tool calls when it truly matters, but it is fully deterministic. My benchmarks surfaced that most Bash calls don’t need an LLM to be classified as safe, ambiguous, or dangerous. A deterministic classifier can auto-allow or block 95% of Bash tool calls as safe or dangerous, with only the remaining 5% being truly ambiguous or unknown.

Conclusion is permission reviews with LLMs like Claude’s auto mode or Codex auto review are like using a data center to flip a light switch - overkill.

The main benefit is that your agent’s autonomy can be governed deterministically through policies that can be stored at the user and repo level. The bonus is that you save tokens vs using auto modes.

https://nah.build

thisisjedr 4 hours ago||
I'm working on https://docx-editor.dev/, the open-source, mit licensed word editor library.

We are building this because we such library it in our core business, and a lot of other engineers seem to need it too. We have contributors showing up with bug reports and fixes, and real interest from people building apps around .docx docs.

My previous show hn post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947229) got a lot of skepticism because we're developing heavily with AI, but with active community feedback and proper ai oversight (mostly me), I'm super proud of what we have now.

maxbond 13 hours ago||
I've been learning to crochet. I'm trying to do more hobbies with my hands, but it's also pretty interesting from a mathematical perspective. The fundamental primitive (the chain stitch) is like a series of slip knots, and each stitch is reversible. So the piece is actually a series of reversible transformations. The yarn is sewn in at the end to secure it.

This has some interesting implications. If you make a mistake, you can always backtrack and try again. If you have a crocheted piece, at least in principle you could find the lose end, free it, and work back stitch by stitch to reverse engineer it. (In practice people don't seem to do a stitch-for-stitch reverse engineering just like you probably wouldn't bother reimplementing something line by line without a compelling reason, you figure out what's going on in the challenging places just by look and feel and improvise from there.)

I'm oversimplifying somewhat and there are some forms of crochet that include irreversible stitches, yarn can be felted together (entangled, like a cotton ball) to create irreversible bonds between adjacent strands, and often several panels/pieces are joined together irreversibly to create a larger piece.

maxbond 9 hours ago|
I guess I should be clear that by "irreversible" I mean a transformation like the following: "to cut the yarn with scissors, to untie a knot that was strongly bound, or to felt together." So a slip knot is "reversible" in the sense that if you tug on it, it easily comes undone, whereas an overhand knot would just get tighter. You can think of felting as being equivalent to tying a lot of overhand knots between adjacent strands, they become permanently attached and could only be torn from each other.
liu3hao 4 hours ago||
Having some progress on CircuitScript, a python like language for describing electronic schematics as code: https://circuitscript.net. Try the language through the online IDE at https://bench.circuitscript.net

In the past 2 months, I have added support for exporting to the .kicad_sch format. Multi-sheet designs are exported as separate .kicad_sch files, one per sheet. The pin types has been updated to be similar to KiCad's and to better support ERC rules. Setting the GND symbol pin as a type of power_input was a real headache for me, eventually, I decided to define a new pin type, power_reference.

The motivation for creating Circuitscript is to describe schematics in terms of code rather than graphical UIs after using different CAD packages extensively (Allegro, Altium, KiCAD) for work in the past. I wanted to spend more time thinking about the schematic design itself rather than fiddling around with GUIs. With code, the design intentions become explicit and reviewable.

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone else frustrated with graphical schematic tools!

jstrebel 8 hours ago||
I am trying to build a simulation that lets a simulated organism come up with its own small language, purely learned from sensory input: https://github.com/JoergStrebel/VirtualZoo/blob/main/compute... I would like to implement the ideas put forward by Stevan Harnad in his symbol grounding problem paper (Harnad, 1990).
metadata 3 hours ago||
Safe Boundary, a database security proxy especially optimized for AI agents: https://www.spectralcore.com/safeboundary

Launching for Postgres very soon (currently working on Supabase-optimal deployment). Continuing with Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL in the coming months.

Our superpower is a very fast parser with full static analysis engine. This enables not only blocking of destructive queries but also deep SQL rewrite for PII masking in real-time. It also means better syntax error messages which allow AI agents to adjust their SQL queries automatically.

Full workflow (parsing + static analysis + SQL rewriting + logging) takes less than 1ms.

holoflash 2 hours ago||
Continuing to chisel away at my browser-based tracker/DAW https://psikat.com/
hxtk 16 hours ago||
I made a Python tool to build distroless container images for projects managed by uv. It draws inspiration from Ko from the Go ecosystem and works with/depends on uv from the Python ecosystem, so I smashed them together and called it Kuvo: https://github.com/hxtk/kuvo

It’s a hobby project in a very early state where it technically works but it’s missing several things I think it needs before I’d use it for anything serious. As of right now it isn’t even complete enough to dogfood a minimal container for itself without an intermediate base image because it can’t target a platform compatible with the distroless uv container image.

aleqs 17 hours ago|
I'm working on a general repo shape/structure linter (language agnostic)[0] - the idea is to enforce things like directory structure, existence of various files (LICENCE, etc.), file naming patterns, jsonpath + schema over json/yaml/toml, absence of potentially malicious unicode. It comes with rule bundles for various languages/presets which can be combined and extended. A goal is for it to be very fast, and useable on huge monorepos. I noticed myself having to add various forms of validation/scripts when coding using AI, and decided to build a reusable, fast tool for this purpose instead of rolling validation scripts for each project.

[0] https://github.com/asamarts/alint

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