Posted by david927 3 days ago
Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
I just hate the Saas Scene today - even a small productivity app is worth $10-$15 / month . When you couple that with a bunch of apps that you use , you spend hundred of dollars in hard-earned Cash .
The Open Source Community is Amazing on Some fronts , but then enterprise & non-technical users can't use them without a layer of Support , Hosting & Setup Assistance .
We want to be the delivery layer between the Current Open-Source Community & Saas users .
Got a lot of ideas to work on it , but decided to build out a small version right now and launch it !!
I didn't set out to do this. After I got laid off in December, a client quickly fell in my lap: a small startup in the middle of a massive investment round that needed to hire 25 people immediately, with only a CTO available for interviews. I created their content and ran their interviews while building the software at the same time. It started as Google Meet + CoderPad + Calendly and gradually became an in-house system. Unlike Proton (lol), I'm not pretending I built my own video call solution from scratch, it's just an off-the-shelf 100ms integration.
The content is all versioned and structured, which makes it fast to iterate on and easy to reason about. We use major.minor versions and only bump the major for backwards-incompatible changes, or changes big enough that comparing interviews stops making sense. Otherwise, any combination of question versions inside an interview format is considered comparable if the major versions are identical.
The interview itself is highly structured: once you define a format from the content library and the various knobs you can adjust, you can schedule interviews and run them using our integrated "room" (video call + multiplayer code editor, both recorded, with transcripts and playback) and "rubric" (the tool the interviewer uses for content, scoring, and notes during the interview). Once you submit/publish the interview, a report is generated immediately. Example: https://coderba.se/sample
Two interesting AI bits:
- "AI linting": a way to benchmark interview questions by running a candidate model and an interviewer model against each other. The candidate closely follows a defined skills profile, then we compare actual vs expected performance. More here: https://coderba.se/blog/product-update-unit-testing-the-inte...
- "AI draft": once an interview ends, it takes ~30s for the video and transcript to become available. Then we use basically every relevant artifact from the interview, with a PII redaction pass first: questions, scoring, incomplete rubric, transcript, code editor history. We send that through our LLM gateway, currently mostly using DeepSeek because the quality/value is insane, though I may switch to Mistral to stay on the better side of privacy. It sends back recommended scoring + writeup, which we present as Cursor-like suggestions you can accept/reject/edit.
it's a programming language
the requirements for growth keep changing plus all the AI noise means that the playbook changes regularly. staying on top of the state of the market while improving/maintaining the product and understanding our icp + exploring new verticals is a tricky (but fun) task to manage!
and for fun, I am building yet another programming language!