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Posted by david927 11 hours ago

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

What are you working on? What have you been curious about lately?
200 points | 712 commentspage 2
hopfog 10 hours ago|
The final stretch of getting my game ready for release next week: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2764460/Sandustry/

It's an automation game and factory builder with "falling sand" physics. Think Noita meets Factorio.

atkion 2 hours ago||
"Noita meets Factorio" is genuinely not something I ever thought I would see. That's an insane combination and I will definitely be picking this up and trying it out :)

I also remember playing that Powder Toy game on my phone in grade school, and I have a ton of nostalgia for these kinds of physics.

Will there be significant hidden mechanics/riddles/lore built into the world in a Noita-like way, or is the physics engine the limit of that comparison?

RaiausderDose 10 hours ago|||
I played the demo, it was very cool. Looking forward to playing it. I see it's on Game Pass, too.

How does such a deal work? Do they contact you? Or are there places where you can promote your game to get it on Game Pass?

hopfog 9 hours ago||
Thank you! The demo is very old by now and the full game is almost a complete rewrite, but I hope people will like it.

It's my publisher (Hooded Horse) handling it so not sure about the exact process. I don't think it's easy to get a day 1 deal though so I'm very grateful for it.

bavell 4 hours ago|||
What was/is it like working with Hooded Horse? How did you get that going? I'm a big fan of the games they publish :)

Good luck on your game & launch!

Bjartr 4 hours ago|||
I can't wait to play, I've been looking forward to the release!
seabass 10 hours ago|||
Looks really fun! Best of luck with the release
stillpointlab 9 hours ago|||
I watched a let's play video recently where someone played your demo. Hope your final release goes well!
chcardoz 2 hours ago||
really cool!
idopmstuff 8 hours ago||
The last time somebody made this thread, I posted about https://the-waterline.com/, a site I launched as a side project/eval to see how well Claude can do a decent-sized project (mostly) independently. It pulls public government data about water levels in the western US, updates the website and sends out a newsletter.

It started getting some search impressions and clicks, so I decided to launch the next 9 of the top 10 ideas that ChatGPT came up with for this type of site - won't post all of them here, but https://the-dwell.com/ (data on ship and truck dwell times/port congestion) is doing the best thus far from a traffic perspective.

First I had it send me a weekly analysis of the GA4/GSC data to see what could be improved about the site, but I've since automated that - each week it reviews traffic and search queries, then updates articles or creates new ones to meet demand. So now in theory I have a full engine to launch these sites and have them self-improve over time. Kinda neat to see all of that being done autonomously.

The thing that these sites really need are some backlinks, so I'm thinking through how to get those. I had ChatGPT generate some lists of places that might find real value in linking to these sorts of things, but I'm unwilling to let an AI agent start emailing people. I'm going to try sending some emails to some of the places that seem like a really good fit, see what the response is, and if it's good try to figure out how to do that on a larger scale without AI email spam.

russellthehippo 8 hours ago|
Pretty cool apps! One thing i'd love to see for both is a historical view of the data - how do things change over time? Where is today relative the past five years for a given place? ten years? etc.
idopmstuff 7 hours ago||
Thanks! There are actually five year charts for most of the data, but you have to click into the page for a specific dataset (e.g. https://the-dwell.com/anchored/east-coast).

But you're right that it'd make sense to have an aggregate view on the level above (e.g. https://the-dwell.com/anchored). I shall go command Fable to figure out all the places where this would be appropriate and add it.

mzhaase 8 hours ago||
I'm working on Dictatorship Simulator. A deckbuilder where, instead of directly attacking your enemy, you manipulate a political simulation to do it for you. You start out on the fringe, and slowly work your way up, fighting an increasingly worried and panicky government - as well as your own.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4564800/Dictatorship_Simu...

cik 14 minutes ago||
I'm clearly signing up for this. It reminds me of a game that I loved in the it's, Balance of Power. Equally, I still love Democracy 3. Good luck, I'm definitely sharing.
zahlman 7 hours ago||
I'd reconsider the name; the "X Simulator" name pattern primes people to expect a first-person 3d game where the gameplay is mainly about directly manipulating objects in the environment.
matheist 7 hours ago||
Counterpoint, I don't particularly have that expectation
ciju 1 hour ago||
https://finbodhi.com - An app for your financial journey. It helps you track, understand, benchmark and plan your finances - with double-entry accounting. You own your financial data. It’s local-first, syncs across devices, and everything’s encrypted in transit (we do have your email for subscription tracking and analytics). Supports multiple-accounts (track as a family or even as an advisor), multi-currency, a custom sheet/calculator to operate on your accounts (calculate taxes etc) and much more. Supports price fetching for most Indian investment vehicles and US stocks. You can create custom dashboards with leading/trailing/rolling charts for investment options and benchmark.

We will soon add more import conveniences, like asking your llm to generate importer for your special pdf formats. See https://finbodhi.com/changelog for details.

We also write about related topics:

We wrote about comparing investment options: https://finbodhi.com/docs/blog/compare-charts

Benchmarking your returns: https://finbodhi.com/docs/blog/benchmark-scenarios

Understanding double entry account: https://finbodhi.com/docs/understanding-double-entry

fredwu 1 hour ago||
Have been working on three micro-saas, all built in Elixir/Phoenix:

https://feedbun.com - a browser extension that decodes food labels and recipes on any website for healthy eating, with science-backed research summaries and recommendations.

https://rizz.farm - a lead gen tool for Reddit that focuses on helping instead of selling, to build long-lasting organic traffic.

https://persumi.com - a blogging platform that turns articles into audio, and to showcase your different interests or "personas".

Took a long break earlier this year to recharge, but now I'm back at it again, mostly working on Feedbun, about to launch it as an early alpha. :)

langs 4 hours ago||
I'm building an AI agent that plays Slay the Spire. It currently reaches A20 Act 3 consistently and occasionally defeats the A20 Heart. It use two search: spare graph search for deck building, and MCTS for combat.

Parallelly, I'm working on an attention-based memory retrieval system that achieved SOTA on LongMemEval, LoCoMo, and code retrieval benchmarks. https://github.com/AttemorySystem/attemory/

Maybe later I'll build a live-streaming AI agent that plays Slay the Spire while conversing with viewers and remembering everything in chat!

JBits 3 hours ago|
An AI able to play Slay the Spire sounds pretty impressive!

What do you mean by agent in this context? Does it mean LLMs?

What search problem are you solving for deck building and is MCTS for combat the same as that in Go AIs?

langs 2 hours ago||
Simply feeding the Slay the Spire game state directly to an LLM is currently insufficient to achieve stable deck-building or consistent combat performance.

I categorize the game's actions into three types: combat, deck-building, and other interactions.

For combat, MCTS is used. Yes, it's similar to the approach used in Go AI.

For deck-building, a sparse graph search is used: the goal is to rapidly identify winning deck templates within the graph structure.

Only the remaining aspects are delegated to the LLM to make reasoned decisions.

shintoist 8 hours ago||
I'm building an uptime monitoring service, in Elixir, called https://larm.dev. It's a tough field because for some reason people vibe coding apps think this is very easy to do, and there are new apps coming out pretty much every day. I'm still figuring out how to effectively stand out in the noise.

I really enjoy working on the app though. The backend is Elixir, with a Phoenix LiveView dashboard. I've got a cluster of 3 nodes running, talking to each other. The probes that check the monitoring targets are tiny go binaries, spread across hosting providers across the world. I've also got synthetic probes now, running in little playwright sandboxes.

A lot of the challenges have been around how to distribute work across the probes, with different strategies for the basic TCP/HTTP probes vs the synthetic workers, and how to effectively store large amounts of events (Clickhouse).

ddon 6 hours ago|
Elixir is perfect for stuff like this, very cool project!
wetoastfood 1 hour ago||
I’ve been working on something to help our family plan things better. We have two kids now in elementary school and both involved in extra activities. Registration dates, birthdays, game times, etc. are a lot to keep track of. We both have work and personal calendars and never sat down to plan which calendar gets what. Maybe that would’ve been easier! In any case, I built Mavo to try and centralize that stuff and see if I can make it more proactive than just a calendar.

You send it your events via email, online, in-app, or text message even, and it puts it into your calendar for you, letting you know if there’s conflicts and keeping track of who is assigned to what, not just who’s attending or not. My goal is to have it proactively notify you when there’s potential issues like rain, traffic, or something else.

You can connect it to ChatGPT, Claude, or other agent through MCP so you don’t even have to use the built-in AI. And there’s an API, SDK and CLI for those who want to tinker and build custom displays or interactions.

There’s an always-free version to get started and try it out. You can find it at https://mavolife.com

tpicks 2 hours ago||
Rated Analysis, rating relative chess analysis: https://rated-analysis.pickle-dev.com/

I've been a bit obsessed with chess lately and have read/heard things like "X is the top engine move, but no one under master plays that line". To me this begs the questions "which line are players below master playing" and "which line are players at/above/below my rating playing". This question motivated me to build a tool to analyze the move distribution (win/draw/loss rate) from a given position across rating buckets (400, 500, 600... 3000). Luckily, https://database.lichess.org/ provides an open/free database of games that have just the data required to build such a tool.

The Rated Analysis tool consists of an 1) an offline job to compute/store the positional move distribution bucketed by rating, and 2) the https://rated-analysis.pickle-dev.com/ webpage to serve the data along with some nice to haves like loading user games from platforms like chess.com/lichess.org.

eric_khun 2 hours ago|
Antics (https://antics.gg): a site to play silly little multiplayer games with friends, and to make your own by using our MCP

The bet is that current models are good enough that anyone can one-shot a fun browser game. What they can't generate is the multiplayer part (server, WebSockets, state sync, hosting), so that's the only part we've built: a browser SDK plus a hosted relay. Deploy a game, get one link, and everyone who opens it is in the same room.

Quickest way to see it: open any game on https://antics.gg/games in two tabs.

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