Posted by david927 1 day ago
Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
It's an iOS app that uses LLMs to estimate and track nutrients and calories in all the food I eat. It is plugged in to Apple Health so it sees all my activity, sleep, body metrics, etc. I have set some general health goals in the app and it uses this to rate (poor, neutral, good) and advise me on the food I log. A calendar view shows how each day has gone in a traffic light coloring system. I can also log contextual notes to help it make sense of my day, and it has a memory system so each session has continuity.
The assistant can save extracted or inferred nutritional data in a library, like when I give it photos of nutritional labels for foods I eat frequently or I log the same thing repeatedly, for easy reuse later. Also useful for home made meals and recipes.
I've connected it to my workout tracker app Hevy so it can keep tabs on my exercise and also adjust my programs based on me chatting with it in the app about how a workout went. This is really useful for swapping out exercises I struggle with, for example, or to keep a well-balanced program over time.
Recently I added an Apple Watch companion app with a watch face complication so I can keep an easy eye on things like up-to-date calorie deficit.
All built in Swift with Opus on the $20 plan. I realize I can probably use existing AI nutrition tracking apps, and probably also connect Claude to Apple Health, but the joy of building and getting this to be completely tailored to me has been so fun and extremely useful. I've shared it with a few friends, but since I am paying for all the API tokens currently I have not yet tried to get more users onboarded.
Done a lot of analysis, sliced and diced data different ways, and then realized I need a website.
Ended up building https://climbable.day - hopefully a helpful resource for fellow Mountaineers from Seattle and around. 500 summits, 20 years of weather data, then went all in and added
- Wildfire smoke map overlays from official sources - Road closures from WSDOT - Information about approaches to most of the summits, sourced from Peak Beggar and Mountaineers - Database of known incidents from AAC - Compare your plan A, plan B, plan C, that type of thing
Site gained traction in the local community, and I have about a couple hundred users that seem to be using it on a weekly basis. It's free, and I intended to keep it such. It's a personal project, not something I plan to make money on. If you're in PNW and find it helpful, I'd be happy to hear what ideas you have. If you're not in Seattle but would like me to extend it to cover your neck of the woods, let me know.
For example, here's my recent trip with few friends https://www.mountaineers.org/activities/trip-reports/interme... - 2 nights out, roped glacier travel, scrambling, rock climbing, a good mix of planning and stamina was required. And for all I know this is a low end of mountaineering.
> here's my recent trip...
Incredible! And yes, that's far more advanced than hiking.
- All our shipments in one UI (instead of searching trough our mail boxes or going to several merchant apps/sites)
- LLM processes update emails, but everything can be manually adjusted (or created from scratch)
- We have a bunch of destinations we order to (work, home, different pick-up spots), this lets me see where I have to pick up and with which pick-up code
- Real-time sync in case we update something, the other person sees it immediately
- PWA, with animations, feels as good as native on mobile
- $0 running cost (I only paid for AI sub when vibing this)
Desktop: https://imgur.com/a/HD9mCIr Mobile: https://imgur.com/a/EAuJiqH
Twitter, sorry X, weirdly has a really nice and welcoming game dev community so I've mostly been posting about it over there where you can check out progress posts: https://x.com/AngryGoblinDev
We have built a few apps recently and what we observe is that while building the app has gotten dramatically faster with AI, everything around it still takes a surprising amount of human effort - testing, debugging, reviewing, store submissions, releases, monitoring, and keeping things running.
Deckhand is our attempt to make that entire loop faster, while keeping humans in control. Would love to hear how others are shipping and operating mobile apps.
The tunnel itself worked, but stock illumos could not manage the DHCPv6 prefix delegation required by my connection. I also spent quite a bit of time tracing a four byte ABI mismatch between a 64 bit Rust process and a 32 bit illumos service.
There was no happy ending, but I learned more about the illumos network stack and distilled the experience into a blog post: https://skalski.dev/connecting-my-illumos-box-to-a-japanese-...
Today you you can self-host some models, yet this does not mean you can safely browse the web with it, and automate tasks that would interact with your email account, your bank account and your clients.
This is the reason why I left Mozilla, to work full-time on fixing these problems.
Prompt-injection, hallucinations and private information leakage might not be fixable, but they can be identified 100% of the time, deterministically, before any undesirable consequences.
However, asking people to pay first without an established brand nor the ability to audit the code requires a lot of trust. Without any additional judgement about the product, I would never recommend anybody to do that by fear of spyware, phishing or worse …
From the same consideration, I intend to open source my solutions. At the very least offer auditing capabilities to people like me, who are too paranoiac about security and privacy.
On the topic, I do not want to ask the user to always vouch for every usage. My goal is to detect ahead of executing any command, and offer options to re-try automatically, strip the leaking context, abstract the information or accept it. Only asking the user when there is a doubt, while not bothering the user when there is no issue.
Astro is a framework that uses no JavaScript by default. I also use just HTML and CSS, so no bloated additional frameworks or styling libraries.
All blog content is written as Markdown or .mdx files, so it's easy to write and move to any other tool if you wish to do so.
You can host it for free using any major provider since it's just a static website (e.g., GitHub Pages, Cloudflare, etc.).
Making it similar to my own website which is on: https://bryanhogan.com/