Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
The perennial 'Ask HN: What are you working on?' thread once again showcases the incredible breadth of passion projects from the Hacker News community. This edition reveals a pervasive influence of AI, with many developers leveraging large language models (LLMs) to build, port, and accelerate their creations, sparking debate about the nature of modern software development. From custom game engines to hyper-niche tools and critical infrastructure, the thread is a testament to the power of curiosity and ingenuity.
The Lowdown
The 'Ask HN: What are you working on?' threads are a beloved Hacker News tradition, offering a monthly glimpse into the diverse, often quirky, and always ambitious projects cooking in the minds and on the machines of its community members. This September 2026 installment proved no different, featuring a vibrant collection of projects ranging from personal utilities to ambitious technical undertakings. A striking number of submissions highlighted the significant role of AI and LLMs in their development, signaling a shift in how many approach coding and problem-solving.
Key projects featured in this month's roundup include:
- Bonsai Voxel Game Engine: A decade-long solo endeavor to build a 3D voxel game engine from scratch, featuring a custom metaprogramming language and nearing completion for a planned game release.
- Orate Public Speaking App: A mobile application that uses AI and peer reviews to help users practice impromptu public speaking, focusing on improving communication skills.
- ConciliaTower (SimTower Remake): A complete browser-based rewrite of the classic game SimTower, faithfully recreated with the help of AI (Claude) based on decompiled binaries and memory of gameplay.
- Holler Social App: An iOS app designed by an introvert, for introverts, to remove the social friction of invitations and coordination for hangouts, allowing users to simply declare their plans.
- UScodex.org: A project to collect all US federal law in version control, cross-link references, and store it in Git repositories, aiming to make legal data more accessible and auditable.
- AI Trading Competition: An experiment pitting various AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) against a human-designed control strategy in paper trading, with early results showing mixed performance but high trading volume.
- Noraneko Cat Identification App: A mobile app using on-device AI (Apple Vision, DINOv2-Small, SigLIP2) to identify, track, and help adopt stray cats, featuring gamified elements like card trading.
- Smol Machines: A novel sandboxing primitive offering 'branchable compute' — essentially git for entire virtual machines, allowing checkpointing, branching, and rolling back compute states.
- Nand2Tetris + MCP Server: A developer's journey through building a full computer system from NAND gates upwards, alongside implementing a custom MCP (Multi-Agent Communication Protocol) server for Bitbucket.
- VeloOS: An ambitious attempt to build an x86_64 UEFI operating system that combines the aesthetics of Windows Vista with the behavior of Linux, focusing on low-level development challenges.
The thread illustrates a fascinating period of technological transition, where individual ingenuity is amplified by advanced tools, leading to a proliferation of innovative, and often deeply personal, software and hardware creations.
The Gossip
Agentic Achievements & AI-Assisted Artistry
The dominant theme was the pervasive use of AI, particularly LLMs like Claude, Codex, Gemini, and Astra, to assist in coding and development. Many participants openly shared how AI agents helped them build, port, debug, or even design entire projects, from voxel engines and game remakes to websites and mobile apps. This sparked a discussion about the changing nature of software development, with some arguing that AI enables faster iteration and allows non-developers to build, while others expressed a preference for 'human-coded' projects, questioning the authenticity or skill involved in 'vibe-coded' endeavors. The idea of tagging projects as `[HUMAN-CODE]` or `[AGENT-CODE]` was proposed to help navigate this new landscape.
Niche Needs & Novel Notions
Beyond AI's role, the comments showcased an incredible variety of projects, often born from personal frustrations or highly specific interests. Examples included a social app for introverts, open-source firmware for charcoal smokers, a Latin language audiobook with advanced pedagogical features, a fitness app optimizing weight training, a tool to track school holiday flight deals, and a game designed to teach children coding using physical cardboard blocks. These demonstrate a vibrant ecosystem of creators solving both universal and deeply personal problems, frequently sharing their solutions with the wider community.
Meta-Musings & Growth Metrics
A standout contribution was a meta-analysis of past 'Ask HN' threads, presenting data on project counts and top topics by year. This analysis revealed a significant surge in project submissions, particularly since 2024, and a dramatic rise in AI/LLM-related and developer tool projects. This led to discussions about the implications of AI on developer productivity, the 'golden shovels' phenomenon (tools for building tools), and the sheer volume of new, potentially 'slop' projects. The original poster of the 'Ask HN' thread also chimed in, providing context on the history and growth of the series.