A custom harness backed by dagger, gives diff, time travel, forking of both files and env. Building a harness is a good learning project. I'm now using other tools to see what they are like. (OpenCode is quite good out of the box)

Currently working on a markdown search and wiki backed by Typesense, also has good web search, fetch, crawl. This will power my personal knowledge base system as an important step towards more leverage and better outcomes.

https://github.com/verdverm/gmd

Ive made some tools after "the advent of AI"

But I dont use "AI" to make them

I use a code generator

I like to use the smallest possible "toolchain", using the least possible resources, to build software tools

Ideally I want the tools to compile quickly on underpowered hardware

I've vibe coded multiple helpful apps and websites for recording data. But longer term, I'm building with its help an internal research system to organize, search, compare, analyze, and esp reuse all the large amounts of data my firm produces, with the public materials without constantly starting over in separate ChatGPT or Claude conversations.

HN Wrapped: https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com

Claudhd

It's a user daemon that runs on my machine and exposes a unix socket, and then a bunch of hooks in claude, zsh, vim, etc, that report directory and commands I've run and all that, pipes it to claude Haiku for summary, and then stores context in sqlite. It also exposes that data as MCP so I can use claude to say "hey what was I doing yesterday," or any arbitrary time range.

I find that in the age of using AI agents, "Wtf was I working on yesterday" is an even harder thing to remember for me, so this helps me kind of track everything with a database that a) has AI summaries already and b) can be accessed by AI as well as a CLI.

Three that have been really beneficial, and all support/build on a hobby / volunteer effort of mapping mountain bike trails:

This one generates maps from OpenStreetMap data + some custom curated info in YAML: https://github.com/c0nsumer/trailmaps.app-map-generator

This one converts a basic chunk of OpenStreetMap data to an SVG so I can mark it up (by hand) in Adobe Illustrator to make specifically-styled print/PDF maps, such as what get installed at trailheads: https://github.com/c0nsumer/osm_to_ai

This one takes GPS recorded rides and builds custom/personal heatmaps serving up the map tiles so I can use them in map editing software: https://github.com/c0nsumer/local-heatmap-tile-server

And all of this has been put together to make the custom, local, specific-use-case maps that are at https://trailmaps.app (which, via local curation, are overall better mobile/online maps than many of the bigger auto-generated systems such as Trailforks, Gaia, RideWithGPS, etc, for visualizing local systems).

It's neat stuff where I understand all the inputs, outputs, and how most of it works, but AI tooling (Claude, mostly) has allowed me to bolt it together much faster than I would have writing it myself.

My agent checks my session logs to look for things that I should automate. I blogged about how I got there: https://austinhenley.com/blog/automatingmyjob.html Maybe I'll share some of the skills.

German language tutor, a midi piano tutor, and an isochrone map generator.

Static site generator for my blog, or at least bits of it.

I was able to create a CLI (https://github.com/gitsense/gsc-cli) without knowing Go. Like 0% Go knowledge. It is currently over 300 files (266 Go files).

I built a half-baked CRM that has a lot of custom fields and visuals for statistics that are relevant to my potential customers. I'm selling primarily to registered data brokers, so being able to pull up their self-published compliance stats (gleaned from their own privacy pages or public filings) and contextualize them in terms of the rest of the industry ("your deletion request volume has been in the 95th percentile year over year") has been extremely helpful when starting conversations. I also gamified it a bit by giving myself targets for cold outreach and gathering hard numbers on my cadence for outbound calls and emails per lead.

I also built this site for educating potential customers and other privacy professionals about the increasing tempo of CCPA enforcement actions driving compliance: https://ccpa.world/enforcement

I could have probably coded this from scratch quicker considering that it took me two weeks to remove all of the hallucinated imaginary enforcement actions against real companies and also the citations to non-existent California law that the models kept injecting into my enforcement summaries.

I wish I had time, but I would definitely make some Android apps to sideload onto my phone. They would be very bespoke and probably only relevant to me, but they would be streamlined to my life.

Over the past few days I have been making a spell checking TUI app. I used AI (meaning: free Gemini web interface) to discuss various aspects about the apps and debug compiler errors ang suggest useful rust crates for various problems.

Just a more helpful discord chat generally. It also gaslights you too!

Here is the tool: https://git.sr.ht/~asibahi/hoopoe

Oh man a few things

1. A dashboard that tracks my personal metrics (github, strava, todo completion, flossing)

2. A eink display for that dashboard

3. A realtime node graph that shows a codebase (and/or its diffs) in a way that I can visualize what functions call which, and under what conditions

4. A agent that automatically fills out government forms and creates invoices for my friends brewery based on the delivery notes in their google calendar.

I made a tool that creates sandboxes (docker, podman, orbstack, seatbelt, tart, containerd, kata, firecracker) and then sets up an agent (claude, codex, gemini, aider, opencode) inside it with max permissiveness (no prompts to call sed, etc).

It creates its own copy of your workdir for the agent to play in, and then you pull changes out ala git diffs or commits.

It's a MASSIVE time saver, and I use it as my daily driver.

https://github.com/kstenerud/yoloai

We used AI to build our AI platform and now we are using the AI platform to build the tools that we need for AI. :)

But no honestly, unfortunately most tools I did for myself are not for hobbies but something that I needed for work... like this one (https://github.com/crmkit/crmkit) most recently.

The tool I'm most proud of is "Hex Flex" (https://seidleroni.github.io/Hex-Flex-Web/). It is a tool to view and compare the contents of Intel Hex files. Should be useful to other people who work in the firmware field.

Not exactly a tool, but I also made pelohard.com which ranks the most recent Peloton classes by difficulty. Updated twice daily.

Year ago I made for myself a simple jar editor https://jar.tools, now it has 8000 user’s monthly

I didn't write any code by hand for either of these:

1. Terminal emulator macOS app with vertical tabs using libghostty (replaced iTerm)

2. Tool for running an encrypted btrfs-RAID1 NAS on NixOS (replaced my Synology machine)

Started this project since I just wanted an encrypted NAS solution that used luks (cryptsetup) for encryption, but luks is pretty annoying to use by hand. And then it turned into this whole thing with hundreds of VM tests, thousands of Rust tests, and random features like making the machine beep on disk issues.

I like the capabilities of C++ and imgui but didn't want to deal with C++ anymore so I had AI do it.

imping - PingPlotter-like app. They didn't have a Linux version and I'm a paying customer, so I vibe coded this one: https://github.com/zenakuten/ImPing

utcolor - text colorizer for Unreal Tournament 2004 https://github.com/zenakuten/utcolor

utquery - Unreal Tournament 2004 Game Browser tool https://github.com/zenakuten/utquery

utstatsdb - This is an old project that did not work anymore with modern php+mysql. I had claude fix it. https://github.com/zenakuten/utstatsdb

created https://github.com/frontman-ai/frontman, not exclusivly for myself but something i'm passionate about(might turn into a paid product).

basically trying to see what a vertically integrated agent looks like, where the agent has deep access inside a framework and it operates from within a framework, so like, instead of reading files, opening processes etc - it gets a bunch of framework specific runtime tools(logs are the easiest example)

Most of it has been to maximize productivity with AI

1) Use chatgpt pro from codex cli, opencode, claude etc as you can't get it via API. This has been the biggest boost in productivity for me as I don't have to copy and paste.

https://github.com/agentify-sh/desktop

2) A small gate to make sure any agent cannot run destructive rm -rf or git reset --hard commands, it has saved me many many times

https://github.com/agentify-sh/safeexec

3) For mac users, summarizes and speaks out loud after codex finishes a turn

https://github.com/agentify-sh/speak

I'm close to releasing a memory safe programming language, with a declarative concurrency model, that runs on a Go-like runtime.

It has "levels" of compilation, with EASY mode being about as easy as Ruby, and the compiler can present you with options to get that as strict & performant as Rust/Tokio.

I'm going to need at least a month to finish all the documentation, though.

Several iterations of buggy build log parsers to extract compile commands databases.

But mostly I let the AI do stuff for me, fix the itch of that day, don't save anything and don't learn anything and every day I feel more empty.

https://gitlab.com/grepular/calendiff - Point it at a .ics URL and it monitors for calendar changes and emails you about them.

https://gitlab.com/grepular/foxcage - Runs Firefox inside podman to isolate it from the host. Has some interesting features that I wanted and nothing else gave me.

https://gitlab.com/grepular/claude-sandbox - Yet another Claude sandbox. Runs it inside podman again. Has a pretty powerful proxy system for securing your credentials.

Currently working on a tool for sanitising email. Will be blogging it up at https://www.grepular.com/blog/ when it's ready for others to use. Does things like applying policies to html/svg/calendar/vcard parts to whitelist or blacklist tags/attributes/css/url schemas, clean URLs, fetch remote content at delivery time and attaching to the email to prevent tracking, pgp and smime auto encryption/decryption and a million other features.

I made a sandbox to productively work with agents while restricting files they can read and write: https://github.com/wrr/drop

All kinds of random stuff really, but to filter it down to only the noteworthy ones:

Tuber[0] - this is my favorite, use it multiple times a week. It's just a little CLI wrapper around yt-dlp for my most common use cases - downloading the video, or the audio, or the subs. And then, if you've got the Claude CLI installed, it can also shoot the subs through Claude for a summary. I use it all the time, it's a great little thing!

Scrapio[1] - this is really specific but I was so pleased with how it turned out. You give it a list of "hacks" ("mods" for Super Mario World) and it goes out to SMWCentral, grabs each of the patch files, and patches a clean ROM. I think I only used it twice but it was just a nice way to chew through a list of hacks and get a few ROMs ready, made quick work of something that would have otherwise taken a bunch of annoying schlep work.

Lotus Eater[2] - calling this a tool is a bit undersell, but I'm still really pleased with it. It's a fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus that scrapes Nugs.net for setlist data and lets you do some mildly interesting analysis on things like song frequency and co-occurrence. Also has a per-user "shows I've attended" thing, Setlist Bingo. It's been fun to hack on.

Lastly, I don't have a link for this, but last week Google released their Magenta model for doing live music generation. I thought it was really neat, and it's open source, so I opened it up with Claude, and after a few passes and some extremely annoying toolchain issues, I was able to add a spectrograph which does key / chord analysis to the "Collider" app, so you get a live readout of "what the band is playing" and you can pull out your guitar or whatever and join the jam with some info at your disposal. It's the kind of thing that would have taken way too much effort to be worthwhile in the past, but with AI, it's a really neat result of a fun night of weekend hacking.

[0]: https://github.com/epiccoleman/tuber

[1]: https://github.com/epiccoleman/scrapio

[2]: lotuseater.epiccoleman.com

I'm building an app that uses cosign similarity across a bunch of vectors to derive team productivity metrics. To be honest the maths is trivial; the hardest part is gathering data and normalizing it in a vaguely sensible way.

I've also built a release notes app for my QA teams, a DORA metrics app, a thing to map UX journeys with Playwright, and a ton of games and stuff. AI got me back into enjoying building things again.