March 8, 2026
Drama, domains, and doilies
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
Makers drop note apps, tiny domains, and AI novels — HN cheers and roasts
TLDR: Makers showed off everything from a simple notes-and-tracker app to AI-written kids’ novels and a knitting design tool, sparking cheers and side‑eye. The thread split over “another notes app,” the ethics of AI bedtime stories, and a flex about a tiny e.ml domain—pure indie energy with spicy debates.
It’s the monthly maker parade, and the crowd came in hot. A dev shipped ChronoNotes, a minimalist note-and-tracker mashup, and instantly triggered the eternal HN split: “not another notes app” eye-rolls vs. “scratch your own itch” applause for a tool built by and for its creator. Meanwhile, an experimenter unveiled a tiny language for embedded gadgets that keeps things simple—think blocks that take turns—promising less fuss than a real-time operating system. Fans said it feels like state-machine zen; skeptics muttered new language, new headaches.
Then came the bedtime bombshell: someone used GPT to write novels for their kid and is now building a structured “team of roles” (planner, editor, lore keeper) to make those stories better. Half the thread called it wholesome; the other half joked “bedtime by API” and worried about outsourcing imagination.
Niche wins stole hearts: MadHatter for knitters/crocheters earned “finally, not a spreadsheet” vibes. Puzzleship served daily logic fixes. e.ml flexed a micro-domain for viewing email files and spawned short-URL envy. SocialProof tried to cure cringe testimonials with smart prompts, while Rauversion pitched an indie music hub. And TypeQuicker declared everyone can type fast—cue the “just use a keyboard” crowd. The mood: scrappy, opinionated, and delightfully extra.
Key Points
- •Chrononotes is a tracker-based note-taking tool with filtering to trace updates; its creator has built a backend and is dogfooding it.
- •An experimental embedded language targets bare-metal devices with cooperative multitasking to avoid RTOS complexity.
- •The language provides an event/messaging system where blocks can be triggered by events, wait internally, and receive interrupt-injected events.
- •The embedded language is mostly an interpreter written in Rust and can emit C code; its syntax is still being refined.
- •An AI fiction-writing workflow is being built with a role-based agent skill (markdown specs plus a Python interface), using Gemini Flash for generation and Opus 4.6 for feedback; MadHatter is a web tool for knitting/crochet design.