April 9, 2026
Alpacas vs. AI: choose your fighter
Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?
Guitars, alpacas, and drama: HN rebels build cool stuff without AI
TLDR: HN asked for non‑AI builds and the community delivered: guitar‑powered monster battles, an alpaca management app, a homemade “cloud,” and more. Cheers for “no AI” projects mixed with drama as one dev was accused of reinventing Tailscale, fueling a lively learn‑by‑doing vs. just‑use‑it debate.
Hacker News threw a curveball: “What are you building that’s not AI?” The replies arrived like a victory parade for handmade tech. A standout was Guitar Quest, an RPG where your real guitar blasts monsters—“No AI anywhere in the stack,” the creator boasted. Another built a cross‑platform Task Manager‑style tool for wrangling servers and Docker (software containers), while HN Arcade showed off indie games, and hyperscript teased a big new release. One dev even launched a retro‑flavored language inspired by Pascal, flexing “manual memory management” like it’s back in style.
Then came the drama. A home coder unveiled Tela—a DIY “cloud” fabric to link all his machines—then joked he typed “claude instead of cloud,” earning laughs. But a veteran quickly clapped back: “You’re rebuilding Tailscale,” a popular tool that creates a private network for your devices, “but with a central hub.” That sparked a classic fight: reinvent the wheel to learn versus use the industry standard and ship. Meanwhile, someone dropped the most HN sentence ever: an alpaca breeding and show management SaaS—no AI, just fluffy logistics.
The vibe? A proud, playful rebellion. People are tired of wall‑to‑wall chatbots and are flexing “no AI” like a badge of honor. It’s guitars over GPUs, alpacas over agents, and indie tools over hype—proof that the web’s basement inventors are very much alive and kicking.
Key Points
- •A Hacker News post solicits non-AI projects from the community amid widespread AI-focused discussions.
- •Highlighted examples include a guitar-learning RPG platform (OpenFret’s Guitar Quest) with a live-input gameplay demo and no AI.
- •Another example is an alpaca breeding and show management SaaS (Alpacuna) combining registry, workflow, herd, and show management, also without AI.
- •A contributor is building a personal network fabric called Tela to connect machines and TCP services without using Tailscale or major cloud providers; code is on GitHub.
- •A reply compares Tela to Tailscale with a centralized hub and references a similar 2016 project, mentioning WireGuard in historical context.