April 12, 2026
Stonks cubes and 5am phone calls
Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
From an AI that spots secret bugs to strangers calling to wake you up
TLDR: HN’s April showcase features an AI that detects hidden security fixes early, a data-on-a-canvas tool, a 3D stocks cube, and a human wake-up app. Readers cheer the creativity while debating disclosure risks and whether “self-running” coding tools are brilliant productivity or a little scary.
Hacker News’ monthly “What are you working on?” thread dropped like a surprise demo day, and the comments lit up. The headline-grabber: VCamper by user rndhouse, an AI tool that scans code changes to spot hidden security fixes before they’re officially listed in the CVE database (the public list of known security holes). Their warning—“this could make it much harder to keep fixes quiet”—had readers buzzing about whether that’s heroic transparency or a maintainer’s worst nightmare. Check it out: VCamper.
Meanwhile, Kavla from aleda145 pitched a simple dream: “What if we put all your data on one big canvas?” A command-line tool connects your laptop to a live, visual workspace. Translation: fewer windows, more sanity. Link: kavla.dev.
For the “robots, do my job” crowd, vinayakverma71 teased an IDE that doesn’t just write code—it runs it, clicks around, finds what broke, and fixes it while you watch. They call it “Not Better Cursor… but what comes after it,” and the crowd’s equal parts amazed and mildly terrified.
Then there’s pure visual candy: division_by_0’s 3D market cube for S&P 500 and Nasdaq movers—try it. And the most wholesome chaos? rpjt’s app where friendly strangers give you wake‑up calls over internet voice. Yes, a human alarm clock. It’s weird. It’s wonderful. It’s peak HN energy.
Key Points
- •The thread invites developers to share current projects and ideas for April 2026, referencing recent similar discussions.
- •Kavla is a canvas-based data workspace with an open-source CLI (kavla-cli) that connects local machines to a canvas via WebSockets, built with tldraw, DuckDB, and Cloudflare.
- •Trove is a simple file-drop web app built with Go, Docker, and Alpine.js to minimize configuration complexity.
- •A mobile app offers friendly wake-up calls via in-app VoIP without requiring a phone number and has a small base of regular users.
- •VCamper uses a staged LLM pipeline to analyze Git commit ranges and flag likely vulnerability patches before CVE publication, with a successful example involving curl CVE-2025-0725.