Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?

A simple Hacker News question — what tools people have built for themselves since AI took off — quickly became less about shiny bots and more about how people feel about the whole AI era. And wow, the vibe is split. One camp is going full personal empire mode, building private search engines, note systems, memory trackers, and research dashboards so they can stop redoing the same work over and over. Another camp is basically saying: hold on, I’m not worshipping AI here. One commenter practically staged a tiny rebellion, insisting they make tools after the AI boom, not with AI, and proudly praising tiny, fast software that runs on weak machines instead of bloated modern stacks.

That tension is the real juice: AI as magic helper versus AI as overhyped clutter. Some replies sound like sci-fi diaries — one person built a background helper that remembers what they were doing yesterday, another is "vibe coding" apps and websites, and someone else is building a giant personal brain for their firm’s research. Meanwhile, the hobby side brought surprisingly wholesome energy, with one commenter using these tools to support volunteer mountain bike trail mapping. So yes, there’s ambition, but also comedy: people are casually building systems that sound like a digital second brain while others are side-eyeing the entire trend and saying, in effect, “my tiny compiler still clears.” It’s less “AI will replace us” and more “everyone made themselves a weird little sidekick, and now they’re arguing about the right way to do it.”