June 14, 2026
Builds, bragging, and big main-character energy
Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Hackers show off their side projects, and the comments turn into a chaotic talent show
TLDR: Hacker News’ June 2026 side-project thread became a showcase for everything from health apps to kids’ game tools to ultra-ambitious productivity software. The strongest community mood was a mix of admiration, irony, and nerdy flexing, with “vibe coded” and “no web-tech” stealing the spotlight.
Hacker News opened its monthly "what are you working on?" thread, and instead of one big announcement, readers got a glorious parade of passion projects, personal missions, and some extremely online energy. The vibe? Half science fair, half startup cage match. People rolled in with everything from a privacy-first self-tracking app and a reverse-engineering tool built with heavy artificial intelligence help, to a kids’ game maker that turns hand-drawn art into playable games. In other words: the internet’s smartest overachievers are, once again, doing the most.
But the real entertainment is in the comments, where every project feels like its own mini-drama. One builder pitched gmd, a markdown search and research tool that seems determined to do absolutely everything. Another showed off MacroCodex, reducing weight loss to a brutally simple slogan: eat above your needs, gain weight; eat below, lose it. It’s the kind of blunt line that sounds obvious, yet somehow still sparks the classic internet response of “well, actually…”. Then the mood swerved heartfelt with an asthma diary app aiming to warn people earlier about triggers, reminding everyone that not every side project is about chasing the next billion-dollar exit.
And then there’s the deliciously Hacker News flavor: one founder proudly said their tool was “100% vibe coded,” another bragged about building a knowledge app in Rust with no HTML or web-tech, and someone else built HN Alerts so they can get emailed when stories start blowing up on Hacker News itself. That last one is so meta it almost feels like the comments section staring into a mirror and applauding.
Key Points
- •The article is a June 2026 Hacker News Ask HN thread asking users what they are currently working on.
- •At the time shown, the thread had 19 points and 26 comments.
- •One visible project, Reflect, is described as a local-first, privacy-focused self-tracking and data analysis app for goals and self-experiments.
- •Another visible project, Specter, is a Ghidra plugin for semi-deterministic agent workflows and is being updated to use Apache Calcite in part of its SQL engine.
- •A third visible project, Breaka Club, lets children turn photos of hand-drawn art into games and is running an in-school pilot with multiplayer, offline play, and a GodotJS/TypeScript-based stack.