Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)

The latest Ask HN thread was supposed to be a cozy show-and-tell for side projects, but the real spectacle was the mood in the crowd. Yes, people shared genuinely charming ideas: Quxnet is trying to revive the cozy, quirky feel of the early web with message boards, private mail, and personal profiles; ShareOurPics wants to make collecting wedding and party photos so simple that, as the creator puts it, it’s not “too complicated for Grandma”; and Duckies AI is pitching a softer, more supportive coding helper that acts more like a patient teammate than a forgetful chatbot. It’s wholesome on paper. In the comments? Existential.

The hottest reaction came from people wrestling with what coding even means in the age of artificial intelligence. One commenter flat-out said coding for fun has become prompting, which is the kind of line that lands like a soap-opera slap in a room full of builders. Another is going back to learning C, an older programming language, almost like a digital return to tradition: less magic, more wrestling with the machine. That made the whole thread feel split between two camps: people building tools for an AI-heavy future, and people quietly yearning for the joy of making things the hard way.

And then there was the accidental comedy. One person is building “Letterboxd for music,” instantly summoning the internet’s favorite genre of startup pitch. Another is making a shared memory layer across all AI tools, which sounds either incredibly useful or like the first line in a sci-fi movie where things go very, very wrong. The vibe was part maker fair, part group therapy, part "are we still having fun here?"