August 9, 2026
Sawdust, side quests, and side-eye
Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
Laid-off maker drops AI woodshop dream as commenters cheer, doubt, and flex their own side quests
TLDR: A laid-off creator grabbed attention with an AI-powered woodworking tool that uses real wood sizes and promises build plans, shopping lists, and even augmented reality previews. The community loved the practical dream but split hard on whether the AI part is genius or wildly overambitious.
Hacker News’ monthly “what are you working on?” thread turned into a glorious internet talent show, but one project absolutely stole the spotlight: a laid-off builder is making an AI-friendly woodworking simulator called Sawdust, basically a digital woodshop where you design furniture using real lumber sizes instead of weird abstract shapes. Fans were instantly hooked by the fantasy: pick your boards, plan your cuts, get a shopping list, and walk away with a custom bed frame instead of another flat-pack regret purchase. One admirer practically wrote the pitch for them, dreaming of software that lets you choose wood, stains, and details, then order everything like “high-end IKEA, but actually good.”
But of course, this is Hacker News, so the applause came with side-eye. The biggest hot take? Can AI really handle woodworking without hallucinating your table into a safety hazard? One commenter loved the real-world approach but openly admitted the automation part was the most suspicious piece, while others argued the magic is in treating joinery and assembly like a recipe the computer can understand. Translation: half the crowd sees a future carpentry revolution, the other half is waiting for the robot to invent a cursed bookshelf.
And because this thread is basically a startup carnival, the comments also sprinted from database map tools to a Linux screen recorder, a printed newspaper for kids, local event listings, and AI brand-tracking. The vibe was equal parts support group, flex parade, and “look what I built instead of sleeping.”
Key Points
- •One project in the article content is a woodworking simulator that models real materials and shop tools rather than abstract CAD primitives.
- •The woodworking tool uses an agent MCP, YAML-based operations, reusable parametric procedures, and both agent and human interfaces.
- •The carpentry system supports exports and planning outputs including 3D printing files, STEP files, BOMs, cut plans, video walkthroughs, AR viewing, and build guides.
- •A second project, Consciousness Library, aggregates psychedelic and consciousness research from more than a dozen academic APIs every 20 minutes.
- •Consciousness Library is built with Rails 8.1, Postgres, DigitalOcean, Kamal, and DeepSeek-V4-Flash, with relevance filtering handled by keyword prefiltering plus an LLM rubric.