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Products that do what LaoTzu Writer Studio does
Hello Hacker News! We bring to you today 2 things: 1. Our passion project - LaoTzu Writer Studio - a modern writing application 2. Thoughts on the abysmal state of Kickstarter - likely well known to you all, but having experienced it for the first time, it is disheartening So lets start with the good stuff: LaoTzu Writer Studio - LaoTzu helps you build the framework of a novel, but still leaves the writing for you to do. That means there are indeed AI elements - like our Guard section that flags inconsistent canon in your universe, or the analyze section that determines writing stats,…
- 1PMProject Maya▲88
Project Maya has started! For those who haven't read about Maya, please look here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4103344 Our goal is to build an open source application that can run in your browser and on iOS/Android without being dependent on app stores. We currently have a working "sneak preview" version viewable over here: http://frontend2.com Want to dig into the source? https://github.com/SchizoDuckie/project-maya We recommend you to check it out in Google Chrome/iOS/Android. Our team currently consists of 5 people. If you think you'd be a good addition, please shoot me an email,…
2012
- 2MF
Just finished my second year at college studying Computer Science, and wanted to try and gain experience as a full stack dev this summer, so I made a website that allows users to create stories using openai's API, using embeddings for custom terms users can define, and create short stories and chapters alike. I'm mainly just looking for some feedback on how I can improve it or make it more presentable, so any help/feedback is welcome and appreciated!
2023 · plotnotes.ai
- 3SS
Hola HN! Long time lurker, sometimes commentor, first time poster here. I’ve been working alongside my two co-founders and a few colleagues on a project I’m excited (and a little nervous) to share with you all! Like many of us, I’ve lived a tortured existence with AI coding (is it vibes?) over the past few months - I think November was a big moment with this. But, one thing I’ve noticed after building orchestration layer after orchestration layer is that the thing I always came back to was “what the hell is Claude Code actually doing?” Perhaps it’s because of the time Claude Code got…
Jun 2026 · backplanes.com
- 4SS
TLDR: The beta of my my site, Sparkmuse, has begun. Please join me at http://www.sparkmuse.com/invitation/Hacker-News . The Story: Well here it is, the beta of Sparkmuse. I'm pretty happy to "get there", but I'm really just relieved. Don't get me wrong, I'm F'ING STOKED to get this in front of some more valuable eyeballs, especially the Hacker News crowd. Right now though, I'm just leaning back in a rickety old chair thinking "I did it." Several months ago I was pretty down on myself. I wanted to get out there and meet new people, do cool projects, explore new technologies, and just jump…
2011
- 5AS
Hey HN community, I run a small team of writers that built TheRightMargin, a new writing platform that focuses on your goals first and is aiming to be the smartest writing tool on the market. We launched last summer actually, but we're trying to make a push for some growth, so I thought I'd debut it here on HN! The #1 'writer's block' pain point this app solves is helping you figure out your next step. We have some neat tools to break down your writing project into milestones and task and a way to write side by side with your plan. We also have smart tips and a timer for writing sprints,…
2017
- 6WA
Hello everyone! We just launched our project for the 48H non-stop Codebits Programming Contest which took place this last days in Lisbon, Portugal. When a new project starts, you get all motivated to get it done. Weeks pass and now you are all confused and wondering why the hell you are doing what you are doing. We hope to help you get those thoughts out of your mind and focus on what's important: getting it done. http://www.whyamidoingit.com "Why Am I Doing It?" (WAIDI) is a personal reminder of why you are doing whatever you are doing disguised as a web app. WAIDI will help people like us…
2010
- 7WM
Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…
2014
- 8HN
Friends, Romans, HNers! Link: http://hackerbyte.com This is my first “weekend project” and it was really fun doing it. The sleepless weekends nights when all my friends were our partying or something we (me and two friends) were busy creating ‘hackerByte’ - a weekly newsletter to share inspiration with start-up people. Nothing fancy - just we’d like to share some really nice stuff we read and some news with you, every week. We know that newsletters like these already exist so why one more? Because we are not really satisfied with what they are doing and here is our version of the wheel. We…
2011
- 9IM
Hi HN! Writing has been a big part of my life for the last few years. It's helped me make sense of the world around me through journaling, and my blog and technical books have made wonders for my career as an engineer. Something I've always been missing is an online community where I can practice my skills and learn from other aspiring writers. I built Tavern, hoping to solve my own problem. Its main concept is that every Monday everyone in the app gets asked the same writing prompt and you have seven days to submit your answer. You can look at what others have posted, but only after you've…
2023 · writerstavern.io
- 10CLCraft.ly▲10
We hatched this idea of a Kickstarter + Groupon + Etsy model last week, threw up a super simple landing page that day, then launched a more detailed landing page last night. What do you think of the idea as a whole? The landing page itself? Since the Etsy / crafting world is so large and diverse, we're really trying to focus on the sharing of our site to get the word out. We are doing some minimal google ads and will be doing various tests to see what brings in the best traffic and converts the best. Interestingly enough, good old fashioned twitter searching with hand authored tweets has had…
2011 · craft.ly
- 11MC
Hi everyone! Im pleased to introduce MadeForHackers.com which is a tiny agency focused on designing beautiful handmade landing pages, user interfaces and logos for hardcore developers, like you guys. This project is focused exclusively on helping hackers like you, stay focused on what you do best: Hacking. I know there are a couple apps that helps you build landing pages but MadeForHackers offers handmade, unique and beautiful landing pages but also user interface design for web, mac, iphone, ipad, android, pc and logo designs at very competitive and accesible prices. Each design is thought…
2011
- 12IB
I’ve spent the last 2.5 months building a product that runs LLM-powered code reviews on my pull requests — and I just launched it. The tool is built specifically for solo developers. You install it on your repo, trigger a scan by creating a pull request, and it leaves structured review comments using OpenAI under the hood. Funnily enough, I used the dev version of this app to review its own pull requests while building it. It helped me spot bugs, simplify structure, and keep quality high — all with minimal need for another human in the loop. Things I want to try out in the next months : -…
2025 · codii.dev
- 13IM
Hey HN, I'm Aydin, a 13-year-old developer and indie maker looking to improve the world with my small startups. Recently, I built 2 micro SaaS projects. I spent days & weeks coding features, always telling myself that after coding one more feature I was for sure to get traction. This never happened. The reason: I never launched. With IndieReq, you can launch your startup fast and get real user feedback so you know exactly what features to ship and improve. All you have to do is sign up for free, create a feedback board, and share the public link with your users. It's that easy! If you've…
2025 · indiereq.com
- 14OS
Hi HN! I'd love your feedback for this AI storytelling game. Remember when you used to read choose-your-own adventure books as a kid? We're trying to re-create that. The site lets you create adventures by seeding them with parameters that end up feeding LLMs: title, genre, writing style, etc. Once you've done that, you can play your book like a game: with custom chapters, illustrations, voice narration, choices, and dice rolls. We’re really into the idea of merging the open-ended generative AI with goal-directed story arcs that the game author can control. Everything is open source (links…
2023 · ai-adventure.steamship.com
- 15SS
I’ve spent the last month or so hacking on a prototype to let filmmakers make concept art more quickly with recent generative image tools. This is very much a beta—with current functionality you can make projects, generate shots, and upload scripts which we can process into shotlists. Features I’m working on as we speak: character consistency, location consistency, framing and composing shots. Let me know what you think or what else I should build!
2024 · storyboarder.vercel.app
- 16WO
Hey guys, I am think of building an open-source version of Perplexity to let devs play around with it. But with all the existing tools available what features would you want? Anything specific? What is missing? Currently working on - 1. Streaming text 2. Citations sources 3. Image and file upload 4. Chat history and storage 5. Temperature and custom instructions If you are in marketing or growth can anyone help me with what to focus on while building such an app? Also here is a very first version. Probably will break and most of the buttons also don’t work, built it in 3 days using Bing and…
2024 · omniplex.vercel.app
- 17BA
Writing is hard, and it's tempting to just let AI do the whole thing So I built an Obsidian plugin that keeps AI in its place Highlight a sentence, get some options, pick the one you like Sharpens your writing instead of automating it
Jun 2026 · rephrasethis.co
- 18
Hey guys, I’m Sean founder & CEO of M2W. We made an AI editor for manga creators worldwide. Manga creators work solo or duo and can’t get critical feedback from public, but editors are too busy and expensive to hire. So we made this AI editor with manga editors who used to work at major Japanese manga publishing firms. As a result, creators can get reliable feedback in minutes to reiterate and make their works better at the earliest stage of creation. This will lead into us becoming publishers ourselves and be able to pay the creators a larger share of revenue than it is now. Currently the…
Jul 2026 · m2w.ai
- 19MA
Saw the remotion claude skills launch earlier, and honestly even though I was surprised how decent some of the results turned out to be I ended up never trying it out with claude code because I knew I'd have to setup remotion, bundler etc and if I was already doing it once I thought I might as well turn it into a site where anyone could just write messages and get a video without any prerequisites. I also know Claude Code is not something everyone has and setting up remotion is a pain. And one of the biggest lessons I learned from this whole experience is that Opus is actually not that good…
Feb 2026 · framecall.com
- 20AD
Hi all, I threw together a small prototype I am calling “Notepad.ai”. A new take on UIs for interacting with LLMs. While I enjoy using LLM’s in the chat format I wanted to see what it would be like to do it in a more long form style. It let’s you write in a pretty free form, much like Window’s Notepad, but you can choose to hit ctrl+[ to analyze the text with a preset prompt of your choosing. It has a few other small features. It’s WIP and very experimental. I would appreciate any feedback or thoughts. Video: https://youtu.be/ntdlgFmSxQY Live Demo:…
2024 · github.com
- 21
Hey Hacker News! I built Writekin over the past week because I was tired of AI writing that didn't sound like me, even though I had just used AI to clean it up, rather than wholesale write it. The usual fixes I found online for this were: - Some sort of SKILL.md, or - A system prompt full of rules to strip the generic AI tells (e.g. no em-dashes, none of the stock phrases, varying the sentence length, etc). While those cleaned up the surface a bit, Pangram still came back as ~100% AI written, which was frustrating, as again it was mainly taking my sloppy copy and tweaking it. So when…
Jul 2026 · github.com
- 22SO
hello everyone, my first post! AA here, founder of ⌘ Langbase.com — we are a developer platform for building and scaling serverless AI memory agents. I know surveys can be boring, but this one’s different—it’s interactive! That's very much intentional. My team and I have been up for the last 21 hours putting together this report. This was a looot of work, so I hope y'all like it. Introducing … State of AI Agents 2024 report On Langbase, we processed 184 billion tokens and handled 786 million AI agent runs from 36K developers. From all that data plus insights from 3.4K builders who filled out…
2024 · langbase.com
- 23TF
Today I come to you on this beautiful Friday with a freshly hardthink-ed solution to a proliferous problem plaguing our world: the loss of original voice. The blanket of blandness slowly suffocating centuries of writing. Or to put it bluntly: AI writing is trash. It is disrespectful to expect ME to read something YOU could not even be bothered to write (or likely even read). The lingering human connection that remained resilient on the internet - through years of SEO optimisation, propaganda bots, ads, regional firewalls, politics, censorship - is now being diluted even further. Many of the…
Feb 2026 · tropes.fyi
- 24IM
Hey everyone! I'm really excited to share a side project I've been pouring my heart into lately. As a developer with over five years of experience, I've taken on my fair share of freelance web development projects. In the beginning, I always coded everything from scratch, but as I juggled more projects simultaneously, I started using Webflow to save time. While Webflow was definitely a lifesaver, I couldn't help but wish for an even faster way to set up a website – something that would allow me to start with a template and then easily customize it to my heart's content. The problem with most…
2024 · instawebai.com
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