Alternatives
Products that do what Mainline – a project tool with no backlog, story points or surveillance does
I've spent the last fifteen years walking into engineering orgs that said they did "CI/CD" (there's no such thing, CI and CD are distinct practices) and "Agile", and proceeded to ship annually through release ceremony and theatre. There are more than a few dark-agile patterns I'm sick of seeing, so I built a project management tool that avoids them, and that exists to be a counterweight against the tools that encourage them. The notion of story points was the first thing to go. Even Ron Jeffries, who invented them, regrets their usage. Mainline hard-codes a story size of 1 and tracks…
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The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
Feb 2026 · berksoft.ca
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I have been working on this game somewhat sparsely for the past three years or so. However, it is still in a very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do. One of my friends encouraged me to post about it here, since he felt people might find interesting how I don’t use any libraries for it. The game can be played on a browser by virtue of WebAssembly. There are native ports using either MiniFB or SDL2, but you have to build those yourself. I decided to write the game in C because I feel like it is a simple language that a lot of people can understand well enough, and I didn’t think I…
2023 · zamfofex.neocities.org
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For a long time (after devouring Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto), I've noticed a gap in the productivity tool market—most tools don't cater well to repeatable checklists. Task managers handle one-off tasks effectively, but falter with routines. On the other hand, project management software often feels overly complex. What I wanted was in the Goldilocks Zone between Todoist and Jira. For my own personal use, I created StepList. I've used it to assist and track workouts, my daily workday, software deployment and setup, household management, and more. Over the last year I've prepared…
2024 · steplist.app
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I've been tired with the current options on the market for awhile and decided to do something about it after the running into the disaster that is MLOps at my last two startups and having to manage a multiple operation platforms both for my fellow ML engineers, the general application CI/CD and orchestration layers while simultaneously building the application itself. Its still extremely early for the product but its functioning and is well on its way. I'd love feedback on the approach and peoples thoughts on the problem space. Personally my irritations have been in the poor tooling,…
2025 · egdaemon.com
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Hello HN! I got pretty overwhelmed with Notion, Trello, etc. (Even though they are great tools!) as an indie dev, so I built an app that is simpler to use and perfectly suited for an indie like me :) You can basically divide your projects into multiple milestones (a milestone could be e.g. a new version), and the milestones can have multiple tasks that are either todo, in progress, or done. The progress for each milestone is calculated with those tasks, and you can also prioritize and categorize the tasks using tags (E.g. for me, #ph turns into "High Priority", and #pm into "Medium…
2024 · apps.apple.com
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TLDR: I made a community where you can find builders or product owners to collab on sideprojects together with <3 A year ago i completed my first sideproject, a digital course on how to "cold email a chief information security officer". I thought and think its a great course, but of course I fell into all the traps (didnt verify a need, i thought id make it and everyone would buy automatically), i tested google ads but hated nerding on that, so i decided to find a marketing person to partner up with! But i knew no one! That got me thinking how many people with relevant knowledge that isnt…
2025 · relentlessly.no
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Hi. We just open sourced Bullet Train, a Feature Flag and Remote Config platform. It's a collection of tools: server API, admin front end and clients for a bunch of different platforms. Together they allow you to control feature flags and remote config across projects, environments and users. We realised that we were building ad-hoc feature flag stuff into individual projects over and over, so we had a look around to see if there was a way of doing this in a more formal manner. There are a few commercial solutions around but they were quite expensive and seemed to be aimed more at the…
2018
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Hello HN, my name is Varun, and I am the co-founder of StepSecurity. Here is the backstory about Harden-Runner. We thoroughly researched past software supply chain security incidents. The devastating breaches of SolarWinds, Codecov, and others, have one thing in common – they attacked the CI/ CD pipeline or the build server. These incidents made it clear that a purpose-built security agent was needed for CI/ CD. While there are numerous agents available for desktops and servers, such as from CrowdStrike and Lacework, none have been tailored specifically to address the unique risks…
2023 · github.com
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Hi HN, I've been working on this for a while and it was hard to decide when to stop, either on the way information is presented or when to stop with adding entries. It's not meant as a blog, but rather as a reference that keeps growing. Link: https://thehardparts.dev Currently I've created 4 main section: - Failure Modes: ways project go wrong - Red Flags: early signals that are worth taking seriously - Tech Decisions: common and not so common trade-offs for hard choices - Playbooks - guided approach for situations that repeat I've also focused on creating links between them to…
Apr 2026 · thehardparts.dev
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I have worked with AI assistants for a while, and while I am really excited about it, there were times when I felt really frustrated. LLM would end up in a loop with no end. This is when I started experimenting with creating work plans. Initially simple todo list, but it felt like "product vibing", so a bit more sophisticated later on. I started seeing value in it. The one day it hit me. Why not use the same GitOps principles to managing product tickets? I started playing with that and really liked the way it worked. After a chat with a friend of mine, I realised that a standard or a spec…
2025 · productascode.org
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Our team works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini all day. We love Ghostty, but wanted something where we could work in multiple worktree at once and have multiple agents run. We decided to open source the internal team we use. Hope you might find it useful. Freel free to contribute or fork. * Cross-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows) all tested * MIT License Features: * Notifications, but also manual 'mark-as-unread) for worktrees (like Gmail stars) * Status indicators work for all terminals inside a wroktree * GH integrations (show PR status) and link GH issues * Can add comments to worktrees…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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I have always found it funny how challenging it can be to find people to jam on side projects with. There are literally entire sub-Reddits where people post looking for someone to work on a project with. That is super inefficient. There are also newsletters for this (also pretty inefficient). Let's Jam is my attempt to solve this. This is NOT a cofounder matching platform. The idea is to connect people with ideas and skills so they can jam on them together. If they end up becoming cofounders, cool, but that is up to them. This is also NOT a place for freelancers to hunt job opportunities.…
May 2026 · letsjam.live
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He HN, I'm an entrepreneur, and I help startups to ship products. I find out that for startups tools like Jira, Monday, slack and others are expensive and unnecessarily complex. That's why I decided to built a Freemium software for simplifying project management process. Workfeed is all-in-one soft, including docs, kanban boards. I plan to add chats in couple of months too. I hope this product will help you to manage your projects simpler and faster. Would love your feedback plz Enjoy !!
2024 · workfeed.ai
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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
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Hi HN! I made a thing and wanted to share it with the builders of HN. Problem: I’ve found it hard/impossible to stay consistent on my side projects over the years with a pretty demanding full-time job and now kids. When the job picks up, it’s too easy to drop the side project for a day, which becomes a week, which becomes months. It’s also been somewhat demotivating to build alone on the side because you only have so much time and projects take so long. In college it was easier to find people to work with. Now, not so much. Solution: I think it’ll be easier to stay motivated and…
2025 · guildorigin.com
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Hi HN! My name is Marko and I am working on a CI/CD system at harmont.dev, a CI/CD system that sucks slightly less. As I've been working on the cloud, I realized that the CLI might be generally useful as a task runner, even if you don't care for our CI/CD, and that's what I'm sharing here! Every CI system I've used at Tesla, Bun, and mesa.dev has had the same problems: stateless and slow (GHA), or stateful and horizontally unscalable (Jenkins), with YAML on top of either. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was the realization that all my Claudes are waiting upwards…
May 2026 · github.com
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For the past few years, I've been frustrated at how we document our products. The code can tell you what you ended up doing, maybe why you ended up doing it (if your team is disciplined about comments/documents), but it can't tell you why you didn't do what you didn't do. Time and time again, I've seen teams try to change something to a better way, only to realize why it was done the "worse" way in the first place. Documenting decisions not taken is just really hard, ADRs help but doing it for everything is just too noisy and time-consuming. What's more, most of the decisions just…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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We're two engineers that got fed up with context switching. Why do we need to do a git push, open a browser tab, wait for some task to actually start, bite nails (or read HackerNews) for 10 minutes or more while dependencies are being installed for the 100th time and finally end up with an invalid YAML error. And for some reason this usually happens in the final stage of the pipeline leading up to the inevitable git commits "Fixed", "Fixed again", "Test", "Really fixed this time". We can do better. We set out to build Zippy. A CI/CD system that works from your terminal. No context…
Mar 2026 · zippy.sh
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I've been using LLMs for long discovery and research chats (papers, repos, best practices), then distilling that into phased markdown (build plan + tests), then handing those phases to Codex/Claude to implement and test phase by phase. The annoying part was always the distillation and keeping docs and architecture current, so I built Unpack: a lightweight GitHub template plus docs structure and a few commands that turns conversations into phases/specs and keeps project docs up to date as the agent builds. It can also generate Mintlify-friendly end-user docs. There are other…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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