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Hi HN, we're Sam and Alex, founders of Risklytics (https://risklytics.ai). We're both on leave from Harvard, and we run an insurance brokerage for companies building robots, drones, autonomous systems and satellites. You describe your machine, we find the insurance companies willing to cover it, and we read everything before you sign.Buying insurance for any frontier tech goes like this:- your first customer or pilot requires coverage before your machine can work on their site- a broker hands you an application written for ordinary businesses, and often will deny you on baseless "risks" (one of our clients got denied for using CAD software in their workflow)- you get filed under something close or outright denied, the person at the insurance company often can't tell what they're looking at, and the safe answer is no- if a quote does come back, the AI risk is often quietly removed by an add-on clause that prevents you from truly being coveredThose clauses surprised us. Insurance companies mostly don't write their own policies from scratch. They license standard forms from an industry body called ISO and attach add-on clauses to adjust them, and in January ISO published clauses that void coverage for losses arising out of AI in any part of a process. Each insurer decides whether to adopt them, account by account, and there's no public record of who has and to what capacity.There's an open question in the wording too. It defines generative AI as systems trained on data that produce text, images, audio, video or code. Whether a robot's control model, which produces motor commands, falls under that is unsettled. We've asked underwriters, the people at insurance companies who make these calls, and gotten different answers across the board.We didn't initially plan to be brokers. We came into YC to work in insurance and spent the first half of the batch on a wildfire risk model we wanted to sell to insura
Hacker News20d agoToolAI
Seven years in the making (I admit that I did get a kid at some point which slowed down progress and brought it to a halt quite a few times), I decided to finaly release it, with a rather drastic change to the now (I believe) generous licensing model.Unlike current major players in this field, I decided to go with uncrippled, free version for commercial use for corps with up to 1M USD ARR. I poured my heart and soul into this, not because I was looking for financial success, but because I felt it just had to be done, given the price hikes wherever you look today. While my wife and kid were enjoying the beach during a vacation, I was using the time to figure out how to best tackle the problem with variable substitution and snapshots, a rather important part of the software. Pulling your hair kind of thing, many of you have likely been there, but darn does it feel good once you solve it! I know, not the best use of my time, but on the other hand, I hate the beach, so I guess this was an escape mechanism for me at that time :)I had received quite a few encouraging emails from people eager to try fDeploy back when I only had a tiny landing page out, but life has its own course and it took a while to even gather the courage to publish the first beta!As everything that sounds too good to be true in this day and age, fDeploy is no different. It does not support multi tenancy (a rather big feature which I'd love to work down the road) and a few other things may be missing which some companies may find crucial. Either way, I see this covering the needs of a large chunk of small to medium sized companies, so some "assembly" may be required. If only HN had the crowd which likes to get their hands dirty and find ways to make things work ;)I'd love to hear your thoughts and if you could take it for a spin. No signups, should be a smooth ride to get up and running and experimenting in minutes.Thanks!
Hacker News22d agoToolAI
We have been using graph DBs more and more at work. I found them painful to work with locally and decided to try and build something better.
Hacker News21d agoToolAI
It's a macOS menu bar app that reads the text of your focused window every few seconds through the Accessibility API. No screenshots, no video, or OCR. It writes plain markdown, one file per day, into a folder you choose.Point Claude Code (or anything with file access) at the folder and ask "what did I work on Tuesday?" or have it build memory about your projects. The folder contains an AGENTS.md explaining the format to the model.Thought it might be useful for someone so chucked it up on GitHub
Hacker News22d agoToolAI
I'm a master's engineering student and a big fan of LaTeX, which I used for my thesis and research articles. I have used Overleaf and that was fine until I wanted to git sync, which unfortunately sits behind a paywall. Since I didn't want to pay subscriptions for things that should simply just work, I built the editor I wanted in my free time, where you open a tab, write LaTeX, get your PDF and the files stay all in one folder on my disk.TeXbrain is a static site with no backend. pdfTeX is compiled to WebAssembly (SwiftLaTeX) and runs in your browser. The editor can read and write your project folder through the File System Access API, so you can use git, any local TeX install, local AI Agents, or any other editor on the same files. Git is built in through isomorphic-git for anyone who would rather not touch a terminal and clone, branch, commit, push or pull via commands. No account is needed, no analytics, and everything works offline after the first load.Try it out: https://tex.swimmingbrain.dev/ (Chromium browsers get direct folder access, while Firefox or Safari fall back to a virtual filesystem)Or for self-hosting/contributing: https://github.com/swimmingbrain/texbrain (MIT, the pdfTeX engine is EPL 2.0 / GPL 2.0 and is listed in the THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES file).The part I'm most proud of getting to work is the package loading. The engine itself is only 1.8 MB. When it asks for a file it doesn't have, then a service worker intercepts the request and resolves it through Cache Storage first, then a small bundled subset, then a TeX Live tree mirrored on jsDelivr, then a SwiftLaTeX style server as a last resort. Every file is fetched once at most and after the first successful compilation, the core subset is prefetched in the background so that the offline story actually holds. Only file names go over the network, never any document content.So far, it only supports pdfTeX (no XeTeX or LuaTeX), so f
Hacker News21d agoToolAI
I am looking for ideas on what to train a specialized model for!What is one simple thing you repeatedly ask ChatGPT, Claude, or another model to do that it still somehow messes up?
Hacker News21d agoToolAI
I think agent-first chat interfaces will be a primary software modality and busy dashboard/UI will go away. I’m not sure who exactly wins it, but I want my knowledge to grow/go with me.A lot of the “knowledge” ie research, analysis, reasoning will be done by agents as the primary user. Our current notes tools & tasks management systems were built for humans… I don’t care what the 17th thing on my bug backlog is. I want to conduct agents that can execute for me and do great work.What I built OzBrain to do: + Create a central place for agent reasoned knowledge to live + Be agnostic about what apps/agents connect to it + Capture everything and track it so I can audit it + Enable teams, collaborators or partners to share brains + Handle conflicts so many agents in the same article doesn’t blow up + Refactor knowledge into more token friendly chunks and map the index well + Close the knowledge loop so new thinking supersedes old thinking across the corpus. Don’t erase, depreciate and link + Keep user data safe and secure ++ Be easy enough to use that you don’t have to have any technical knowledgeSome among us will always build their own custom solutions, but there are millions of tech professionals and small business owners that will use agents heavily and need a solution. So I’m trying to build that.Isn’t this like gBrain? Yes, similar. I think it’s like AWS vs Vercel. AWS is very powerful, configurable, and useful if you’re technical and want to invest the time into really fine tuning your system… but if you just want your web deploy/hosting to just work and be easy to deal with you use Vercel.// WHY I MADE ITI’ve been enjoying getting back to my technical roots, as I lost my coding skills more than a decade ago, but with AI I can focus on the system and the product in partnership with agent coding workflows.I recently built a Voice AI for older people. To build it I created an agentic engineering workflow (feel free to rip that up as
Hacker News25d agoToolAI
The Shortcuts Gallery is filled with outdated or low-quality user-created automations, making it hard for users to discover effective AI and app integration workflows.
X23d agoToolAI
Hello everyone. I've been working on this experimental editor called Huzzah.I've been working almost exclusively with coding agents since January of this year, and over the past few months I began to feel utterly exhausted by them. They're great, but I'm finding it more and more tedious to write full sentences for every change I want. Not only that, but it seems there's a complexity limit for codebases - beyond a certain point the agent begins confusing itself.I'd like to go back to writing code, but I don't want to go all the way back to fully manual coding. So I've come up with this interaction paradigm where you: 1. write pseudocode in whatever way makes the most sense to you 2. on save, the editor synchronizes your work to real source code 3. the pseudocode is persisted alongside the generated code, making your prompt effectively a stored record of intent. It may not work for every use case, but in my initial playthroughs I've found it very enjoyable.Right now it's just a proof of concept - installation instructions are here in the readme: https://github.com/danielvaughn/hzYou can also watch a video of it in action here: https://x.com/danielvaughn/status/2090456808431165715Cheers!
Hacker News26d agoToolAI
Certain logos started standing out to me on LinkedIn as brighter/whiter than everything else around them.I dug in and found out this is accomplished by adding a gain-map to an existing JPEG, visible only on HDR screens like a newer MacBook Pro. LinkedIn is the only social network I've found that isn't stripping them out, but of course you serve them up on your own site.I worked with Claude Code to turn it into a little browser-based utility (no registration) and hope you find it useful!
Hacker News24d agoToolAI
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15).The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device.The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
Hacker News26d agoToolAI
This project has been kicking around in my head since I first heard about the webauthn PRF extension in early 2024. I've slowly chipped away at it since, and finally got things to a shareable state over the summer thanks to a very fun parental leave. Headed back to work tomorrow, so I figure there's no time like the present.tldr: A client-held encryption key derived during passkey authentication encrypts all sensitive user data prior to persistence so that only the user is able to decrypt and reuse that data on their device. This allows short-lived, privacy-preserving age proofs to be issued to requesting applications (18+, no PII shared) without requiring users to re-upload their documents. The SSO user experience is built on top of the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Flow.https://loginwithone.com - demo video + high-level architecture + FAQI also made the parody demo apps from the video public if anyone wants to play around with the user experience:https://demo.brainrot.loginwithone.com https://demo.dgnrt.loginwithone.com https://demo.kirby.loginwithone.comI suspect most will choose to pass on the ID stage for now (no offense taken, doing so is low reward in this context) but if you navigate to https://app.loginwithone.com after onboarding you can demonstrate the passkey-powered encryption on your email via the lock/unlock button.Very open to feedback and happy to answer any questions! I plan to pull the client-side encryption functionality into an open-source typescript library for general use, so any thoughts or suggestions on what you’d like to see out of that interface would be supremely useful. Thanks all,Michael
Hacker News27d agoToolAI
Hi HN- I'm Pablo, the founder of Proliferate (YC S25)!Proliferate (https://github.com/proliferate-ai/proliferate) is an open-source, self-hostable AI IDE that lets you work and automate tasks with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, and Grok in one place.Here's a quick 2m demo of how we use Proliferate to build Proliferate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNX0oaWmBYI started building Proliferate after my team onboarded to OpenAI Codex. Within days, we were using it for everything: using computer use instead of navigating websites ourselves, having Codex coordinate other agents, and setting up automations for recurring work. We really never needed to leave the desktop app to get work done.If my team’s experience is anything close to representative, a Codex-like app (a horizontal agent with a beautiful UI) is the main interface every company is going to use to get work done. That is perfectly in line with OpenAI’s mission to make Codex the everything app (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796469).But as we started automating work closer to the core of the business, I wanted to work with agents from all the labs, including open-weight models, without becoming increasingly dependent on OpenAI.And that’s what Proliferate is for! It's the open-source, self-hostable Codex that preserves your optionality across agents and model providers while building toward Codex’s breadth.Today Proliferate supports:* Working with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, and Grok with their native inference and configuration options, including Bedrock, Azure, and self hosted inference.* Inter-agent communication and management: a parent agent can spawn and communicate with another supported agent as a subagent (I personally like to have Fable delegate to Codex, with OpenCode models reviewing PRs).* Building workflows- one of the features I'm most excited about. These are re-usable chains of agent sessions and
Hacker News25d agoToolAI
I have been using omarchy on my tower since nearly a year now, shortly after it was released first. I really love the experience I am having with it but I still use my macbook for daly work, so I wanted to recreate a similar experience on it. Thats why I created omacosy, a setup for tiling windows, custom menu bar, some themes from omarchy, focus follows mouse, focus rings around windwos, some mac flavors with trackpad events and a custom mission control overview for your workspaces.I used AeroSpace over yabai for the tiling window manager because I didnt wanted to compromise on SIP which is a mac security feature. It is supposed to be keyboard first like omarchy to move windows organize workspaces etc The setup runs around 157mb of ram and consists of AeroSpace, Karabiner (for the super key), and five small self build swift binaries.I am running it daily on my M1 max macbook, currently on macOS26. I havent tested it much on other macbooks or macOS versions. The install script creates a manifest file to backup what was installed before and what it installed itself, the uninstall script takes that into account to clean up the macbook to exactly the state it was in before. It needs quite some permissions for it sfunctionality which I layed our in the project readme. I wanted to be really transparent about which permissions it uses and for what reason.I would love to get some feedback or see people trying it out and hearing your opinion. Mostly about what still doesnt feel smooth in the experience or if you find any performance issues.
Hacker News26d agoToolAI
Working on Mac, Linux, and Windows now. I include a simple GUI to find new models and get things built and set up. It is working quite well across a few models for me. The GitHub README and DESIGN.md files go into detail of the how/why and it's working remarkably well so far. https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/shoehorn
Hacker News28d agoToolAI
Hi HN, we’re Yousef & Nour, founders of Vendo (https://vendo.run). Vendo lets users create new features inside the software they already use. A user describes the dashboard, workflow, or small app they need, and Vendo builds it on top of the product’s existing data, API, and interface.Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdpHehY64lsWe built Vendo because every SaaS eventually faces the same problem: every customer needs something slightly different. One wants a new report and another needs a workflow that only makes sense for their team. These requests either sit on the roadmap, become one-off engineering work, or force the customer into spreadsheets and external tools. We wanted the user to be able to create the missing feature themselves, without leaving the product.Here is how it works:- npx vendo init reads the product's API surface, theme, routes, and more. These are used so that the apps Vendo creates (1) look on-brand and native and (2) have the ability to read data and perform actions directly through the company's API- When a user asks for a feature, we have a custom Vendo harness that writes a React component with a bunch of Vendo add-ons and guardrails (ex. ability to make calls to the host API + our component library). Every save is compiled, type-checked, run against real API responses, and rendered before the user sees it. We just released a benchmark and write-up here with more info for anyone interested: https://vendo.run/blog/generating-product-ui-measured- We use QuickJS to make sure that anything the agent creates is sandboxed and can't mess with the company's site. Vendo compiles the component and runs it with Preact inside a QuickJS VM with no access to the DOM, network, or clock. The VM returns a UI tree, which the host renders using the product’s registered components. When the user clicks something, QuickJS emits a tool call; the host executes it through Vendo’s guard and p
Hacker News26d agoToolAI
Hi HN, I built this. Quick background on why it exists:When music is streamed on digital streaming platforms (think Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora), there are two separate royalty streams: one for the recording, paid through your distributor (DistroKid, TuneCore, CDBaby), and one for the underlying work (generally known as publishing). The work side's mechanical royalties are collected by The MLC, a nonprofit that was created by the 2018 Music Modernization Act (MMA). If you haven't registered your songs with The MLC, there are issues with your metadata, or about half a dozen other reasons, that money will never reach you, it just collects in a big pile we call the "black box".That pile is big. The MLC's own dashboard currently shows over $656M is held (themlc.com/blanket-royalties), and the biggest problem is the MMA dictates that The MLC cannot hold that money indefinitely. At some point, by law, The MLC must distribute this big pile of cash, and since they don't know who it's supposed to go to, they pay it out through a process called "market share" (themlc.com/marketshare). Market share means they pay it out, pro-rata, to the artists, songwriters and publishers that are in the system, which in practice means the largest publishers collect most of the leftovers.This is slated to begin in January 2027 and will pay portions of the pool out monthly (themlc.com/unclaimed-accrued-royalties), as of this morning, the next 12 months of market share sums up to $76.61M, starting with $6.41M in January.Full disclosure: I run Doubly, which is an independent publishing administrator, so I have a commercial interest in this space. That being said, we're a team of two people and we don't have the bandwidth to directly assist the hundreds of thousands of artists and songwriters who are going to start losing this money in January 2027.That's why I built this self-service tool, no signup, no email, no paywal
Hacker News26d agoToolAI
Hacker News1mo agoToolAI
Hi HN, Jonathan & Guy here from OneCLI, an agent harness built for teams, giving every employee a secured, sandboxed personal agent.Here’s what you can do with it:1. get a sandboxed agent, with all the OneCLI capabilities in place like connect your GitHub account, Gmail, Notion, or Dropbox simply from the chat.2. deterministic human in the loop approval in the chat itself for things that you need 100% control like sending an email or deleting the Linear ticket.3. manage team policy in one place, enforced across every agent in the workspace4. enjoy global connections at the team level, like shared LLM keys or service accountsHere’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlW-44ntpbEWe started working on this by accident, even though our careers were in the security space. We were working on a devtool called ChartDB, an open-source DB tool. When OpenClaw took off back in January, we started using it to orchestrate agents on top of ChartDB. We quickly understood there is a big issue around auth. Agents need credentials to do real work, but to give them those secrets would not be the best idea. They keep them in their memory and also write them down to local files and their sessions as plain text. And we knew that agents can easily be fooled into giving up those API keys/secrets. So we needed some way to control the agent and stop prompt injections from tricking it into using its services for an attacker's benefit.We created OneCLI that started as a vault for AI Agents built in Rust.We found out that most of our demand for OneCLI came from autonomous agents like Hermes, OpenClaw and NanoClaw for individuals and teams.Users looked for useful agents that do things for the person who runs them with two missing parts: 1) managing secrets and permissions. 2) and for teams - multiplayer management.We decided to pivot and provide the agent itself as a harness for teams, to give each employee an agent. We saw that teams had to deal with setting up t
Hacker News27d agoToolAI
Hi HN, I've become lazier in my old age and struggle to replay my favorite Sierra games from the 80s and 90s because I keep getting into those situations where I need an item from 3 acts ago, I have no save game handy, and now I gotta make dinner.So I'm building the Lucasartsifier: a static analysis tool that decompiles Sierra resource files, automatically finds those states, automatically generates code to prevent the player from getting into those states, then emits loose patch files that can be placed alongside the original game resources. There's no game-specific code involved; all the logic is generic, though of course Sierra introduces new idioms and mechanics in every game so every new supported game needs a bunch of engine work.So for example in Leisure Suit Larry 2, the patched game prevents you from boarding the cruise ship until you have both the sunscreen and the Grotesque Gulp. Without them you die on the raft 3 play-hours later.So far this works on Leisure Suit Larry 2 (SCI0), King's Quest 4 (SCI0), King's Quest 6 (SCI1.1), and Laura Bow 2 (SCI1.1). I'm currently working on King's Quest 5 (SCI1.0).This is work done with Claude -- I do the design and playtesting and it does the rest :DAny feedback, play testing, and suggestions would be great!
Hacker News28d agoToolAI