Ideas Lab

Companies need computer vision for facility tracking

Businesses want computer vision solutions for real-time tracking of assets or waste sorting in facilities, but require custom models trained on large datasets (20k+ images) and face deployment issues in real-world environments.

X · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

AI agents lack visible reasoning chains for debugging

Developers building AI agents struggle to debug erroneous decisions because they cannot trace the full reasoning chain behind AI actions.

X · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls

I'm excited to introduce Zerobox, a cross-platform, single binary process sandboxing CLI written in Rust. It uses the sandboxing crates from the OpenAI Codex repo and adds additional functionalities like secret injection, SDK, etc.Watch the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZiPm9BOPCgZerobox follows the same sandboxing policy as Deno which is deny by default. The only operation that the command can run is reading files, all writes and network I/O are blocked by default. No VMs, no Docker, no remote servers.Want to block reads to /etc? zerobox --deny-read=/etc -- cat /etc/passwd cat: /etc/passwd: Operation not permitted How it works:Zerobox wraps any commands/programs, runs an MITM proxy and uses the native sandboxing solutions on each operating system (e.g BubbleWrap on Linux) to run the given process in a sandbox. The MITM proxy has two jobs: blocking network calls and injecting credentials at the network level.Think of it this way, I want to inject "Bearer OPENAI_API_KEY" but I don't want my sandboxed command to know about it, Zerobox does that by replacing "OPENAI_API_KEY" with a placeholder, then replaces it when the actual outbound network call is made, see this example: zerobox --secret OPENAI_API_KEY=$OPENAI_API_KEY --secret-host OPENAI_API_KEY=api.openai.com -- bun agent.ts Zerobox is different than other sandboxing solutions in the sense that it would allow you to easily sandbox any commands locally and it works the same on all platforms. I've been exploring different sandboxing solutions, including Firecracker VMs locally, and this is the closest I was able to get when it comes to sandboxing commands locally.The next thing I'm exploring is `zerobox claude` or `zerobox openclaw` which would wrap the entire agent and preload the correct policy profiles.I'd love to hear your feedback, especially if you are running AI Agents (e.g. OpenClaw), MCPs, AI

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Real-time dashboard for Claude Code agent teams

This project (Agents Observe) started as an exploration into building automation harnesses around claude code. I needed a way to see exactly what teams of agents were doing in realtime and to filter and search their output.A few interesting learnings from building and using this:- Claude code hooks are blocking - performance degrades rapidly if you have a lot of plugins that use hooks- Hooks provide a lot more useful info than OTEL data- Claude's jsonl files provide the full picture- Lifecycle management of MCP processes started by plugins is a bit kludgy at bestThe biggest takeaway is how much of a difference it made in claude performance when I switched to background (fire and forget) hooks and removed all other plugins. It's easy to forget how many claude plugins I've installed and how they effect performance.The Agents Observe plugin uses docker to start the API and dashboard service. This is a pattern I'd love to see used more often for security (think Axios hack) reasons. The tricky bit was handling process management across multiple claude instances - the solution was to have the server track active connections then auto shut itself down when not in use. Then the plugin spins it back up when a new session is started.This tool has been incredibly useful for my own daily workflow. Enjoy!

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Baton – A desktop app for developing with AI agents

Hi,I built this because running multiple Claude Code agents across multiple IDE and terminal windows was getting messy. Like many, I went from working at one thing at the time, to multiple, and it was all changing quite fast.I needed one place to see all my agents and worktrees, seamlessly switch between them, monitor their status and once their done, review their changes. I also wanted to quickly spin up new agents in isolated worktrees whenever an idea came to mind.I've been building Baton from within Baton for a while now, which has been a pretty fun loop. Would love to hear what you think!

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Dull – Instagram Without Reels, YouTube Without Shorts (iOS)

I kept deleting and redownloading Instagram because I couldn't stop watching Reels but needed the app for DMs. Tried screen time limits, just overrode them. So I built this.Dull loads Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and X and filters out short-form content with a mix of CSS and JS injection. MutationObserver handles anything that lazy-loads after the page renders, which is most of the annoying stuff since these platforms love to load content dynamically.The ongoing work is maintaining the filters. Platforms change their DOM all the time, Instagram obfuscates class names, YouTube restructures how Shorts appear in the feed, etc. It's a cat-and-mouse thing that never really ends.Also has grayscale mode, time limits, and usage tracking.Happy to answer questions.

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Client took over development by vibe coding. What to do?

I’ve worked on a project for one year now, a marketplace web application for one of my clients. It involves a web shop frontend, integration with suppliers, payment platforms, product management, stock syncing, and much more. I built the project from scratch with open source components, guided other developers on the project, and was leading all the technical decisions.Last year I started using LLM’s for cumbersome tasks, and since the beginning of this year I started working with Claude Code to implement features. Still, I always need to think about the implementation, and actively direct and correct the bot. As many of you will know, it can speed up development, but I still need to use my more than ten years of experience as a developer. I thought the project for my client would be safe.This changed when they started developing some of their own, much smaller and simpler projects on an AI-powered no-code platform. They immediately concluded this also must be applied to the marketplace project that will run their core business. I tried to convince them with good arguments that this wouldn’t be a good idea, but failed. Since I am not the owner of the code, and don’t want to be a gatekeeper, I instructed them how to participate in the development with their coding agents.The additions they made to the codebase in only a week are huge, around 10,000 lines of code. To be honest, most of the features they introduced are functional, but the performance of the application has suffered already. What I am most concerned about is the maintainability of the project and how we will get this live. Before, I had a clear mental model of how everything was built, and I added human readable documentation where needed. They still want me to participate in the project and work on the most critical parts of the application, DevOps and other parts they and their coding agents will not succeed in themselves.It seems some people are possessed by the promises of AI-tools, and do not have

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search

Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

AI-generated code fails on design, documentation, and maintainability

AI coding tools perform adequately on basic functionality but produce poor results in design, documentation, and code maintainability, requiring significant human fixes.

X · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

AI builders output text instead of short-form videos

Current AI content builders generate text or static UI, but creators need tools that directly produce scrollable short-form videos without manual text handling.

X · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Need an AI app: upload a photo → get a weekly verdict «progress / no progress» and advice on when to increase load. Existing trackers either lack AI or are too complex. Willing to pay $100/year.

ProblemHunt · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Turbolite – a SQLite VFS serving sub-250ms cold JOIN queries from S3

I built a SQLite VFS in Rust that serves cold queries directly from S3 with sub-second performance, and often much faster.It’s called turbolite. It is experimental, buggy, and may corrupt data. I would not trust it with anything important yet.I wanted to explore whether object storage has gotten fast enough to support embedded databases over cloud storage. Filesystems reward tiny random reads and in-place mutation. S3 rewards fewer requests, bigger transfers, immutable objects, and aggressively parallel operations where bandwidth is often the real constraint. This was explicitly inspired by turbopuffer’s ground-up S3-native design. https://turbopuffer.com/blog/turbopufferThe use case I had in mind is lots of mostly-cold SQLite databases (database-per-tenant, database-per-session, or database-per-user architectures) where keeping a separate attached volume for inactive database feels wasteful. turbolite assumes a single write source and is aimed much more at “many databases with bursty cold reads” than “one hot database.”Instead of doing naive page-at-a-time reads from a raw SQLite file, turbolite introspects SQLite B-trees, stores related pages together in compressed page groups, and keeps a manifest that is the source of truth for where every page lives. Cache misses use seekable zstd frames and S3 range GETs for search queries, so fetching one needed page does not require downloading an entire object.At query time, turbolite can also pass storage operations from the query plan down to the VFS to frontrun downloads for indexes and large scans in the order they will be accessed.You can tune how aggressively turbolite prefetches. For point queries and small joins, it can stay conservative and avoid prefetching whole tables. For scans, it can get much more aggressive.It also groups pages by page type in S3. Interior B-tree pages are bundled separately and loaded eagerly. Index pages prefetch aggressively. Data pages are stored by table. The goal is

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Running legacy IE/ActiveX clients without local admin rights?

We are currently maintaining a very old client-server architecture. The server collects real-time data from a large number of sensors and controllers, transmitting it to a legacy database under continuous, massive load (writes every few seconds).The problem is the client side. It’s ancient, strictly requires Internet Explorer, and heavily relies on ActiveX. If a standard domain user launches the browser, the data fails to load and the browser completely hangs. It only functions correctly if run with local administrator privileges.Giving users local admin rights is a massive security risk we can't take. Currently, I have a workaround running in production using Task Scheduler to elevate just this specific application without giving the user the actual admin password. I documented the specific approach we are using here: https://www.hiddenobelisk.com/how-to-let-a-standard-domain-user-run-one-program-as-administrator-without-giving-admin-rights/#:~:text=least%20privilege.-,Approach%202%20%E2%80%94%20Running%20Applications%20with%20Administrative%20Privileges%20Using%20Task%20Scheduler,users%20can%20simply%20double%2Dclick%20the%20shortcut%20to%20launch%20the%20application.,-Changing%20the%20ShortcutI recently started a thread over on r/sysadmin trying to find a cleaner solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1rm6uv4/how_do_you_let_a_standard_domain_user_run_one/The general consensus there was to either buy an expensive enterprise PAM (Privileged Access Management) solution, or deep-dive with Procmon. I am currently analyzing the software with Procmon based on that advice, but so far, I haven't been able to make the client work without the Task Scheduler workaround.My questions for the HN community:1) Are there any reliable open-source PAM alternatives or privilege elevation tools for Windows that handle this "per-app" scenario effectively?2) When dealing with hostile Activ

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Veil – Dark mode PDFs without destroying images, runs in the browser

Hi HN! here's a tool I just deployed that renders PDFs in dark mode without destroying the images. Internal and external links stay intact, and I decided to implement export since I'm not a fan of platform lock-in: you can view your dark PDF in your preferred reader, on any device. It's a side project born from a personal need first and foremost. When I was reading in the factory the books that eventually helped me get out of it, I had the problem that many study materials and books contained images and charts that forced me, with the dark readers available at the time, to always keep the original file in multitasking since the images became, to put it mildly, strange. I hope it can help some of you who have this same need. I think it could be very useful for researchers, but only future adoption will tell.With that premise, I'd like to share the choices that made all of this possible. To do so, I'll walk through the three layers that veil creates from the original PDF:- Layer 1: CSS filter. I use invert(0.86) hue rotate(180deg) on the main canvas. I use 0.86 instead of 1.0 because I found that full inversion produces a pure black and pure white that are too aggressive for prolonged reading. 0.86 yields a soft dark grey (around #242424, though it depends on the document's white) and a muted white (around #DBDBDB) for the text, which I found to be the most comfortable value for hours of reading.- Layer 2: image protection. A second canvas is positioned on top of the first, this time with no filters. Through PDF.js's public API getOperatorList(), I walk the PDF's operator list and reconstruct the CTM stack, that is the save, restore and transform operations the PDF uses to position every object on the page. When I encounter a paintImageXObject (opcode 85 in PDF.js v5), the current transformation matrix gives me the exact bounds of the image. At that point I copy those pixels from a clean render onto the overlay. I didn't f

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

AI agents trapped in chat windows provide terrible UX for autonomous task execution

For three years, AI agents have been confined to blank browser tabs or chat interfaces, offering poor user experience for real autonomous work like research, design, and operations, necessitating native desktop integration.

X · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Self-hosted AI agents like OpenClaw have high costs, security issues, bad UX, and limited capabilities

Developers setting up self-hosted AI agent platforms face $700 setup fees, multiple security vulnerabilities (9 CVEs), terrible user experience, and inability to perform common tasks like building websites, generating videos, or creating slide decks.

X · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Desktop apps for LLMs like Claude have terrible UI, UX, and performance

Users of desktop applications for large language models, such as Anthropic's Claude app, experience frustratingly bad interfaces, user experiences, and sluggish performance despite the company's vast resources, pushing them to inferior web alternatives.

X · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

AI assistants give generic answers because they lack context about your actual work and priorities

Knowledge workers constantly switch between apps and meetings, but AI assistants like ChatGPT have no idea what they're actually working on. This forces users to manually paste context, repeat information, or get irrelevant suggestions. Teams waste time re-explaining projects, decisions, and priorities to AI tools, or they simply stop using them because the answers aren't grounded in reality.

Product Hunt · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Robust LLM extractor for websites in TypeScript

We've been building data pipelines that scrape websites and extract structured data for a while now. If you've done this, you know the drill: you write CSS selectors, the site changes its layout, everything breaks at 2am, and you spend your morning rewriting parsers.LLMs seemed like the obvious fix — just throw the HTML at GPT and ask for JSON. Except in practice, it's more painful than that:- Raw HTML is full of nav bars, footers, and tracking junk that eats your token budget. A typical product page is 80% noise. - LLMs return malformed JSON more often than you'd expect, especially with nested arrays and complex schemas. One bad bracket and your pipeline crashes. - Relative URLs, markdown-escaped links, tracking parameters — the "small" URL issues compound fast when you're processing thousands of pages. - You end up writing the same boilerplate: HTML cleanup → markdown conversion → LLM call → JSON parsing → error recovery → schema validation. Over and over.We got tired of rebuilding this stack for every project, so we extracted it into a library.Lightfeed Extractor is a TypeScript library that handles the full pipeline from raw HTML to validated, structured data:- Converts HTML to LLM-ready markdown with main content extraction (strips nav, headers, footers), optional image inclusion, and URL cleaning - Works with any LangChain-compatible LLM (OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, Ollama, etc.) - Uses Zod schemas for type-safe extraction with real validation - Recovers partial data from malformed LLM output instead of failing entirely — if 19 out of 20 products parsed correctly, you get those 19 - Built-in browser automation via Playwright (local, serverless, or remote) with anti-bot patches - Pairs with our browser agent (@lightfeed/browser-agent) for AI-driven page navigation before extractionWe use this ourselves in production at Lightfeed, and it's been solid enough that we decided to open-source it.GitHub: https://githu

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI

Optio – Orchestrate AI coding agents in K8s to go from ticket to PR

I think like many of you, I've been jumping between many claude code/codex sessions at a time, managing multiple lines of work and worktrees in multiple repos. I wanted a way to easily manage multiple lines of work and reduce the amount of input I need to give, allowing the agents to remove me as a bottleneck from as much of the process as I can. So I built an orchestration tool for AI coding agents:Optio is an open-source orchestration system that turns tickets into merged pull requests using AI coding agents. You point it at your repos, and it handles the full lifecycle:- Intake — pull tasks from GitHub Issues, Linear, or create them manually- Execution — spin up isolated K8s pods per repo, run Claude Code or Codex in git worktrees- PR monitoring — watch CI checks, review status, and merge readiness every 30s- Self-healing — auto-resume the agent on CI failures, merge conflicts, or reviewer change requests- Completion — squash-merge the PR and close the linked issueThe key idea is the feedback loop. Optio doesn't just run an agent and walk away — when CI breaks, it feeds the failure back to the agent. When a reviewer requests changes, the comments become the agent's next prompt. It keeps going until the PR merges or you tell it to stop.Built with Fastify, Next.js, BullMQ, and Drizzle on Postgres. Ships with a Helm chart for production deployment.

Hacker News · 7mo ago · Tool · AI