Ideas Lab

Ax-check.com – Can agents use your product?

I'm the co-founder of Gauge, and I built ax-check.com to quickly test how well coding agents can onboard to your product.You'll get a scorecard, specific suggested fixes, and three full coding sessions that show how agents read your site and use your product.I built this because similar checks were too noisy. Most suggested obscure technical changes that don't actually make a difference in agent experience (or AX, hence ax-check.com).This check starts by using DeepSeek 4.1 Flash to try to find key information about your product, starting from the homepage. In actual agent traffic data, we've seen that the key pages are the homepage, llms.txt, pricing, and the docs site (by traffic volume, and by influence), so we focus on those and ignore the rest. We also find that content negotiation for Markdown is legitimately helpful for agents to complete tasks faster and find what they're looking for, so the scan tests that your key pages can serve Markdown.The other key piece is that we run actual coding agents in sandboxes, and have them try to onboard to your product. You can see the full trace and watch it happen live (we kick it off fresh when you enter a new site). We surface interesting findings like hallucinated URLs, inaccurate docs instructions, or product confusion.It also detects whether the agents could complete a fully working onboarding autonomously, without being blocked by a login wall. This is still controversial, but I think finding ways to let agents safely onboard autonomously is going to be table stakes within a year for developer tools in particular.The whole site is agent-friendly itself! You can generally just talk to your coding agent about ax-check.com and it can do the rest. Would really appreciate any feedback to make this useful.

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Scry, programmable internet search w/ congestion pricing

Meet Scry, a 500 TB NVMe internet index in ClickHouse that you can run ~arbitrary readonly SQL and some of Datalog over, and I handle the problem of resource-contention with congestion-based micro-auction pricing. When there's capacity, the service is free for non-commercial use.---Hello. It's 2026, we're training simulated fruit fly brains to play Beat Saber, do we still have to be stuck with internet (re)search as fn: natural language -> black box we can't do anything about -> ranked_list/summary?There is a long history of people trying to do very fancy things that end up being done in relational databases and a little SQL. There is a gravity to them, a bitter lesson, just like scaling of generalized ml training methods. I mean many, many information products can be built off essentially giant real-time OLAP databases and frontier LLMs writing brilliant SQL+Datalog+vector+Jev etc. queries.Google Search, Tavily, Exa essentially have the problem of mapping your agents' context you are willing to provide, to a tiny subset of their index. You pay a fixed cost to an extremely hard problem that has a distribution of hardness, which means YOU eat the downsides when they are running out of budgeted compute to help you out.Their algorithms are opaque to the caller, there's really not much user control, and there's not a serious opportunity to communally improve search recipes, like the lexical+Jev recipes you trust to select bleeding edge AI builders.Furthermore, search companies aren't even pursuing text-to-SQL anymore (several have talked to me)... they made up their minds during the traumatic 2024 text-to-sql days. They were just too early.I hope you enjoy. I'm intent on scaling this paradigm on differentiated hardware over much more data, so any compelling use cases or queries I could show off, would be much appreciated!

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Microsoft Office running with Wine on Linux with no virtualization

Microsoft Office famously hasn't worked well with Wine since Office 2007. There are lots of solutions out there to work around this, but all of them involve fairly heavy virtualization.Multiple people have told me that their biggest hangup for switching to Linux from Windows is the lack of the desktop version of Microsoft Office, and they don't want to run a VM to get around it.I recently fell into a bunch of free time with a Claude Max subscription, so I got Fable to hack at this until it worked! And with this, we have Microsoft Office running on Linux, with no Windows in sight!I can't promise that this will work on everyone's computer, but I did put this all in Nix Flakes, so ideally it should be relatively reproducible on any Linux system with the Nix package manager and Flakes enabled. Also, it does not work very well with X, but Wayland appears to work fine.This is not warez. You need a valid license for Office 365 for this to work. You also need to register on Microsoft's website in a browser; the flow for registering in the app proved to be tricky and not worth pursuing.This is more proof of concept than anything else; I have no doubt that there are bugs and improvements to be made. I have only tested this with NixOS on Sway and KDE, and as stated it only really works with Wayland and the absolute latest GE-Proton, but I believe it would work fine with Gnome or any other Wayland desktop.Full disclosure, Claude Code with Fable did the vast vast majority of the work on this. I ended up primarily just reading log messages and complaining back to it.

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

How to recover Google auth after phone stolen?

As we know, google has been effective at automating a lot of their systems, to the point where it can feel like there isn't any help available from a human. So what is supposed to be the plan when this type of situation happens?Basically I have a situation that after my phone was stolen, I can't get into any of my accounts that are either connected to google, or connected to the phone via 2FA. This has made it complicated/impossible not only to get info about my phone, but also my banking, email, drive, etc.Of course they offer you "multiple options" to recover an account, but not if you forgot your old email's password. At that point the options you get are, a) Use old phone (obviously the phone is long gone) b) Use current phone (the phone is gone) c) Use old email (I haven't used it in like 12 years) Does anyone know if their is a process to appeal 2FA or anything to deal with this type of situation?I'd imagine that this has happened to people many many times, and given how phones and particularly, google auth have become so critical to accomplishing essential tasks within society, there must be some way. Or maybe it's just like, once your phone is gone, you are completely over with society? If anyone has any experience with this or inside knowledge please share it!I'm sure people here have heard of this, and maybe experienced it themselves.Is there a secret option that exists that allows us to use passwords instead of rigamarole? I would love an account that let me simply log in with a password, like google used to be.

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Aclif – Agent CLI framework: one grammar, canonical names across SaaS

Simple discovery of the provider's default schemas is possible without any credentials (since they are built into the binary). If you want it to fetch customizations of your specific instance, give it credentials to your org.The repo has more details. https://github.com/agent-cli-framework/aclif

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

58FL score

Skillsync (YC W26) – AI chat sessions made portable across agents

Hey HN, we're Nars & Nishant, founders of Skillsync (https://skillsync.com)Skillsync lets you move your AI chats across every coding agent. Most of our work exists as conversations, which are currently scattered across our agents. Though stored locally, these conversations use different formats. This is annoying because you cannot simply switch between agents without starting over. We get locked into a single provider and their agent as we invest in skills and memories over time. Skillsync acts as a universal converter. It moves the entire session, including all the messages, reasoning and tool calls so you can pick up right where you left off.Skillsync collects all your sessions in one place and makes them searchable. It breaks down what each session is carrying, including which loaded skills the agent is actually using, making stale context easy to spot. You can also create shared workspaces to sync sessions across your team. You can build your own closed loop systems. Everything runs locally except when you share to workspaces.The core is an open-source Rust engine called txcript (https://github.com/skillsynchq/txcript). It translates a session from one agent's on-disk format into another's, mapping conversation, reasoning, and tool history. Think ffmpeg or pandoc, but for agent sessions.On top of that engine is a local-first desktop app. Your agent sessions are normally scattered across different tools' folders in formats you'd never read by hand; the app surfaces them in one place with a UI that makes them actually readable, the conversation, the reasoning, and the tool calls, so you can revisit what happened, move a session into another agent, or share it with a teammate.Skills and memory are stored as portable, human-readable markdown you own, and exposed to any agent over MCP for search and selective retrieval.Sessions and translation run locally on your machine. The one thing that leaves is what you

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Pizza Bot – An inbox for AI agents that work in the background

Hi HN - long-time lurker (since 2012!), first time poster.Pizza Bot is a self-hosted desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux that runs AI agents in the background and exposes them through an email-like UI. Finished work shows up in Unread, and anything waiting on your approval shows up in Action. It's Apache 2.0-licensed, there's no signup and no telemetry, and you bring your own model provider: Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini, OpenAI, OpenRouter, or a local model through Ollama. There are builds on the releases page, or you can run it from source.Pizza Bot started as an internal passion project I worked on with a small team at Amazon.The whole thing came out of my frustration at having to manually log CRM activities through a browser form. I built a simple REST API called "JoeBot" that connected to my authenticated browser session over CDP and filled out the form for me using Playwright. Then I hacked up a quick Obsidian plugin so I could trigger it from my local notes (no AI and no MCP servers involved).This caught on quickly. My fellow AWS Solutions Architect Igor Fil joined up with me, and we rebranded the project as "Pizza Bot," named after Amazon's two-pizza teams. We started seeing what other automations we could build. We found a GraphQL API we could query and hacked up some "recipes" to pull data out of the CRM to help with meeting prep. That worked great, and it was right around the time MCP servers seemed to be taking off, so we decided to expose Pizza Bot as an MCP server instead, so it would be available to AI tools through natural language.This was a decent solution for technical users, but the Account Managers who live inside our CRM system wanted something too. We decided to rebuild Pizza Bot as an Electron desktop app modeled after an email inbox, so it would be familiar to non-technical users and would run on both Mac and Windows. We also bundled internal MCP servers as OCI images and hosted the

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Capsule – Single-file web apps that save their data into SQLite

Hey HN,I always had the problem that building HTML pages is really simple now, but trying to save data required hosting it somewhere, and sharing it afterwards was not easy. Over the last few months, I've been building an app called Capsule (it’s also the file extension name) written in Rust with Tauri 2.0 that allows packing an HTML app and its data into a single SQLite file.The HTML file and any related assets are directly embedded in the database. User data can either be saved as a localStorage key/value store or via a MongoDB-inspired collections API as documents, saved in a table in the file. You can also save other assets, like PDF files or images, directly in the database to keep different documents together. All data can be easily exported to CSV or JSON if needed.Privacy and security were a big priority for me, so documents cannot do anything out of the box. They don’t have direct access to the file system and they require permission to access the internet. The permission model is still something I’m working to improve. Capsule documents can also use local or remote AI models for document specific AI features.One downside with this approach is that multiple people working on it will create different copies. To make it possible to merge different copies of the same file, each data entry has a unique UUID and timestamp.I’m planning to open up the file format specification for the 1.0 version of the app so other apps can read or write Capsule files.You can try it out in the web preview at https://withcapsule.app/preview with pre-built templates or use any AI provider of your choice to create a custom, Capsule-optimized app by using the following prompt:"Please read the app wizard instructions at https://withcapsule.app/prompt.txt and help me design an app.“I’m still working on the file format but there are migrations for each new version, so data should never be lost when using newer versions of the app in the futur

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Nari Qwen3-TTS and Qwen3-ASR – High accuracy, low latency and cost

Hey HN, Toby from Nari Labs here.We've been working on making OSS speech models super-fast. Last year, we built Dia, the first OSS text-to-speech model capable of doing natural dialogue. Since then, so many more great speech models have been released to the public.But the market is still dominated by closed source models. We think that's an inference problem. Existing systems such as vLLM / SGLang are not well suited for multimodal inference. To prove this, we built an inference engine specialized for Qwen3-TTS and open-sourced it (https://github.com/nari-labs/nari-qwen3-tts). Running at sub-50 ms latency at 10 RPS, this showed open models can be run much faster and cheaper.Since then, we've been working hard to bring cheap, fast, and high quality serving to all. And we've even beat closed models at their game!Measured on the highly cited Coval (YC S24) voice AI benchmarks, our Qwen3-TTS endpoint not just is #2 in latency, but #1 in accuracy (WER) compared to 11Labs, Cartesia etc. while being the cheapest endpoint. Our Qwen3-ASR endpoint has the lowest latency and #2 accuracy, just 0.1% away from #1. It is the second cheapest model on the list.It took a lot of clever inference engineering to make these models quick, perform well while keeping costs low. Interestingly, Alibaba's official endpoints seem to perform worse in terms of accuracy and latency compared to ours. But nonetheless, much love to the Qwen team for OSS-ing these amazing speech models.We want to continue to push prices down to make speech technology a commodity - so that every app can have great TTS and STT without worrying about unit costs. We're also working on other parts of audio such as diarization - as well as video and world model inference. More to come!

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Sunk Cost – How long until a local LLM rig pays for itself?

I kept hearing "just buy a Mac and run models locally, it pays for itself" and wanted to check. Sunk Cost takes a machine, a model and how many tokens you use a day, and works out how long the hardware takes to pay back against renting the same model by the token.Obviously there are other reasons to buy your own hardware aside from just saving money on llms but this is just looking at it from a raw cost saving perspective.If you have any ideas on how I can make this more helpful lmk!

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

EterDB, a Postgres fork that makes it easy to recover from incidents

Hey everyone, a few months ago, after recovering from a Clade-generated bug, I was thinking to myself “wouldn’t it be nice if prod DB writes were easy to roll back”. I’ve put something together: it’s a two-container deploy plus a CLI tool. It’s far from being production ready, so please be gentle. All feedback welcome!The nitty gritty: https://eterdb.com/techGitHub: https://github.com/eterdb/eterdb

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Building multiplayer visual AI automation workspaces faces hard architecture challenges with syncing and agent control

Need for deterministic, fast, minimal-scope syncing in a multiplayer visual workspace for AI automations that is agent-agnostic (no control over agent read/write tools) while supporting HTML as first-class and handling concurrent agents on the same pages.

X1mo agoToolAI

Vertumnus – printable posters of farmers' market produce seasonality

The origin of this project was me, as a casual farmers' market attendee, grossly misremembering the start date of early girl tomatoes. Ironically, I still haven't achieved that goal, because I couldn't find a suitable source with varietal level granularity online. I'm half dreading a "Why didn't you check X?" comment and discover there's some perfect local varietal data source, but that would really be the best case scenario.The poster is customizable per crop, and the pictures reposition heuristically. There's only two regions, SF and NY, with very different source data for each. See https://vertumnus.fyi/about/sources for methodology.A static poster is not the greatest form factor for a schedule with annual variation, and this whole project was a non serious side exercise. See https://vertumnus.fyi/about for more.The project was coded in a single 731 prompt Claude Opus 5 session over 22 days within a 46 day period, from July 20th to September 2nd, 2026. I've published the entire transcript, searchable and organized by chapter, at https://vertumnus.fyi/about/transcript. A write up, with the stuff that Claude was good at and its repeated code quality shortcomings, is at https://vertumnus.fyi/about/ai.

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

28FL score

AI apps lack direct Twitter feed scanning capability

Users of other AI tools want the ability to directly scan and read their Twitter/X feed like the Grok mobile app does, but no plugins or integrations exist for competitors.

X1mo agoToolAI

Syq – copy files between machines fast (better than rsync)

I got frustrated with the slowness of rsync and made an alternative that works faster by using multiple parallel connections, direct encrypted TCP when available, and other optimizations. I also added cool features like the ability to maintain a persistent ssh connection to the server for fast one-offs, the ability to download to your laptop while working in an ssh shell on a server, and the ability to do direct remote-remote transfers without forwarding your ssh agent (by using restricted ssh keys on the receiver that will only execute a specific request signed with the key on your laptop). It is also designed to be more robustly/flexibly scriptable than alternatives.

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Engrim – A universal, local-first SQLite memory engine for AI CLIs

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Self-hosted company OS, Claude Code and Codex agents in departments

Hi HN, I am Dimitris. This is a company OS that I built and use to run my business and anyone can install it and self host it for free. Think of it as Claude Code, Cowork and the cloud sessions in one self hosted application.It is a Multi-tenant application by design where many people can collaborate on the company agents with 4 different modes of collaboration, and it runs with your Anthropic or OpenAi subscription or even with local models.Every agent can run on Claude Code or Codex CLI running as a persistent process on your server in a kernel sandbox (bubblewrap) with network isolation always on (pasta), with its own workspace, memory, schedules and tools. The same agents can also be configured to run identical on any remote computer through one outbound WebSocket (no inbound ports, no VPN needed).The agent already have lots of built in features, as an example they can answer and place phone calls through Twilio or your own Asterisk, they can edit videos and excel, word, ppt files and preview them directly inside the chat with collabora and many more.Trying it is one install script and a docker compose, no signup. The license is Fair Source, all the code is public and self hosting is free up to 5 users. 1.6.0 went out today.AI Disclaimer: large parts of OtoDock are written using OtoDock itself, running Claude Code.I would love people to read the code, take a look in the sandbox model, and tell me what would stop you from running this on your own hardware.GitHub: https://github.com/OtoDock/oto-dock Website: https://otodock.io

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

Geiger – See every AI agent on your machine and what it can touch

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI

HomeCat – Design your backyard office

Hey HN! Ilya and Nikita here. We’re building HomeCat, a tool that lets you design a backyard office space - https://myhomecat.comWe started out by helping people design sheds, and quickly realized that many people actually want to build a backyard office. There wasn't really an easy way to do this, so we thought we'd take on the challenge.Right now, you can design a backyard shed and our tool will make it code compliant. It's maybe 90% of the way there, since you also have zoning/HOA and other edge cases. But it does figure out most of the details for you. Right now, it's pretty simple: enter your address, what you want to build (i.e. 8x8 backyard office), and it'll create a few concepts for you. If you like one, you can customize it with the chat.Here's an example of a design that's compliant in SF: https://myhomecat.com/scene/classic-cottage-137134efWe would love for you to try our tool if you are planning your backyard office. As a bonus to the HN community, we can professionally design one for you for free if you comment what you're looking for.Happy labor day!

Hacker News1mo agoToolAI