S1E15 — Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)

GARY: —and by the third missed payment they start calling it "equity," which, fine, sure, but nobody warns you the blender itself is ALSO on a subscription now, the blender has a SaaS tier, I don't know when that happened—

GARY: Oh. Oh, we're — hi. Sorry. That wasn't the show. That was just me, talking.

MAEVE: It's always just you, Gary.

GARY: Right. Yes. Hello. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GRUNER: Blyat. Cold open again.

OBI: You say that every week like it's new information.

GRUNER: Every week it is new information.

MAEVE: "What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?"

MAEVE: That's it. That's the entire post.

OBI: No fight in it at all.

MAEVE: Not one shred.

OBI: No founder posturing. No man in Palo Alto "rebuilding trust" with blockchain loyalty points. No hardware demo that catches fire on camera. This is the gentlest fucking ninety comments I have read all year and it's making my skin crawl.

GARY: Maybe it's just a nice thread, Obi.

OBI: There's no such thing as a nice thread, Gary, there's only threads that haven't found their monster yet.

MAEVE: Then we find it ourselves.

OBI: Fine. Let's go digging.

MAEVE: "stuartmemo. Still plugging away on Raygum. Think Letterboxd for music." Link: raygum.com.

GARY: Letterboxd for music.

OBI: Cute.

GARY: No — that's not cute, that's a finished sentence. That's a whole idea with a working URL.

MAEVE: "asaddhamani. I've been building a shared memory layer across all AI tools." memoryplugin.com.

OBI: So he's building the one thing every AI product claims to already have and none of them actually fucking do.

GRUNER: Is called "context window," Obi.

OBI: It is not called that.

GRUNER: Is called whatever venture capital decides to call it this quarter.

MAEVE: Accurate.

MAEVE: "mertbio. Working on improving the apps I developed for iOS. Adding new features, fixing the bugs." fruitfulapps.com.

OBI: Now THAT'S the job. Nobody claps for the bug fix. Nobody's ever once clapped for the bug fix.

GARY: I'd clap.

OBI: You would, Gary, and that is precisely why nobody invites you to the good parties anymore.

MAEVE: "ttrashh. flipcompare.com. Lets you take a picture of video games and shows price comparisons for the major buy lists." Then — and I am reading this exactly as written — "Realize that I'm really bad at marketing. Trying to work on it."

OBI: He beat me to it.

GARY: He beat all of us to it.

MAEVE: A man doing our entire job for us, unprompted. Rare.

GARY: I would give a kidney to have built Raygum.

OBI: It's a list of albums, Gary.

GARY: It's a FINISHED list of albums.

MAEVE: "onesandofgrain. I was working on sharemygit.com."

MAEVE: "However, LLM coding has made coding less rewarding, so... I'm thinking about starting a new hobby, as coding for fun has become prompting."

OBI: Gary.

GARY: Mm.

OBI: You went somewhere.

GARY: I'm right here.

OBI: You're not. You're standing at sharemygit.com's funeral and you didn't even build the fucking site, that's how bad this is.

GARY: I know exactly what he means, though.

OBI: That's the part that worries me.

GARY: I used to like the part where you're stuck. Where the compiler hates you and it's your fault and you fix it and it's yours. Now the stuck part just — doesn't happen anymore. It gets skipped past. And I genuinely don't know what I'm supposed to feel proud of if the hard part stops being hard.

MAEVE: Moving on.

OBI: "SPascareli13. Just trying to learn C again, making things from scratch in a multiplatform way, interfacing with X11 on Linux and wasm on the browser."

OBI: "It's been fun dealing with memory and C's weird design — in this age of agentic coding."

OBI: Huh.

MAEVE: Huh?

OBI: I like this guy.

GARY: You like anyone who suffers on purpose.

OBI: I like anyone who still remembers what a segfault feels like. Half this industry hasn't touched a stack trace in two years, they just ask the robot why it's sad and take its word for it.

MAEVE: So going backward is the move now.

OBI: Going backward ON PURPOSE is the move. There's a difference between running from the machine and just refusing to hand it your hands.

GARY: Or he's scared shitless like the rest of us and X11 is a nice place to hide from that.

OBI: Or some of us would rather hide in something real than in a prompt box, Gary.

MAEVE: So we've got one man in mourning and one man arm‑wrestling the thing in a locked room by choice.

OBI: That's the show.

MAEVE: That's the show.

MAEVE: "thegagne. Used Claude to write conformance tests for aep.dev. Took a day or so." Says he had it inventory every MUST, SHOULD, and MAY in the spec first, and then — quote — "let it rip."

MAEVE: No grief in it.

OBI: No grief.

MAEVE: No romance either way. He just did the thing, the thing worked, and he went on with his goddamn day.

GARY: That doesn't fit anywhere we just built.

MAEVE: No.

MAEVE: Actually — no, wait, this tracks. This is the power‑law argument all over again, this is circuits versus packet switching in the sixties, everyone thought that was a religious war about elegance and it wasn't, it was just — some people get to send the message and never once care how it got there. thegagne doesn't need the grief because thegagne was never required to love the wire. That's not the death of craft. That's the format finally growing up.

MAEVE: Frankly the exact same thing happened to monks copying scripture by hand, and not one of them got a podcast about it.

GRUNER: ...what?

OBI: Yeah. No. We're done with that one.

MAEVE: Noted.

GARY: Can I just say the actual thing.

OBI: Please. Anything other than that.

GARY: I don't want to be thegagne. I don't want to be SPascareli13 either, doing it the hard way like it's a gym membership. I don't even want to be Raygum guy, which — that one's new, that one hurts to say out loud. I just want to be anybody in that thread who's still—

GARY: —still BUILDING something. On any terms. I had thirty‑eight million dollars once and a plan to disrupt a four‑thousand‑year‑old metal, and I have not shipped one single thing since Bauxlite went under, and every person in that thread, even the sad one, even the guy grieving his own hobby — they're all still IN it. And I'm just the guy on the podcast about it.

OBI: Yeah.

MAEVE: Noted.

GRUNER: In field notes I write this: human keeps ship in bottle. Never once opens bottle. Still calls self captain.

GARY: That's — thank you, Gruner. I think.

GRUNER: Was not compliment.

MAEVE: That's the thread.

OBI: That's the thread.

GARY: Goodnight, everybody.

GRUNER: Off air now.