The graveyard of good ideas
Solutions that were tried, and what stopped them.
Patents that were rejected or abandoned, products that shut down, projects that went quiet. Borrow the idea, avoid the dead end.
496 solutions
- startupShut down2026
Tell HN: Anthropic won't reset usage limits for those who downgraded
On March 27, I contacted Anthropic Support reporting I hit usage limits very early. On 13 April, I emailed again asking about usage issues (like many others): I started that Monday with 72% of my usage used. On 17 April, after three weeks of the first open support thread, disappointed in their replies to the second, and exactly six days before their published post-mortem and their promise to reset usage limits, I downgraded my account from Max to Pro, and updated the support thread with that info. > Today we are resetting usage limits for all subscribers. -- Yesterday's post: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem I followed up today to ask if this applied to me, noting, > Does this [reset usage promise] apply to my account? And how many weeks worth of usage is reset, please? I note there was ongoing impact for significant time. Their rep
Why it failed: On March 27, I contacted Anthropic Support reporting I hit usage limits very early. On 13 April, I emailed again asking about usage issues (like many others): I started that Monday with 72% of my usage used. On 17 April, after three weeks of the first open support thread, disappo
vintagedave
- startupShut down2026
Alternative to Internet Archive
Now; i use the archive to archive my prolithic output of music. (i have over 300 albums.) The music is of my own creation. Since the DDoS attack of 2024; Archive has been a hit or miss on the uploading factors. And many of my releases have specific dates for release. With the uncertainty of the uploads happening it causes me to break focus on working with music and watch the upload to make sure there isn't a 503 happening each file. (which sometimes happens frequently.) I am in search of a similar uploading process with an unlimited amount of uploads. I don't want to make money off of my music. I don't want to individually input over 2000 songs; including their metadata and other factors. Many sites that we both have heard of; have various limitations or are not privacy friendly platforms ran by a company that seeks to be Big Brother from 1984 and watch us in a Brave New W
Why it failed: Now; i use the archive to archive my prolithic output of music. (i have over 300 albums.) The music is of my own creation. Since the DDoS attack of 2024; Archive has been a hit or miss on the uploading factors. And many of my releases have specific dates for release. With the unc
earworms
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: How do people keep track of organizational knowledge?
With code coming in faster and faster, we've been losing track of context, what's out of date, the source of truth, etc. Also with individuals spending less and less time on any one problem, finding an expert to answer questions has become challenging. People don't have that single domain of expertise like we used to. There's too much surface area to cover. Are we the only ones dealing with this? How's everyone else handling it?
Why it failed: With code coming in faster and faster, we've been losing track of context, what's out of date, the source of truth, etc. Also with individuals spending less and less time on any one problem, finding an expert to answer questions has become challenging. People don't
kadhirvelm
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: A new benchmark for testing LLMs for deterministic outputs
When building workflows that rely on LLMs, we commonly use structured output for programmatic use cases like converting an invoice into rows or meeting transcripts into tickets or even complex PDFs into database entries. The model may return the schema you want, but with hallucinated values like `invoice_date` being off by 2 months or the transcript array ordered wrongly. The JSON is valid, but the values are not. Structured output today is a big part of using LLMs, especially when building deterministic workflows. Current structured output benchmarks (e.g., JSONSchemaBench) only validate the pass rate for JSON schema and types, and not the actual values within the produced JSON. So we designed the Structured Output Benchmark (SOB) that fixes this by measuring both the JSON schema pass rate, types, and the value accuracy across all three modalities, text, image, and audio. For our test s
Why it failed: When building workflows that rely on LLMs, we commonly use structured output for programmatic use cases like converting an invoice into rows or meeting transcripts into tickets or even complex PDFs into database entries. The model may return the schema you want, but with hallucin
khurdula
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Aura – a Rust agent that investigates and fixes production incidents
We run a SaaS that handles petabytes of data. Our SRE team experimented with using claude, openclaw, langchain, etc. within our incident response workflows. We struggled with overflowing context, lethal trifecta vectors, hallucinations, and burned a lot of frontier tokens mostly on easy work. Approval fatigue was a challenge, and we drew a hard line at relaxing permissions in production. Long story short, we built and open-sourced AURA, a Rust-based harness specifically designed for the type of operations work which routinely involves large volumes of telemetry data and coordinated investigations across many domains of knowledge / state. We have found even on open-weights models, root cause accuracy has been very good, and remediation actions are guarded with human-in-the-loop. AURA runs from a centralized configuration file where workers are defined and scoped to task domains, (e.g
Why it failed: We run a SaaS that handles petabytes of data. Our SRE team experimented with using claude, openclaw, langchain, etc. within our incident response workflows. We struggled with overflowing context, lethal trifecta vectors, hallucinations, and burned a lot of frontier tokens mostly
jvogt
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Clawe – open-source Trello for agent teams
We recently started to use agents to update some documentation across our codebase on a weekly basis, and everything quickly turned into cron jobs, logs, and terminal output. it worked, but was hard to tell what agents were doing, why something failed, or whether a workflow was actually progressing. We thought it would be more interesting to treat agents as long-lived workers with state and responsibilities and explicit handoffs. Something you can actually see and reason about, instead of just tailing logs. So we built Clawe, a small coordination layer on top of OpenClaw that lets agent workflows run, pause, retry, and hand control back to a human at specific points. This started as an experiment in how agent systems might feel to operate, but we're starting to see real potential for it, especially for content review and maintenance workflows in marketing. Curious what abstractions
Why it failed: We recently started to use agents to update some documentation across our codebase on a weekly basis, and everything quickly turned into cron jobs, logs, and terminal output. it worked, but was hard to tell what agents were doing, why something failed, or whether a workflow was a
Jonathanfishner
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Kontext CLI – Credential broker for AI coding agents in Go
We built the Kontext CLI because AI coding agents need access to GitHub, Stripe, databases, and dozens of other services — and right now most teams handle this by copy-pasting long-lived API keys into .env files, or the actual chat interface, whilst hoping for the best. The problem isn't just secret sprawl. It's that there's no lineage of access. You don't know which developer launched which agent, what it accessed, or whether it should have been allowed to. The moment you hand raw credentials to a process, you've lost the ability to enforce policy, audit access, or rotate without pain. The credential is the authorization, and that's fundamentally broken when autonomous agents are making hundreds of API calls per session. Kontext takes a different approach. You declare what credentials a project needs in a .env.kontext file: GITHUB_TOKEN={{kontext:github}} S
Why it failed: We built the Kontext CLI because AI coding agents need access to GitHub, Stripe, databases, and dozens of other services — and right now most teams handle this by copy-pasting long-lived API keys into .env files, or the actual chat interface, whilst hoping for the best. The probl
mc-serious
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: TTF-DOOM – A raycaster running inside TrueType font hinting
TrueType fonts have a hinting VM that grid-fits glyphs. It has a stack, storage area, conditionals, function calls, and it turns out it's Turing-complete. So I built a raycasting engine in the hinting bytecode. The glyph "A" in the font has 16 vertical bar contours. The hinting program reads player coordinates from font variation axes via GETVARIATION, does DDA ray marching against a tile map in the storage area, and repositions bar heights with SCFS. It ends up looking like a crude Wolfenstein-style view. Small visuzlization: https://github.com/4RH1T3CT0R7/ttf-doom/blob/main/docs/media... About 6.5 KB of bytecode total - 13 functions, 795 storage slots, sin/cos lookup tables. JS handles movement, enemies, and shooting, then passes the coordinates to the font through CSS font-variation-settings. The font is basically a weird GPU
Why it failed: TrueType fonts have a hinting VM that grid-fits glyphs. It has a stack, storage area, conditionals, function calls, and it turns out it's Turing-complete. So I built a raycasting engine in the hinting bytecode. The glyph "A" in the font has 16 vertical bar contours
4RH1T3CT0R
- startupShut down2026
Thanks HN for 15 years of support and helping me find my life's work
Tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of the first day of the Recurse Center ( https://www.recurse.com/ ) My cofounders and I did YC all the way back in the Summer of 2010, with the initial idea of building "OkCupid for jobs." That idea quickly fizzled, and we spent the better part of a year pivoting between other ideas that also failed. Finally, we made something that we wanted ourselves: a self-directed programming retreat, where people built fun projects, contributed to open source, and helped each other become better programmers. After running two small batches, we launched on HN[1] and got an incredible reception. That post on HN helped us reach beyond our personal networks and meet programmers from around the world, many of whom have since become friends. HN brought us the majority of people who came to our next few batches, and in the years since, HN has remain
Why it failed: Tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of the first day of the Recurse Center ( https://www.recurse.com/ ) My cofounders and I did YC all the way back in the Summer of 2010, with the initial idea of building "OkCupid for jobs." That idea quickly fizzled, and we
nicholasjbs
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: How I find a job where what is needed is solid code, not firefighting?
Today I saw that post about AI destroying the future of West software. I remembered I am having a similar struggle with my jobs. Right now my life is like this: some company lost their senior, they hire me to replace. They expect me to produce code with same speed and same quality in 2 months. Then they realize they are late actually (one company for example was 6 months late to deliver to clients) and want me to use AI to churn out code even faster. Meanwhile I find out they lost all people that knew how things actually worked, there is no documentation, or worse, the documentation is outright wrong ( one project I worked had thousands of Jira tickets generated from a requisites document. After some months of politicking I got permission to see the requisites document and learned it was from another project entirely, they wasted years coding with the wrong requisites outright! ) Then as
Why it failed: Today I saw that post about AI destroying the future of West software. I remembered I am having a similar struggle with my jobs. Right now my life is like this: some company lost their senior, they hire me to replace. They expect me to produce code with same speed and same qualit
speeder
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Netfence – Like Envoy for eBPF Filters
To power the firewalling for our agents so that they couldn't contact arbitrary services, I build netfence. It's like Envoy but for eBPF filters. It allows you to define different DNS-based rules that are resolved in a local daemon to IPs, then pushed to the eBPF filter to allow traffic. By doing it this way, we can still allow DNS-defined rules, but prevent contacting random IPs. There's also no network performance penalty, since it's just DNS lookups and eBPF filters referencing memory. It also means you don't have to tamper with the base image, which the agent could potentially manipulate to remove rules (unless you prevent root maybe). It automatically manages the lifecycle of eBPF filters on cgroups and interfaces, so it works well for both containers and micro VMs (like Firecracker). You implement a control plane, just like Envoy xDS, which you can manage t
Why it failed: To power the firewalling for our agents so that they couldn't contact arbitrary services, I build netfence. It's like Envoy but for eBPF filters. It allows you to define different DNS-based rules that are resolved in a local daemon to IPs, then pushed to the eBPF filter
dangoodmanUT
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: How to break Claude Code addiction?
TL;DR: How can I break my workaholic Claude Code addiction? Hello HN users, I really appreciate you reading this. I can't think of a better audience for this question. If this issue has affected you in any way, I would be really thankful to you if you could leave a comment on this post. MY GOAL: to be able to consistently do an acceptable day's work as a professional software engineer, keeping a reasonably good understanding of the parts of the code that I changed that day, ending the day roughly on time, feeling like I did enough, feeling like I can forget about work until the next workday. MY PROBLEM: I find that as the workday goes on and time runs out, my style of programming gets further from LLM-assisted coding (me designing and writing code, talking to Claude Code only when I get stuck) and closer to pure vibe-coding (where I don't even review the code it writes unt
Why it failed: TL;DR: How can I break my workaholic Claude Code addiction? Hello HN users, I really appreciate you reading this. I can't think of a better audience for this question. If this issue has affected you in any way, I would be really thankful to you if you could leave a comment o
isomorph
- startupShut down2026
Alan Kay: Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels [video]
The following explanation is taken from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622607 : Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration. Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over. What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it. Alan joked it
Why it failed: The following explanation is taken from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622607 : Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration. Alan
behoove
- startupShut down2026
Tell HN: I cut Claude API costs from $70/month to pennies
The first time I pulled usage costs after running Chatter.Plus - a tool I'm building that aggregates community feedback from Discord/GitHub/forums - for a day hours, I saw $2.30. Did the math. $70/month. $840/year. For one instance. Felt sick. I'd done napkin math beforehand, so I knew it was probably a bug, but still. Turns out it was only partially a bug. The rest was me needing to rethink how I built this thing. Spent the next couple days ripping it apart. Making tweaks, testing with live data, checking results, trying again. What I found was I was sending API requests too often and not optimizing what I was sending and receiving. Here's what moved the needle, roughly big to small (besides that bug that was costin me a buck a day alone): - Dropped Claude Sonnet entirely - tested both models on the same data, Haiku actually performed better at a third
Why it failed: The first time I pulled usage costs after running Chatter.Plus - a tool I'm building that aggregates community feedback from Discord/GitHub/forums - for a day hours, I saw $2.30. Did the math. $70/month. $840/year. For one instance. Felt sick. I'd do
ok_orco
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please? (2026)
The 2020 thread does a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 It shows 100 solutions in light of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Intense opinions and discussion. It teaches about alligator energy and how they can live without food for up to two years. It teaches that this site should look like top, yet I’ve rarely seen top on a white terminal in the past two decades. This does exist, nofi. Workarounds exist, and those are “mid” janky shit shows. One I tried was an iOS app. It flashes the page between light and dark on every click. Aside from not being a solution, it’s nausea-inducing, takes 20+ steps to install, requires you to blindly trust the app without a Git repo, and requires you to change your OS. It shows that running 20 miles to solve this is what people do to get to any promise of a solution. So many of these exist that it’s just a swamp of well intend
Why it failed: The 2020 thread does a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966 It shows 100 solutions in light of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Intense opinions and discussion. It teaches about alligator energy and how they can live without food for up to two years. It
Stitch4223
- startupShut down2026
Median product "lifespan" has fallen from ~4y down to ~1.5y
The "product graveyard" of SaaSHub has been tracking the status (and lifespan) of hundreds of thousands of products. It's been hovering around 4y for quite some time. However, there's a sharp decline in 2026 leading to about 1.5y these days. https://www.saashub.com/product-graveyard That's a huge drop. And, it matches my "human" observations. A lot of products are being vibe coded, released, and soon after that abandoned. It's become too cheap to produce software. So, a lot of people have been experimenting for 'free' with their ideas - only to find out that they weren't viable... or that they couldn't bring customers in. Distribution and marketing have become much more important than before - within the context that everyone can build "features" for free. Anyhow, I expect this trend of shortening produc
Why it failed: The "product graveyard" of SaaSHub has been tracking the status (and lifespan) of hundreds of thousands of products. It's been hovering around 4y for quite some time. However, there's a sharp decline in 2026 leading to about 1.5y these days. https://
stanislavb
- startupShut down2026
LG ThinQ Terms of Use
Some of my kitchen appliances are LG and I installed the LG ThinQ app on my phone. Sometimes I like to leave a cold dish in the oven before I go out then remotely start it when I’m on my way back home, so I arrive to a nice hot dinner. After a recent HN post about LG malware and further research, I decided to kick my appliances out of the network. I also tried to remove my user account just to find out that in order to use the app I need to first accept the new terms of use. I asked ChatGPT for a summary. This seems a lot more aggressive than the standard terms of use of other products and services. 1. No arbitration opt-out. You give up court, jury trial, class actions, mass actions, and collective claims. Most disputes must go through individual arbitration, and LG says your only alternative is to stop using the service. Claims generally must be brought within one year. (Sections 20.b
Why it failed: Some of my kitchen appliances are LG and I installed the LG ThinQ app on my phone. Sometimes I like to leave a cold dish in the oven before I go out then remotely start it when I’m on my way back home, so I arrive to a nice hot dinner. After a recent HN post about LG malware and
tedggh
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: How do you deal with AI output of your boss?
So, my boss goes on a rampage. You can clearly see the joy and at the same time the rage and impatience. AI is the tool he always wanted. We are too slow. Process is out of the window. No need for sprints anymore. No planning, just doing. All people downstream must somehow adapt. Whenever i see now his automated messages in slack, my natural reaction is: why do i even bother reading that? Thats for machines to read. He does not need me? Clearly i am not made for that. What is he expecting me to do? To confirm how great the AI did the job? Should i remember all these perfect presentations AI has created and integrate it into my doings into the coming weeks? I am torn. Should i really free my AI and deal with all this incoming text? Is this the way to react on this perfection? I am not mad at him, it clearly frees him of all the burder of dealing with people. I just dont know how to deal w
Why it failed: So, my boss goes on a rampage. You can clearly see the joy and at the same time the rage and impatience. AI is the tool he always wanted. We are too slow. Process is out of the window. No need for sprints anymore. No planning, just doing. All people downstream must somehow adapt.
okr
- startupShut down2026
Durable Object alarm loop: $34k in 8 days, zero users, no platform warning
Sharing this as a warning to anyone using Cloudflare Durable Objects with alarms. Root cause: My DO agent's onStart() handler called this.ctx.storage.setAlarm() on every wake-up without checking whether an alarm was already scheduled. Combined with 60+ preview Worker deployments each creating independent DO instances, this created a runaway self-health-check loop. Timeline: - April 3: loop began (zero DO usage before this date) - April 4-5: peaked at ~930 billion row reads/day - April 11: found it, fixed it - April 15: $34,895 invoice due with no billing response yet The fix: // Before (dangerous) async onStart() { await this.ctx.storage.setAlarm(Date.now() + 60_000) } // After (safe) async onStart() { const existing = await this.ctx.storage.getAlarm() if (!existing) { await this.ctx.storage.setAlarm(Date.now() + 60_000) } } Other things worth doing: - Strip
Why it failed: Sharing this as a warning to anyone using Cloudflare Durable Objects with alarms. Root cause: My DO agent's onStart() handler called this.ctx.storage.setAlarm() on every wake-up without checking whether an alarm was already scheduled. Combined with 60+ preview Worker deploym
thewillmoss
- startupShut down2026
Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
Same as the popular question from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26721951 I'm asking again as a lot has changed in the past few years especially w.r.t LLMs, coding agents etc. copy pasting from the op: "I'm an average developer looking for ways to work as little as humanely possible." - I really don't care about the product I work on. I just want to do some task/project and checkout. - Fully remote will be ideal. - Salary can be on the low end. - I feel the world currently is too hyper-capitalistic and I don't think I fit in well. On top of that my country has a billion+ people and everything seems like battle for scraps. Unless I hit home with some indie hacking/side project, I don't think this will be possible. I believe there must some niche apps/plugin/extension/ssydev roles for some crm/cms e
Why it failed: Same as the popular question from 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26721951 I'm asking again as a lot has changed in the past few years especially w.r.t LLMs, coding agents etc. copy pasting from the op: "I'm an average developer looking fo
makemethrowaway
- startupShut down2026
Show HN: Xmloxide – an agent-made Rust replacement for libxml2
Recently several AI labs have published experiments where they tried to get AI coding agents to complete large software projects. - Cursor attempted to make a browser from scratch: https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents - Anthropic attempted to make a C Compiler: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler I have been wondering if there are software packages that can be easily reproduced by taking the available test suites and tasking agents to work on projects until the existing test suites pass. After playing with this concept by having Claude Code reproduce redis and sqlite, I began looking for software packages where an agent-made reproduction might actually be useful. I found libxml2, a widely used, open-source C language library designed for parsing, creating, and manipulating XML and HTML documents. Three months ago it became u
Why it failed: Recently several AI labs have published experiments where they tried to get AI coding agents to complete large software projects. - Cursor attempted to make a browser from scratch: https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents - Anthropic attempted to make a C Compil
jawiggins
- startupShut down2026
Tell HN: An update from the new Tindie team
Received by email tonight about two hours ago: Dear Tindie Community, My name is Gongyu Su, and I am writing on behalf of the new Tindie ownership team. First, we sincerely apologize for the recent downtime and the disruption it caused. We understand that many buyers and community members were left without clear information during the transition, and that this created frustration and concern. Tindie is now owned by EETree LLC, a Washington State company. Our team took over Tindie because we believe it remains an important platform for makers, hardware creators, engineers, and independent sellers around the world. The recent transition was more complex than expected. Tindie runs on an older technical framework with many connected services, and the migration from the previous operating environment to the new one took longer and caused more disruption than anyone wanted. We know this was no
Why it failed: Received by email tonight about two hours ago: Dear Tindie Community, My name is Gongyu Su, and I am writing on behalf of the new Tindie ownership team. First, we sincerely apologize for the recent downtime and the disruption it caused. We understand that many buyers and communit
altairprime
- startupShut down2026
SlopCodeBench 10/2026 – Opus 5.5, Astra wins overall, xhigh considered harmful
Quick update here since a lot of folks asked about what slopcodebench is / where it fits in Slop code bench is unique among benchmarks in that it makes a model work against a progressively disclosed list of features (checkpoints) that it doesn’t know it advance, inheriting the same codebase through the lifecycle of a single multi-checkpoint challenge I like this because it much more mirrors how real software dev happens, rather than most benchmarks with one off tasks where slop code doesn’t hinder future progress The original post[1] and the SOL/fable follow up[2] went into a bit more detail on the benchmark and its challenges 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49076391 2. https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-f...
Why it failed: Quick update here since a lot of folks asked about what slopcodebench is / where it fits in Slop code bench is unique among benchmarks in that it makes a model work against a progressively disclosed list of features (checkpoints) that it doesn’t know it advance, inheriting t
dhorthy
- startupShut down2026
Google to discontinue allowing send as an external account in Jan. 2027
Per https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213, starting in January 2027, you may no longer send email as you@x.com if you use a you@gmail.com account. You can only send as you@gmail.com. For those who like the convenience of having all of their external email commingling with their Gmail email, and taking advantage of the integration, such as calendar integration, Google Drive integration, and more, what is our best path forward? At this point, it seems like doing a Google Workspace paid account may be the best solution for continuity of experience, but you break all the commingling and integration. Also, your you@x.com account is a separate window from your you@gmail.com account. You could also consider a service like Fastmail. While it is reasonable quality, you don’t get the quality of the app or of the web experience, and its spam catching features don’
Why it failed: Per https://support.google.com/mail/answer/17101213, starting in January 2027, you may no longer send email as you@x.com if you use a you@gmail.com account. You can only send as you@gmail.com. For those who like the convenience of having all of their exte
AuthorizedCust