Forkcast Hacker News #21: keybytes, hob, r2d2-tv, moxnox, farol, china-policy-data, Agenttrust

Episode Summary#

Thirty GitHub projects shared on Hacker News: modular magnetic keyboard hardware, offline local AI, a webOS assistant, and a self-hosting hobby OS. Also featured are pull-request risk analysis, decentralized agent coordination, local speech recognition on an ESP32, self-hosted media and legal tools, and privacy-focused developer utilities.

Repositories Covered#

keybytes#

A truly modular keyboard. Each key has a CH32V003 RISC-V controller, four-sided pogo pins for power and I2C, and a magnetic case.

hob#

An easier way to use AI on your own computer. A free, open-source alternative to Claude and ChatGPT that runs open-weight models like Gemma and gpt-oss locally on Mac, Windows and Linux. Private, and works offline.

r2d2-tv#

Local home screen, private remote browser, and push-to-talk voice assistant for webOS TVs. A Linux host runs Chromium and voice models while the TV handles display and controls.

moxnox#

NT-like POSIX-compatible operating system. Its README says the system can build Moxnox from within Moxnox itself.

farol#

Know the risk of merging a pull request, and where it lives. Free, open-source CLI and GitHub Action: after your AI review, farol shows the riskiest files, what they reach, diff coverage and contract breaks. TypeScript/React, Go, Python.

china-policy-data#

Free daily JSON feed of Shanghai government grant/subsidy notices, for researchers and AI agents. The README cites roughly 150 notices gathered from nine official sources, available over an HTTP endpoint.

Agenttrust#

Enterprise Zero-Trust Security, Cascading Delegation, Human Approvals & Verifiable Audit Infrastructure for Autonomous AI Agents. It screens parameters for injection and leaks, checks blast radius, applies capability policies, and gates dangerous actions for human approval.

casecite#

CaseCite is a source-available, self-hosted legal RAG caselaw research & document analysis platform. Its source-available Python platform keeps documents, indexes, and chat history on your servers, with eight tools sharing one corpus.

Agensh#

A Decentralized, Scalable Multiagent Harness. Microsoft’s Python harness lets them discover and claim subtasks, share findings, verify results, and merge progress asynchronously.

termcraft#

Terminal-based 2D sandbox survival. This Rust project offers procedural Overworld, Nether, and End areas, with mining, crafting, villages, and an Ender Dragon.

agent-relay#

Let AI coding sessions from different vendors work together, while you stay in charge. One session leads while another follows, and the relay carries plans and results so you can oversee the exchange.

MuscleMemory#

Open-source procedural memory for AI agents. Learns from what worked and what failed. It watches agent work and learns from a task after tests pass following the last change, then keeps that knowledge locally by default.

Nook#

Nook is a terminal markdown note editor written in Go with Bubble Tea whit the concept of Focus Line: the line you are typing always stays in the middle of the screen as raw markdown, while the rest of the document scrolls around it already rendered.

tiny-tube#

A tine tube like service. A single Go binary serves its own web interface, stores metadata in SQLite, and keeps video files on disk, with builds for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

esp-watchtower#

Autonomous, always-on Home Network Sentinel & Canary Honeypot for under $4 on ESP8266. The README describes a roughly three-dollar board monitoring network health, outages, and suspicious activity, with Discord alerts and no recurring subscription.

duls#

A mix between du and ls, visually showing the size current working directory. Its Go terminal view displays file counts, sizes, share percentages, and the largest items inside each entry.

bloom#

A task management and note-taking app for Android that is compatible with org-mode. You select a folder of dot-org files and sync it with a tool such as Syncthing; no account or export conversion is required.

aqueous#

Aqueous Archive Format. Its aqr tool decodes and recompresses formats including JPEG, MP3, PNG, ZIP, PDF, and gzip, then reconstructs the originals on extraction.

cleancode#

Open-source canvas for orchestrating Claude Code, Codex, and other CLI agents. Run agents in parallel, delegate tasks, and let AI build reusable workflows.

specops#

Make your AI agent think before it codes. One command begins a four-phase workflow that examines the codebase, specifies requirements, designs the change, and breaks it into ordered tasks.

icons#

React icon library with 2,500+ duotone icons and 250+ flags. Smooth, RTL-aware, and optimized SVGs. Its TypeScript React package advertises more than 2,500 SVG icons and 250 flags, with right-to-left awareness.

gradientdeck-skill#

An Agent Skill that gives coding agents design judgment, so the pages they build look made rather than generated. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Copilot.

junior#

RUNS ON YOUR MAC. ASKS BEFORE ANYTHING GOES OUT. Its README says the app stays on your Mac and supports Apple silicon and Intel.

whatsapp-bridge#

Self-hosted, read-only bridge to your WhatsApp chats, with an MCP server and a web admin UI built on top of whatsmeow. This Go bridge links as a WhatsApp device, keeps chosen messages in an encrypted database, and exposes signed-in, read-only MCP tools.

shotstash#

Self-hosted media cloud for creators. Your footage, your hardware, your cloud. Its Docker Compose quick start targets Linux x64, opens an owner account on port 3005, and documents backup plus GraphQL and REST APIs.

esp32-pie-asr#

Live English speech recognition on the ESP32-P4: a 65.7M-parameter streaming transducer in 2/4-bit weights, faster than real time, on the chip alone. With six voice-control demos.

git-dupe#

Plain Git versioning for the files that are yours, not the project’s: notes, scripts, skills, and agent instructions, all hidden from the project’s git while still getting their own history.

ranwhat#

Flight recorder and secret scanner for AI coding agents. Reads what Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and 17 more ran, and flags risky actions and leaked keys. Runs locally, no telemetry, MIT.

skill-spotter#

Auto detect potential skills based on repeated prompts. No: suggestions stay local, use no tokens per turn, and only become a draft when you invoke its command.

nodecode#

A living agent organism in Lisp. A single SBCL process evaluates Lisp definitions and stores its evolution as generations, with shells attaching to the same process.

Watch#

• Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX_Q86DduTQ
• Cover: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nX_Q86DduTQ/hqdefault.jpg

Notes#

Transcript and notes will be added from Forkcast output artifacts.