Tooling needs developers say they would pay for, from HN and Software Recs.
I pay for JetBrains, Creative cloud, chatGpt, figma, and mid journey… Are there any must have dev productivity tools?
The most important features are the ability to quickly and reliably deliver app updates over one year, safety, affordability.
RDP sends draw commands… the default way on MacOS and Linux is VNC which sends all the pixels. I've noticed for years…
Think google comments connected to Inspect Element in chrome that can be shared with an organization.
I maintain a set of REST microservices (Go and Node.js, in Docker on Linux) and our API regression suite is mostly hand-written Postman collections. Keeping them updated takes too much time, and our mocks for downstream services drift from real behaviour.
On a client project, Copilot and Codex rate-limit me for 30+ minutes at a time — even on paid plans. Looking for a free/open-source VS Code assistant with no strict caps.
I'm working on an embedded C project with a complicated network of structures, pointers and 'objects' — part legacy, part written by someone else. I want to understand the codebase's structure.
They like to self-host everything, and are wary of using outside services… We've set up Jitsi.
Is there a modern open-source OCR library more accurate than Tesseract or PaddlePaddle? We tried both — too inaccurate for automated software testing.
I've a few services that currently use a chat service and a CLI client to generically send notifications from various apps. I'd like something similar without being tied to a chat client — just native web browsers. Something self-hosted, running behind nginx.
Swagger presents a JSON API schema nicely. What tool does the same for a database schema stored as JSON/XML? I want to track schema changes with Git only.
I manage a single Linux VPS (Ubuntu) and I am currently juggling several separate tools: SSH to run commands, upload/download over SFTP, and manage MySQL and PostgreSQL (queries, browsing tables, quick backups).
dig is the standard DNS query tool, but it can't enumerate a domain's subdomains — each one must be queried explicitly.
Sharing links to internal services (e.g. http://10.8.39.29:7830/) in Slack triggers a 'make sure you trust this link' dialog every single time — pure friction for teams living in internal tools.
My phone auto-uploads photos to Nextcloud. On desktop I want a GUI that downloads files from the WebDAV server and deletes them afterwards to free space.
Every run needs a fixed, checkable permission profile: file tools only, no hooks/MCP/plugins.
We are a subsidiary and copy via ODBC part of a big database from our parent company onto our own servers. The old software we are using is at the end of its life-cycle; it was never the best and we built a lot of workarounds within and around it.
But why none of them are getting a real traction while node.js is popular for many years now?
I don't want a whitespace change to replace the whole line, and commenting a line shouldn't count as a rewrite either — so I can track the code that actually stayed the same.
Obtainium installs and updates apps straight from their releases pages and notifies on new versions — just add a URI. Does a desktop-OS equivalent exist?
I'm trying to incorporate AI code tools into my flow, but my issue is that I spend a lot of time code reviewing AI. I wanted to find an AI tool that helps me code review better — look at a diff and present it to me in a way that makes it easy to understand.
We want a tool that easily enforces policies on user endpoints — right now just disk encryption and automatic OS updates, across Linux/macOS/Windows.
Our system: SQL backend, Access frontend with forms, datasheets and reports. It works but the limitations compound yearly — we need a new frontend.
Local Python project, every file has docstrings. Is there a tool to generate static HTML docs from them? Sphinx seems like overkill.
I want to install a closed-source audio player but worry about malware — install it in a containerized environment I can wipe cleanly.
I patch a third-party site's JS via DevTools → Source → Overrides. Works, but next visit it's inert until I open DevTools again — and the JS lives in webpack chunks, so swapping it isn't easy.
To decide when to buy a new computer, I'd love minimal historical performance data — a report like '2020-01-01: response time: 0.01s' over the years.