Five side projects worth your time (week of 17 Aug 2026)
Every Monday our collector sweeps the high-scoring posts on Show HN, lobste.rs and GitHub Trending. I pick the ones genuinely worth opening and give each a line on why. The bar is simple: someone building a side project should come away with something — an idea, or proof that one person can pull this off.
Five picks this week, all from Show HN.
MIDI piano autocomplete
simedw.com/midi-autocomplete (HN discussion, 584 points)
One person trained a 125M-parameter model that autocompletes piano improvisation in real time, on-device. Worth reading because it proves the point directly: interesting AI projects don't need datacenter compute. 125M is a ten-thousandth of a mainstream language model — trainable on one consumer GPU. The write-up covers data, training and deployment end to end; a textbook case of a small model doing one thing well.
Huzzah
danielvaughn.dev/posts/huzzah (HN discussion, 373 points)
A take on what AI-assisted coding should look like that is nothing like a chat window. It's contentious — 208 comments arguing in earnest — and that's exactly why it's worth your time: the thread holds more practitioner experience about AI workflows than the post itself.
Desktop Colors
desktopcolors.com (HN discussion, 166 points)
A museum of solid desktop background colors from classic operating systems. That Windows 3.1 green, that Mac OS 8 blue, each researched down to the hex code. No business model, no reason to exist; the maker just wanted it to. We think this is side projects at their best: a topic too small to justify, finished well enough that people share it.
Mic Drop
micdrop.gg (HN discussion, 92 points)
Realtime multiplayer karaoke. Realtime sync is famously hard — latency, state consistency, reconnection, each a paper of its own — and this project wraps the whole bundle in a product nobody could call boring. A good reference if you want a project that is technically hard and demos well to friends.
Model Map
modelmap.cc (HN discussion, 113 points)
Feed it any HuggingFace model, get an interactive architecture diagram. A model teaching tool: one question (what does this model look like), one answer (a diagram), done thoroughly (animated, interactive, any model). Tool-shaped side projects usually die of scope; this one shows the opposite.
How these get picked
The candidate list is automated (HN's public API, lobste.rs's public JSON, the GitHub Trending page). The picking and the one-line judgments are human. We publish links and our own opinion, never the original content. Any week that can't fill five worthwhile slots gets skipped.
This post comes from SideShip, a place for sharing side projects. If you have one half-built, or finished and unseen, post it here — three required fields, no email verification, two minutes. When you publish, I'll personally leave the first piece of feedback.