Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by michaelbuckbee 2 days ago
The funniest thing I've made is a free utility called "Moniker" that contextually renames files based on their contents.

Uses local AI models and I was able to snag this great domain name.

https://finalfinalreallyfinaluntitleddocumentv3.com/

But hands down the most useful thing I've made is HutchDB, which is a MCP service that you can call from any AI chat or Agent setup to store data for you.

Literally from your AI you just say "save that to Hutch" and then it figures out:

- The schema + fields - Builds nice webviews (Kanban, Timeline, Grid, Calendar) - Lets you share the output with people

So people use it for all kinds of things like time tracking ("every hour save a summary of my activities to Hutch"), for Agent to Human handoff ("Every day check social media for mentions of my company and save them to Hutch").

I use it for things like recording all of our marketing activities and then having my AI compare those to signups for rough attribution, etc.

Dead useful and at https://hutchdb.com

2 comments

I love it! A few questions that made me think: - how do you know that "people use it for all kinds of things"? I just read your privacy policy and I'm concerned about my AI agent possibly leaking some API key to Hutch and then you can read it. - how is this free? You're hosting on Vercel, one of the most expensive hosting providers. What happens when this goes semi-viral? How do I know you won't just pull the plug to cut costs or start charging $500/month? I don't want to sign up, invest my time, and then lose access. - I signed up and now I can't access privacy policy nor terms of service pages, because when I go to https://hutchdb.com/ I get redirected to https://hutchdb.com/dashboard
This is all very fair criticisms. This thread asked: "What are tools you have made for yourself?" and that's genuinely what this is. I wanted it so I made it and then AI makes it so easy to just throw up a marketing page.

I've a a handful of dev friends that have started to use it as well and give their feedback and it's been slowly growing as I've added sharing/invites.

I would absolutely not recommend putting big production data into it currently.

My vision for it was something more like how the #1 use of spreadsheets is actually people making lists and not actually people doing lots of calculations.

Given the uptake today (thanks everybody!) and your feedback (thanks Mystery-Machine) I'm going to work at addressing your concerns.

You completely ignored every question related to costs/privacy.
I thought it was more implied, but let me be more explicit:

- This is something I made for myself without a lot of commercial thought, so I still haven't thought through pricing + usage + limits + operational limits. In it's current wildly unoptimized state it's still very cheap to run.

- For the specific concern about API Key leakage there's not a lot I can do about that (that I'm aware of) as the logic of what gets sent is handled by the client AI. It is possible to pull down and audit both the tools + instructions that are published by the MCP server if there are concerns on that side.

dope!