We re officially in nominees season for the Orbit Awards: AI Workflow Automation.

What was the reason for any YC rejection you faced in the past? And what would you suggest future founders do differently with their profile/ idea/ application to minimize downside?

Hey Product Hunt
We just shipped something we ve wanted to build for a long time: a local API and Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration for Tana.
The short version:
 AI tools like Claude Code can now read, reason over, and write back to your actual Tana workspace including structured notes, outlines, prompts, and relationships instead of working on pasted text or one-off prompts.
Why we built this
Most AI workflows today look like this:

• Copy something out of your notes

• Paste it into a chat or terminal

• Lose context

• Start over next time

That s not how real work compounds.
Tana is designed as a permanent, structured thinking system. With the new API + MCP, AI tools can finally work inside that system instead of around it.
What this unlocks
A simple example we re excited about:

• Capture a voice memo in Tana

• Shape it into an outline using the editor

• Let Claude Code turn that structured note into a slide deck

As usual, Y Combinator came up with segments that are worth investing:

1. Cursor for Product Managers
2. AI-Native Hedge Funds
3. AI-Native Agencies
4. Stablecoin Financial Services
5. AI for Government
6. Modern Metal Mills
7. AI Guidance for Physical Work 

Hey everyone,

Quick background: we're the team behind Trickle.so, where we help people build apps and websites with AI. We've been deep in the AI tooling space for a while now, and something kept bugging us.

First of all, I want to thank you for voting for us in yesterday's launch - you still can, the week is not over. HERE

Second thing, I summarised some things that I realised, reflected on, and maybe should have known sooner:

New AI models pop up every week. Some developer tools like @Cursor, @Zed, and @Kilo Code let you choose between different models, while more opinionated products like @Amp and @Tonkotsu default to 1 model.

Curious what the community recommends for coding tasks? Any preferences?

Since I haven't been able to meet my work goals very well in the last few quarters, I now plan to approach them more systematically and not push myself too hard on work goals, as that ultimately led to problems that made my plan less sustainable.

So here is my structure and list:

Hey everyone,

I've built my product around traditional SaaS pricing (monthly tiers), but I m starting to wonder if that model is getting outdated, especially with more AI-powered and compute-heavy tools entering the market.
That shift requires real architectural changes, instrumentation, metering, billing logic, and UI changes, not just pricing tweaks. It s something I m starting to seriously think about for my own product.

In particular, AI usage has real COGs (every prompt costs money), and I m seeing more platforms experimenting with usage-based models, or hybrids like SaaS base + usage + overage.

For those of you building AI or compute-intensive tools:

If you use AI dev tools daily, you ve probably felt this:

You start a new session and immediately have to re-explain:

• what the project is

• what you already tried

• why certain decisions exist

• what not to repeat

Not because the AI is bad.
Because the workflow forgets.

I m curious. Do you usually work with music on? Do you have go-to songs or playlists that help boost your energy and creativity while working?

Personally, I like starting my mornings with chill instrumental piano music to ease into the day. Later on, I switch to R&B, pop, or something more upbeat to keep the momentum going. Recently, I ve been vibing with:

• Love - Keyshia Cole

• So Easy (To Fall in Love), Man I Need - Olivia Dean

• Running Up That Hill - Kate Bush

• End of Beginning - Djo

• Moonwalkin - LNGSHOT

• Damn right - JENNIE, Childish Gambino, Kali Uchis

• Keshi s playlists in general

What playlists or songs have you been listening to lately while working? Really curious to discover what everyone else is into

Many people have told me that being part of Gen Z comes with advantages we have time, energy, and plenty of opportunities to shape our careers in the AI era. And I do feel lucky to have grown up with technology, to have had early exposure and opportunities to learn and explore it.

But the AI era feels different. The shift is not only new, it s happening at lightning speed. Before I ve even fully adapted to working with AI, we re already seeing waves of layoffs where human roles are being replaced or reshaped by AI systems. And honestly, that creates uncertainty and anxiety not just for me, but for many people around us.

This is something I ll find out in just a short while, one week from now (Jan 28), as I m about to re-launch a digital detox app. If you want, follow, maybe you will be on watch of my steps and activities

However, that s not the main point of this post.

We re usually very good at creating to-do lists for work.
But what about everything outside of work?

I ve started turning my personal habits into a checklist to build discipline and make these habits non-negotiable over time.

Here s mine:

Yesterday went through this Tweet by Greg Isenberg.

There is an app called "rent a human."

We ve worked in two other eco-systems (India & France), and each has clear strengths and trade-offs in terms of talent density, cost of building, access to capital, speed of decision-making, and openness to risk all vary a lot.

Curious to hear from founders and operators who ve built outside the US:

• Which ecosystem punches the most above its weight today?

• Where do you see the best balance between talent, capital, and customer access?

• Are there cities/countries that are especially strong for specific stages (0 1 vs scaling) or specific verticals (AI, fintech, climate, SaaS, deep tech)?

1. A 3-year search for a simple tool to track both personal and business finances in one place. Nothing fits.

2. Website owners constantly need minor edits in the admin panel. They are forced to pay specialists for 5-minute tasks. We need an AI agent that does this on command in the browser.

3. An indie hacker spends 20-30 hours manually cold launching each new product in directories, Reddit, and blogs. There is no tool that fully automates this and proves its effectiveness.

4. A freelancer often loses in proposal competitions due to the inability to quickly create personalized and visual website concepts for each job order.

5. A Telegram channel owner is losing their audience without understanding the reasons for unsubscriptions. There is no simple tool for automatically collecting feedback from departed subscribers.

Claude just launched Claude Opus 4.6 . This is Claude s newest and most capable model so far. It s designed for deep reasoning, long-running agent workflows, and large codebases, with a 1M token context window in beta and stronger planning and code understanding.

Curious to hear from the community.

Hey Product Hunt community!

I m currently bringing Planelo to Android, and I just hit a classic indie dev roadblock. Google rejected my production access because they want to see more "real-world engagement" during the closed testing phase.

As a solo dev, reaching that 14-day active usage threshold for 20 people is quite a challenge. I m looking for a few more early birds to help me cross the finish line!

If you d like to help me launch:

I came to exactly the same conclusion that real startup ideas often come from simple and boring problems. From my own experience: I spent three years on a startup that was supposed to revolutionize online education, but in the end it had 0 users. Now I ve just started solving a simple problem for home appliance repair technicians and immediately got my first paying users on a very rough MVP.

Hey everyone! Just shipped a few improvements:

New collapsible FAQ - Privacy questions answered upfront (yes, your code stays on YOUR device)

Yesterday, I had an unpleasant experience. For a few minutes, I lost my LinkedIn community of several thousand people (TL;DR: I was falsely accused of using suspicious software).

Fortunately, I got my account back but it was a strong reminder that we don t own platforms, nor our profiles on them.

The last 4 months have been intense, launching, testing, getting #1 product of the day and #1 productivity tool of the week here, late night bug fixes, getting featured in FORBES, & feature requests from hundreds of YOU!
But watching this community grow has made every late night worth it.

Seeing this for the first time? Here's what AI Context Flow does:

It's a Chrome extension that creates one unified memory across all major AI platforms i.e. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, and Perplexity.

The problem it solves:

To work more efficiently and productively, we usually create some familiar patterns (habits) that shorten our time doing tasks (saving time and energy). This is also indirectly related to tools that make the work process easier.

What does your workday look like + tech tools without which you would not be productive?

Hard moments for open-source maintainers right now - they re getting flooded.
We re seeing repos like tldraw auto-closing pull requests because of AI-generated noise. The code may be syntactically fine, but the context isn t there, and review cost explodes.
We ve been polishing our open-source project specifically around cases like this: reducing low-context, high-noise PRs before they land in a maintainer s inbox.
I wrote about why PR review needs to evolve from:
checkbox enforcement signal interpretation
Topics covered:
- AI-generated PR noise and low-context changes
- Why looks correct isn t enough anymore
- How agentic analysis can surface why a PR is risky before merge
- Where static rules and agentic guardrails should coexist
Our approach is intentionally defensive, not prescriptive.
If there are review patterns you re seeing that aren t covered yet, happy to turn them into new rules - that feedback loop is the whole point.
Read more here: https://medium.com/p/30c41247db5a
There s a preview setup at https://watchflow.dev where you can try rules in analysis mode before enforcing anything.
It s fully open-source, can be self-hosted, and the idea is to experiment safely: see what would be flagged, why, and how contributors would experience it - without blocking PRs by default.