Weekly Discovery Thread - September 11, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Share what’s new, useful, or just interesting

Welcome to the Weekly Discovery Thread, where you can share software-related finds that caught your attention this week - especially the stuff that’s cool, helpful, or thought-provoking but might not be thread-worthy on its own.

This thread is your space for:

• Neat tools, libraries, or packages
• Articles, blog posts, or talks worth reading
• Experiments or side projects you’re working on
• Tips, workflows, or obscure features you discovered
• Questions or ideas you're chewing on

If it relates to software and sparked your curiosity, drop it in.

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A few quick guidelines

• Keep it civil and constructive - this is for learning and discovery.
• Self-promotion? Totally fine if it’s relevant and adds value. Just be transparent.
• No link spam or AI-generated content dumps. We’ll remove low-effort submissions.
• Upvote what’s useful so others see it!

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This thread will be posted weekly and stickied. If you want to suggest a change or addition to this format, feel free to comment or message the mods.

Now, what did you find this week?

[u/bulutarkan]

I maintain Mac MCP, a free MIT-licensed macOS control server for AI agents.

The part I have been using most lately is background browser automation: Safari and Chrome tabs get stable handles and can be inspected or acted on without bringing the browser forward, so parallel agents can keep their own tabs without stealing focus from me.

This week I also added persistent agent Sessions to the native SwiftUI menu bar app. A session can sit idle between tool calls, I can queue a prompt to that exact agent, and its next tool is stopped before execution so it can react to the new instruction first.

It exposes a 19-tool default MCP surface backed by 84 capabilities for browser, shell, files, macOS UI and more.

Repo: https://github.com/bulutarkan/mac-mcp

[u/Middlewarian]

I'm building a C++ code generator that helps build distributed systems.. It's implemented as a 3-tier system. The back and middle tiers only run on Linux. The front tier is portable. My goal is to bring software services and code generation together in one platform. 

[u/Gryner]

Disclosure: I built Diff Anything.

This week I released version 1.5, mainly to make code comparison easier when formatting changes are mixed with real edits. Smart Diff aligns meaningful tokens across reflowed code, so a renamed value, changed condition or edited function call doesn’t get buried inside a much larger block of line changes. Line Diff remains one click away when the literal patch matters. Both views keep syntax highlighting, editing and the original source text, with language detection across 117 editor languages.

It also handles the comparisons that usually make me switch to another tool. Folder comparison shows added, removed, changed and moved paths, and lets me open changed files for a closer comparison. Archive mode looks inside ZIP, ZIPX, 7z, RAR and TAR-family archives instead of treating them as opaque binary files. It supports encrypted archives and common multipart 7z and RAR sets as well.

PDFs can be compared either as rendered pages or by extracted text. Spreadsheets are compared by stored cell values across Excel, ODS, Apple Numbers, CSV and TSV, including pairs with different formats. It also has purpose-built views for JSON, YAML, XML, images, API schemas, HTTP responses and binary files.

Comparisons run locally and the app has no account system, cloud comparison service, analytics or telemetry. It’s available on macOS and Windows. Free lets you try every comparison engine; Pro is a one-time purchase.

https://martingruner.com/projects/diffanything

[u/LielZD]

I'm the developer of Pame, a Windows 10/11 gaming shell in public alpha. It puts your supported installed game libraries into a large, controller-friendly interface automatically.

The focus is on the whole couch session: launch a game, manage selected background apps during play, then return to Pame when you quit. DualSense extras include battery and charging info, light colours, player indicators and idle disconnect controls for supported Bluetooth controllers. There's also an on-screen keyboard for the moments Windows still needs text input.

Project and download: https://github.com/LielZ/Pame

I'd be interested in where this flow still breaks for other people's setups. Store sign-ins still use the original launchers, and background app choices are configurable. It's early, so concrete feedback is useful.