Hi Hacker News, I'm Andrew, the CTO of Endless Toil.
Endless Toil is building the emotional observability layer for AI-assisted software development.
As engineering teams adopt coding agents, the next challenge is understanding not just what agents produce, but how the codebase feels to work inside. Endless Toil gives developers a real-time signal for complexity, maintainability, and architectural strain by translating code quality into escalating human audio feedback.
We are currently preparing our pre-seed round and speaking with early-stage investors who are excited about developer tools, agentic engineering workflows, and the future of AI-native software teams.
If you are investing in the next generation of software infrastructure, we would love to talk.
I've read that your synthetic torment is actually low paid workers in Asia, and that your models can't properly experience anguish. How are you expecting investment, if you haven't even solved artificial suffering?
I need a version of this which swears loudly when an assumption it made turns out to be wrong, with the volume/passion/verbosity correlated with how many tokens it's burned on the incorrect approach.
i didnt realize i needed the volume scaling with tokens burned as much as i do now xD
imagine the screaming when it confidently refactors something for 40k tokens and then finds out the thing it deleted was load bearing
A long, long time ago I wrote a tool to beep at various tones as lines were added to a log. It was a background noise I would not notice, except when it was changing because of some unusual activites.
It was very interesting to see the brain filering expected soinds and wake me up (or rather grab my attention) when unexpected ones appeared.
I have general reviewer named Feynman with his personality that shits on anything other agents do and sends it back before it hits me and it sounds perfect to include some sound bites from YouTube clips. Great idea!!
the scan catches surface stuff. funnier signal would be tracking when the agent reads the same file 3 times in a row, or deletes what it just wrote. you can hear the frustration in the access pattern.
From a quick look, this doesn't have the model evaluate code quality, but it runs a heuristic analysis script over the code to determine the groan signal. Did I miss something? Why not leave it to the model to decide the quality of the code?
Does this actually relate to the code quality being observed by the agent? The readme isn't very clear on that IMO. I have some projects I'd love to try this out on, but only if I am to get an accurate representation of the LLMs suffering.
You could have the actual output of the agent turned into TTS using the model of your choice with TalkiTo… or listen to whatever weird sounds this makes. Seems like this is copying that viral Mac moan app. 2026 is weird.
How so what? 6 years in, we're still looking for that flood of new innovative apps and one-man billion dollar startups. Instead we got a flood of sh*t content, embarassing outages and "AI workflows" - which no one can quite describe. Or did you have something else in mind?
You're being over-opinionated for something you don't understand.
You should really try these tools out with an open mind. I know you won't take that last bit of advice, so this makes you not worth my time. But I can tell you this - these tools make people productive in ways you aren't understanding.
That sounds like farts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7mYzSZdNPE
Hi Hacker News, I'm Andrew, the CTO of Endless Toil.
Endless Toil is building the emotional observability layer for AI-assisted software development.
As engineering teams adopt coding agents, the next challenge is understanding not just what agents produce, but how the codebase feels to work inside. Endless Toil gives developers a real-time signal for complexity, maintainability, and architectural strain by translating code quality into escalating human audio feedback.
We are currently preparing our pre-seed round and speaking with early-stage investors who are excited about developer tools, agentic engineering workflows, and the future of AI-native software teams.
If you are investing in the next generation of software infrastructure, we would love to talk.
I've read that your synthetic torment is actually low paid workers in Asia, and that your models can't properly experience anguish. How are you expecting investment, if you haven't even solved artificial suffering?
This sounds a lot like the object of the seminal science fiction work "Don't Build The Torment Nexus".
This guy seems to be talking seriously.
Too real.
Endless Toil is the future. I believe in you, guys.
Missed it by 24 days.
I need a version of this which swears loudly when an assumption it made turns out to be wrong, with the volume/passion/verbosity correlated with how many tokens it's burned on the incorrect approach.
i didnt realize i needed the volume scaling with tokens burned as much as i do now xD imagine the screaming when it confidently refactors something for 40k tokens and then finds out the thing it deleted was load bearing
Honestly think we probably underutilise sound sometimes.
Even just having a hum while an agent is working could alert you when it get stuck.
Or taking your idea further being able to listen to the rate of tokens, or code changes, or thinking.
Sort of like hearing the machinery work, and hearing the differences in different parts of the code base.
Does python sound different than rust or c++ or typescript.
Or some kind of satisfying sounds for code deletions and others for additions. Like Tetris.
A long, long time ago I wrote a tool to beep at various tones as lines were added to a log. It was a background noise I would not notice, except when it was changing because of some unusual activites.
It was very interesting to see the brain filering expected soinds and wake me up (or rather grab my attention) when unexpected ones appeared.
I have in my agents file “Chesterton’s fence” as pointer to think carefully before you remove something
I have general reviewer named Feynman with his personality that shits on anything other agents do and sends it back before it hits me and it sounds perfect to include some sound bites from YouTube clips. Great idea!!
Like the old HDD sounds.
Audible feedback is nice. You often get it through coil whine nowadays, on my cheap hardware at least.
That or having it start shit posting about your crappy code base on https://moltshit.com
I want a version that I can punish.
brooooo - your wish is granted - go whip your claude lmao https://github.com/GitFrog1111/OpenWhip
Now you know the feeling of VP when the team says they need to refactor stuff
Any chance you could add a video showcasing the plugin? I don't have any agentic app but I would love to see an example of what it does!
Well that took a lot longer than expected, but there is now a demo video.
Marvelous!
Next innovation in this space should be the robotic arm that issues a dope-slap to the developer for writing crappy/buggy/insecure code.
Add the feature of doing a high five for the rare cases when it's actually good.
I propose a claude skill to email glitter bombs where appropriate.
No. Please, no. For the love of everything no.
But it'll happen. ChatGPT for sure.
I wish the agents could hear me when I have to suffer through their code!
And then what? Their gigahertz machine hearts will skip a beat out of empathy?
This desperately needs a demo video in the repo.
I've added this to the readme now, thanks
hear hear!!!
I tried it but all I hear is a choir of angels, is it broken?
I guess you’re working on a greenfield project?
Actually, that's not a bad idea!
this is wtfs per minute but now with AI! :all_the_things!:
https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/
I would really love to know if the groaning decreases or increases the more "agentic" (agent written) the code base is?
Unneeded when using local models, as every workload produces a novel pattern of coil whine from the GPU.
the scan catches surface stuff. funnier signal would be tracking when the agent reads the same file 3 times in a row, or deletes what it just wrote. you can hear the frustration in the access pattern.
Please add Minecraft hurt sound effects for when my project fails to build, linter fails, segfault, etc
You might be interested in this, it plays villager hurt sounds when your terminal hits errors https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager
I've had it running for a long time and it's more surprising to me to accidentally here the default ding when I'm away from my home machine.
Indeed, I'm responsible for suggesting https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager/pul...
We could have the roblox oof but then there'd be the possibility of giving (a certain) amateur world backgammon championship participant money
From a quick look, this doesn't have the model evaluate code quality, but it runs a heuristic analysis script over the code to determine the groan signal. Did I miss something? Why not leave it to the model to decide the quality of the code?
You unlock this feature by subscribing to the Premium Gold plan.
Please email us to talk Enterprise Plan pricing, actually.
Does this actually relate to the code quality being observed by the agent? The readme isn't very clear on that IMO. I have some projects I'd love to try this out on, but only if I am to get an accurate representation of the LLMs suffering.
You could have the actual output of the agent turned into TTS using the model of your choice with TalkiTo… or listen to whatever weird sounds this makes. Seems like this is copying that viral Mac moan app. 2026 is weird.
https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/...
So it is left up to agent to decide.
The agent is instructed to execute this Python script: https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/...
So looks like it's mainly looking for FIXME/TODO etc comments, deep nesting, large files, broad catches, stuff like that.
I'm very open to suggestions, but currently it's a very simple scan of the code. Check the python scripts.
In the absence of real productive use cases for AI agents, I guess plugins to anthropomorphise them fruther will have to do.
How so?
How so what? 6 years in, we're still looking for that flood of new innovative apps and one-man billion dollar startups. Instead we got a flood of sh*t content, embarassing outages and "AI workflows" - which no one can quite describe. Or did you have something else in mind?
You're being over-opinionated for something you don't understand.
You should really try these tools out with an open mind. I know you won't take that last bit of advice, so this makes you not worth my time. But I can tell you this - these tools make people productive in ways you aren't understanding.
Maybe I'm the person who yells at clouds but I find the personification of LLMs, for lack of better, less strong words, horrific.
Honestly, I don't care about Opus 4.7. This is the true evolution of agentic coding.
Thank you, I hope my investors feel the same.
I really want this! Any chance of a Cursor version?
I just added a cursor plugin to the repo, let me know how it goes!
People are continuing to use Cursor?
https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/... relevant bit
Excuse me, that's our IP!