2026-05-31 Picks: Four Tools Worth Checking Out

Today's selection from Hacker News covers writing, design, document templates, and AI agent protocols.

1. Pandoc Templates — Community Template Repository

Pandoc Templates is a centralized directory of community-built Pandoc templates. Pandoc is a powerful document conversion tool, but finding good templates has always meant hunting through GitHub repos one by one. This site aggregates them with filters for output format (PDF, HTML, DOCX, EPUB) and document type (article, thesis, CV, letter, presentation).

Popular templates include Eisvogel (7,154 stars, designed for lecture notes and exercises) and The Markdown Resume (1,748 stars, write your resume in Markdown and export to PDF). You can sort by GitHub stars and last update date, making it easy to find actively maintained templates.

If you write academic papers or technical documents, it's worth browsing for templates that fit your workflow.

2. Interfaces — Design Engineering Magazine

Interfaces is a paid monthly magazine for UI engineers and frontend developers, founded by Jakub Krehel, a founding design engineer at OpenSea. Each issue focuses on a specific topic — recent covers have included gesture-based animations, gradient techniques, OKLCH color models, and shared layout animations.

What sets it apart from typical tech blogs is the interactive demos. When explaining border radius, for instance, you can drag sliders to see how border-radius, padding, and width changes affect the result in real time — not just static screenshots. Articles include source code you can copy directly.

Subscription is $7.99/month or $79.99/year, covering all past issues, a Discord community, and Agent Skills resources. For developers building design systems or who care about UI polish, the price is reasonable.

3. Cheese Paper — Fiction Writing Editor

Cheese Paper is an open-source desktop writing tool built specifically for fiction writers. Its core idea is scene-based organization — each scene has its own notes, summary, and text. While writing, a sidebar shows character profiles and worldbuilding notes without switching files.

Files are stored locally as Markdown plus TOML, and you can sync across devices with Syncthing or Nextcloud. No cloud service, no subscription, no data collection. Export is practical: outline export merges all notes and summaries into one file, while story export combines all scenes into a single Markdown file that Pandoc can convert to EPUB or DOCX.

The site includes a feature comparison with Scrivener, Manuskript, and Obsidian. The overall positioning is lightweight, offline, and focused on writing itself — good for authors who don't want to deal with cloud sync overhead.

4. Open Envelope — Open Schema for AI Agent Teams

Open Envelope aims to do one thing: define a declarative JSON Schema standard for AI agent teams, similar to what Docker Compose does for container orchestration.

The schema is currently at v1 pre-release and covers agent role definitions, hierarchy, approval gates (human gates), webhook triggers, scheduling, and access policies. It lets you define who does what in an agent team, who reports to whom, and which actions need human approval. The schema is listed on SchemaStore, so you get autocomplete and validation in VS Code and JetBrains.

The managed platform has free and paid tiers: free supports 3 installs, 5,000 runs/month, and 1M compute tokens; Pro is $39/month with 20 installs and 25,000 runs. Worth exploring if your team wants to standardize how multiple AI agents work together.

All four tools were found on Hacker News today and have been added to the navigation site.