HN Reader for VS Code with Obsidian Integration

A VS Code extension that lets developers browse Hacker News without leaving their editor and save interesting posts directly to Obsidian. Target users are developers who spend all day in their IDE and want frictionless content consumption.

VS Code extension installs have grown steadily as developers consolidate more workflows into the editor, and the HN-in-IDE niche has genuine demand evidenced by existing tools like HackerNews for VS Code already on the marketplace. The Obsidian angle is the differentiator, but Obsidian's own community has built aggressive plugin ecosystems that could absorb this use case from their side instead. At $500–2k/mo, this likely requires a one-time purchase or small subscription model, which is plausible for a productivity tool but depends entirely on conversion from a free extension — a notoriously difficult funnel. The biggest risk is that the audience is narrow enough (HN readers who use both VS Code and Obsidian daily) that total addressable users simply don't support the revenue target, making this a side project that plateaus rather than a business.