429 new ideas this week

Level up how you use AI

Real things everyday people got it to do, and how to try them yourself.

Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Find the refund hiding in my inbox

After SAS cancelled and rebooked his family's Oslo flight and a human agent said the dropped prepaid meal fees couldn't be fixed, a father asked the AI to pursue the reimbursement he had never filed since July. The AI searched all his SAS emails and found the airline had already reimbursed the fees the day of the change - buried under that day's notification spam.

HobbiesPartly worked

My writing bot sent me drafts that sounded like a fake me

Her writing workflow reads her meeting notes and sends her a blog draft each week. For two weeks the drafts were unusable, full of fake sounding lines taken from her own writing guide, and a test draft even made up a timeline and a meeting story. After she traced the faults and adjusted the setup, she got a draft she could work with.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

My sales close rate went from 20% to 75% with AI

A corporate salesperson who cannot code keeps all his customer files in one folder that the AI reads directly. Before a meeting it pulls out up to three things to check, and after a meeting it turns his voice memo into minutes and a thank you email and files them.

Two kids at two schools and three email addresses became one shared family calendar that fills itself

His son is in half a dozen orchestras and bands, plus cadets and Explorers and Scouts, and his daughter is in reception class at a different school. Both schools send everything by email, the important details are often buried inside one of several PDF and Word attachments, and he kept missing things. Over the years the schools had collected three different email addresses for him, which made it worse. He got the AI to help him build a system that runs on a schedule in GitHub Actions, reads the school emails and drops the events into a shared Google Calendar. It costs him about $2 a month in API credits, which he calls much cheaper than a missed guitar lesson.

Find plumbing leads with no website and pitch angles

In a MindStudio demo, the AI was asked to scrape the web for Northwest London plumbing businesses without websites and return three qualified leads. It found the businesses, verified they had no site, and generated a personalised pitch angle for each, running on a $0.24/hour CPU instance.

The AI matched a client's 60 legacy reports to the new system in about an hour

His team is replacing a client's 15 year old system. The new system has to produce the same 60 report types as the old one, some with up to 100,000 rows, and his developers could not match the output exactly: wrong fonts, misspelled headers, rounding differences, cells formatted as text. He gave Fable 5.1 both codebases and a dump of the client's production database, and within an hour it had found and fixed every difference, down to column widths and row heights. Matching the reports by hand would have taken weeks.

The AI priced my new iPhone and AirPods and saved me about $250

Andrew asked the AI for the cheapest price on a new iPhone and AirPods, the best trade in value for his old phone, and whether a new model was about to drop. The AI found Amazon beat Apple by about $50 on the AirPods and a trade in worth about $200 more, and he bought on Amazon himself in the end.

$250

The AI edits my videos so I can post more

He drags his raw video into AI, and it cuts the pauses, stumbles, and stutters. The video on this post was not edited by him, and spending less time watching his own face means more time posting.

Uploaded all 6 nursing-school syllabi to the AI 'Mila', which spotted a hidden

Lixka, an accelerated nursing student at Mercy University, uploaded all six syllabi to her AI 'Mila'. Mila identified that Monday, September 28th was a 'triple-header' — two quizzes and a Pharm lab she hadn't noticed — then built a sustainable weekly rhythm around fixed classes, clinicals, and workouts, and asked permission before creating three tracked goals: quiz prep, reflection paper, and workouts/downtime.

My agent got my USPS shipping label ready to go

Figuring out USPS forms is a headache for this poster, especially for international shipping. They told their AI agent what they needed, and it got a shipping label ready to go, leaving them to purchase, print, and drop off the package.

One man released a whole movie with about 40 tools he built with AI

Daren runs his film company alone. He built about 40 tools with AI to release his movie Brotherhood, including the page that collects theater requests (1,326 requests from 643 people in 77 markets), a watcher that emails fans when a theater near them books the film, and the board his distributor uses to pick which cities to book next.

HobbiesWent wrong

The AI failed at almost all the simple tasks I gave it

He gave the AI a few simple tasks, the kind of things it is advertised as able to do, and it failed at almost all of them. It ended up costing him much more time than it would have saved.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

A college counselor built a degree planning side business with AI

A community college counselor of 16 years turned her idea for paid degree planning into a working side business: The AI helped with the business plan, built and edited her website, including a later round where Work mode edited the live Squarespace site directly, found leads and shaped her replies to potential clients. She has her first client and a lot of leads.

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Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.