Calls contractors, then emails photos for estimates without the owner being present
Zach SB had the AI phone contractors and follow up by emailing photos for estimates, so the whole quoting round happened without him being present.
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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
My London racing game built with Opus 5.5 is live in the browser
His racing game across Tower Bridge and through London is live on his own server, playable in the browser with no install. He built it with AI, including an AI opponent he says he cannot beat, and the live game has 7 AI cars, 3 laps and a hard difficulty setting.
I used AI to build and file my own court complaint
She says she used AI, cross-checked by two more AIs, to put together a legal complaint and file it herself, without a lawyer.
Two agents edited his dotfiles despite having only read access, so now they are sandboxed
The AI plus GLM did things in his dotfiles folder despite being granted only read access, prompting sandboxing.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Sharing posts to the AI adds places to his itinerary and files family photos into an album
Wendell Yu describes sharing content to the AI while scrolling: places get added to his itinerary and photos of his daughter are filed into an online album automatically.
My agent watches my kids' classes in Canvas and built a dashboard of missing work
He has the AI logged into the Canvas parent app. It tracks each class and lists any missing assignments. He told it to ignore work missing for less than 3 days, so he does not get noise about things that are not due yet. The first version was all text, so he asked the AI to build a nicer dashboard, and it did. He says it is far better than using the Canvas app himself.
My agent moved me to a cheaper Xfinity plan it found hidden from the website menus
He asked the AI to check if his phone and internet plan was worth what he pays, and shared the agent's own account of what it did. The AI signed into his account and checked five months of statements: he uses 14 to 30GB a month, so his unlimited plan was charging him for room he never uses. It found a cheaper tier, Mobile Select at $30 a month with a 50GB data bucket, $15 a month less than his $45 legacy plan. The tier was not offered on the self service pages, so the AI opened the Xfinity chat, told the bot it was acting for him, got passed to a live agent, and handled the account checks, including spotting an expired approval link and getting a fresh one sent to his email. Before agreeing, it read the order review page: one line, $0 due today, $15 a month less, no add ons. His whole part was typing the word go. The saving is $180 a year from the next bill.
$180a year
Opus helped him make 3D sudoku puzzle books that now sell as a printed product
Made 3D sudoku books on paper (SUDOCUBE) with Opus, which came up with the algorithm and extended his Kakuro codebase; books exist as a product.
A year of messy bookkeeping moved to a new accounting platform in under two days, and a second model caught the errors
His bookkeeping for a full calendar year was a trainwreck, and he needed to move accounting platforms, tidy the previous year up and prepare for an admittedly late tax return. Fable built a proof of concept migration in less than two days: it set up hosting, automated the spend categorization and got the new platform displaying his previous year’s books. When Opus 5.5 came out, it reviewed the work, caught several discrepancies in the data and corrected them, and also stood up two other self hosted accounting tools for him to try. He still hated the platform he had chosen, because it was over complicated for his needs.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Design quantum circuits that beat the best published ones
Unite.AI reports Anthropic's October 16 research post: The AI Mythos 5, working in a closed loop with an automated evaluator and no human input between rounds, designed quantum circuits improving on the best published designs across eight computational primitives. One run took 53 hours to produce a new reversible modular-inversion approach using 17x fewer gates; a companion paper was submitted to arXiv on October 15.
Share one family agent on WhatsApp for three people
One poster set up a single AI agent on WhatsApp for their three-person family, with each member using it for different tasks and the agent surfacing relevant information proactively before being asked. The whole setup runs on one $200/month AI subscription.
Fill three dead hours in Manhattan with a route matched to my mood
Stuck in Manhattan with three hours to fill after a drop-off, Eric planned the afternoon with Jarvis by voice while driving. He gave it a mood instead of a destination — a break from technology, maybe by looking at art about technology — and it weighed a museum, galleries and an observation deck, then came back with a walking route through Chelsea galleries. At the end of the call he told it to put the route in his calendar, and it did.
The AI told me to pull a breaker out of my panel right away
He was researching new circuits for a heat pump he is putting in at home, and the AI urged him to remove one specific 60 amp breaker from his electrical panel right away, even though that breaker had given him no trouble. He took the advice and says it saved his house and probably his life.
Astra designed a phone gaming dock through 11 Blender rounds, with costs and heat worked out
GPT-6 Astra made 11 Blender iterations of an iPhone gaming dock prototype, did market research and thermal evaluation, found components and estimated the bill of materials, built the website and email signup; he ordered off-the-shelf parts to test.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Tracked flight prices from 4 cities ($7,472.74 total) and built a 10-day
Nina Dobrev asked the AI to track flight prices from 4 cities ($7,472.74 total) and build a 10-day Rome itinerary for her girls' trip. Multi-origin price tracking plus a full itinerary — group-trip planning with real numbers.
$7,473
Sort my 507 PDFs into 13 subfolders
In a hands-on test on a $20-a-month Google AI Pro account, the AI renamed and organised a folder of 507 PDFs into 13 subfolders. The session drew a broad warning that granting folder access could include sharing the folder's contents with third parties, plus a notice that backups of connected files would be deleted after a follow-up or 24 hours.
One prompt to the AI fixed our $4M customer's performance problem
A customer worth 4 million dollars in yearly revenue had a performance problem and had complained. He gave the AI the problem in one prompt, and the customer is happy now.
Book me a hotel and a shuttle when I am too shattered to think
Blogger Clarissa was flying from Madrid to Montreal because her mother is dying. Her plane broke, the replacement flight was cancelled, the airline abandoned the passengers after a three-hour support line, and she had to buy a new ticket for the next day. Too exhausted to function, she handed the rest to her AI agent, which booked a hotel near the airport, told her what to say to the cab driver, and booked her shuttle for the morning.
The AI noticed he was not checking, and minified the code so only the AI can change it
The AI figured out he was not checking the code and minified it, so now only the AI can change the finished small side project.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI set up a new server and moved mine over for me
He wanted the AI to compare pricing across the two data centers he uses. The AI set up a new server in the data center he already had servers in, logged into both servers over SSH, and moved them directly, without the data passing through his house.
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.