427 new ideas this week

Level up how you use AI

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

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WorkWent wrong

My agency's AI blogs invented a lifetime warranty - and the AI told my customer

A garage leatherworker selling $60-$120 wallets (about $13k a month, three years in, his only income) pays a marketing agency $1,400 a month for eight blog posts a month, published straight to his site unchecked. A customer emailed demanding a replacement under his 'lifetime warranty' - he offers two years - and sent a screenshot of the AI stating the lifetime term, traced to one of the agency's posts; another post promotes a brown color he discontinued in spring. Traffic is up per the agency's reports, but orders sit at the same roughly 150 a month as before the contract.

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

Agent 'Aaron P' planned a date and locked it into the calendar

In a skit-style demo, her AI Aaron P offered three date options (a wine bar, a BeltLine stroll plus Ponce City Market, a brewery with games); she picked the BeltLine plan and it was locked to her calendar for Sat Sep 26, 4:00-7:00 PM with parking tips and a reminder offered.

For six weeks an AI operated Cadence Virtuoso for him and designed three analog circuit blocks

Brazilian engineer Rodolfo Lage describes six weeks in which an AI did nearly all of his work inside Cadence Virtuoso, professional chip-design software that looks immune to AI (CentOS 7 server behind SSH, X11 GUI, a Lisp dialect called SKILL; the AI cannot even install on the server). Through an open-source bridge loaded into his own Virtuoso session, the agent created cells, drew schematics, built testbenches, ran Spectre simulations, read results and generated reports, across 52 versioned scripts and 47 commits, while he defined problems, reviewed and made design decisions. Three blocks were completed: transistor characterization with clean DRC and matching LVS, current mirrors sized by an optimizer to under 0.005% current error, and a common-source amplifier reaching 26.8 V/V gain and 109 MHz gain-bandwidth. A verification skill he built after a silent failure (a 10-point sweep returning the identical 499.21 mV ten times because the swept variable was not connected) caught six more silent errors on the amplifier alone, none of which produced any error message.

HobbiesPartly worked

Build my game prototype and get it onto my phone — third route worked

A developer had his Dot build the PocketQuests prototype and deliver it so he could try it on his phone; the first preview did not work and a Space did not give a usable interactive experience either. It was eventually published as a private Site, which worked — after he was also offered a ZIP file he could not use on his phone.

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

Run my whole solo business on a daily ritual — I just approve and send

Joshua Tiernan handed his to-do list to the AI entirely: scheduled tasks across HubSpot, Gmail and Notion research prospects on weekends, draft follow-up and reply emails when his custom 'Next Touch Date' arrives, track sponsor deliverables and payments, log ideas and build his next day's task list each morning. Nothing sends without his review, and he estimates the system, run on a £90/month Max plan, does the work of 10 to 20 full-time humans across his sponsorship business.

Scan and categorise my Instagram DMs every morning

Agency owner Rui Fu (someone, 253K followers) demonstrates the daily system he shows for the AI: an 8 AM scan of the last 24 hours of Instagram DMs, categorised into brand partnerships, collaboration requests, fan messages and spam so he wakes up to only the important ones. The tutorial also shows an auto-reply rule for guide inquiries and offers his prompt guide in exchange for comments.

My support agent emailed the customer before I could

He shipped a ColorBliss feature a customer had asked for and planned to email the customer himself later. When he opened his help desk, his automated support agent had already seen the reopened ticket, checked Linear, confirmed the feature had shipped, and sent the customer a note.

Run my resale back office from an AI spreadsheet app

A solo reseller's the AI-built spreadsheet app is his back office: he dumps in a batch of receipts and it enters them, creates a folder for each new item, and sorts the item's photos and receipts into it alongside measurement files. The same app recommends prices, writes his listings and does resale research, which is the part he says makes the $20 a month worth it.

WorkPartly worked

Hands-free session deleted the whole C: drive; backups saved 98% (partial)

A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.

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

A highways engineer built a routing tool that scores roads by five years of crash data

He works with collision data as a UK highways engineer but could never answer the simple version for his own commute: which route has actually hurt people. He built SafeRoute with AI, which plans a route and scores it on five years of collision records; colleagues then asked for the same data as branded evidence reports for committees, which the tool now produces in about 30 seconds instead of a day of manual work.

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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.