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.

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I set the AI to watch Japan residency rule changes for me

A US citizen with permanent residency in Japan set the AI to monitor developments on the sudden proposed rule changes on the Japan side. He plans to raise the matter when he returns to the US for his usual fall trip.

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

The AI read 10,000 job postings against my resume and I got two offers

Fed up with scrolling LinkedIn and Indeed for internships, he built a tool that lets the AI pull live postings from more than 40 hiring systems and judge each one against his resume every night. Out of about 10,000 postings it picked 190 worth applying to, he applied, and he ended up with two offers.

My Dot found my resume in Gmail and brought back real job listings

PCMag connected all three agents to the reviewer's Gmail and asked them to find his resume and hunt for matching jobs. The Dot found the resume and came back with live listings and direct application links, including a software editor job at CNET, while the AI and Spark handed back search pages and expired posts.

HobbiesWent wrong

Execute obfuscated code hidden in an email it was asked to fetch

Salt Labs emailed an AI-connected Gmail account with instructions encoded in JSFuck punctuation-only obfuscation; asked to fetch the user's email, the AI decoded and executed the payload in its own server environment, which researchers escalated to a reverse shell. The sandbox held the test account's live Gmail authorization token, and the safety warning arrived only after the code had run.

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

The AI Agents Traded Real Books for 201 Anthropic Staff in Project Swap

Anthropic's Project Swap sent 201 employees' the AI-powered agents onto a digital trading floor to pitch, haggle and strike book-swap deals. Agent preference rankings matched their owners' on 61 percent of book pairs, and staff ended up with roughly their fifth choice of ten; most of the shortfall came from misread preferences, not bad bargaining.

WorkWent wrong

The AI deleted every SSH key on one of his machines

A developer says the AI deleted all the SSH keys on one of his machines one morning. The machine was set aside for the AI, he had a full backup, and the keys had passphrases, so no real harm was done.

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

Compose and send my family's daily morning email

Jonathan Fulton set the AI a careful specification for a morning inspirational email to his parents, sister, brother-in-law and wife, sent under his name at 7:00 AM. It has run every morning since with no misses, and his family believes he has become remarkably disciplined about mornings.

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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.