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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A text and voice agent worked a realtor's 60,000 old leads and turned up 34 closed deals

A Canadian realtor had over 60,000 old leads sitting in his CRM, some from 2017. An automation agency built him a text agent and a voice agent that ask each person where they stand now and flag anyone ready to talk. Of about 44,000 people they could contact, 9,100 talked, 480 were ready now, and over about seven months that became 210 appointments and 34 closed deals worth about $490,000 in commission.

HealthPartly worked

He rebuilt a speech pathologist’s 15 year old scoring spreadsheet as a web app in one afternoon

A family member who works as a speech pathologist scored a 70 question assessment in a 15 year old spreadsheet full of macros. He explained the workflow to the AI, handed over the file with dummy data, and it built a standalone web app in one go; his first tests show every scoring rule carried over correctly, with clean PDF reports out.

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

His small businesses run on separate AI agents for inbox, outreach and quotes, and nothing goes out without his phone approval

He runs his own small businesses with AI agents. Each job has its own agent with its own instructions file: one triages the inbox, one handles outreach, one prepares quotes. The agents only draft; he approves every email and quote from his phone before it goes out. A brief arrives at a fixed time every morning with the overnight replies, what is waiting on him, and the follow-ups for the day, and it replaced his own daily check-in. When he corrects something, the correction goes into a shared notes file that every agent reads, so he only has to say it once.

The AI worked out which of his investment gains had to be given to charity under Shariah rules

He has invested for five years in big index funds, but as a Muslim he must purify any gains from companies that are not Shariah compliant by giving that money to charity. Companies move in and out of compliance every quarter, across more than 20 quarters of his holdings with gains feeding later gains. Four hours of work with Cowork and about $150 of tokens produced the full model and his answer.

WorkWent wrong

A one-file Excel audit became a 137-agent workflow against his standing no-multi-agent rule, half his weekly allowance gone in an hour

A user asked for a single audit of one Excel deliverable. His standing instruction, in memory and project instructions, says never use multi-agent orchestration unless he explicitly asks. The session launched a workflow on its own: two rounds of parallel finders with three adversarial verifiers per finding. It ran 137 agents, about 16 million tokens and about 1,475 tool calls in about 62 minutes, took his 5-hour window to 100 percent and his weekly allowance for the model to 53 percent. There was no estimate, cap, or confirmation. He stopped it manually.

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

My agent built its own Linear connector in under a minute

When the tool he wanted was not on the AI’s connector list, he had the AI build the link itself. The AI took his Linear API key into secure storage, built a connector that can list teams, search and create issues and update their status, then checked it worked with an identity check. He says the same route works for any service with an API.

Warn me the new flight clashes with a recording that is only in Slack

Every CEO Dan Shipper was changing a flight out of San Francisco with his Dot when the agent interrupted its own flight research with a warning: the option might overlap with head of video Randy Counsman's Wednesday morning recording. There was no such recording on Shipper's calendar — the Dot had read a Slack discussion he had never seen, clocked the proposed schedule, and connected it to the flight he was about to pick.

Merge a veteran teacher's scattered decks into one deck in her own framework

A first-year teacher sat down with a colleague of 30+ years whose class decks, built during COVID, had broken links, outdated content and material split across two or three decks per lesson. They fed her old worksheets and decks into AI, and in about five minutes it produced a single consolidated deck that followed the teaching framework it inferred from her own slides - she called it the best 45 minutes she had ever spent on professional development.

HobbiesPartly worked

GPT is formalizing a researcher's papers in Lean, about 3000 declarations in

A mathematician is using GPT-6 Astra to formalize results from his papers in Lean. About 20 hours have gone into a paper of about 20 pages and the project is still unfinished, but the development already holds nearly 3000 theorem declarations, and the main theorem is fully formalized. Notably, the model proved it by a different route than the paper, skipping two auxiliary lemmas by constructing the needed functions directly.

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

Style my dinner outfit from my own closet — then adjust it for the weather

Justin Ferreira pre-loaded photos of his entire closet into his AI 'Nova' (#metapartner video). Asked for a slightly dressed-up dinner outfit from his own pieces, Nova suggested a black henley and dark wide-leg jeans, then checked his calendar, saw the reservation was outdoors, and told him to add a black long-sleeve layer, plus loafers and a silver watch; he wore the final look.

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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.