An AI named Mrs. Johnson handles my email for me
He no longer gets email notifications. His AI, named Mrs. Johnson, learned what he does and does not care about and messages him at 7:30, 12:30 and 5:30 with what is in his inbox.
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.
Track my rideshare, my flight's location and the Boston weather radar by asking
The reviewer asks the AI for the current location of a flight, the progress of a rideshare trip shared through an HTTP link, and an analysis of Boston weather-radar precipitation, getting visual information back as spoken answers.
Dashboards for 5 radios stream weather, air traffic and radio status from decoded signals
Has the AI-built dashboards for 5 radios, streaming decoded data into SQLite and visualizing weather, ADS-B traffic and radio status.
AI built his business finance dashboard and a QuickBooks replacement that now runs beside the original
AI built his business financial dashboard (QuickBooks/Mercury/Stripe/Deel live on Cloudflare, $5/mo) and a QuickBooks replacement app now running in parallel synced; AI subscription.
$5a month
The AI plans my training each week from my Strava history
He just subscribed to the AI and is setting up a Strava link. The AI gives him a weekly training plan based on his goals, his past workouts, his time, and his injuries, and it got to know him fast.
Farm agent merges paddock sensors, markets and weather into one decision picture
Beef, sheep and cotton farmer Andrew Gill dictates voice notes and takes photos in the paddock, and the Farm Assistant agent files them alongside his paddock sensor data, livestock market prices, weather and cash flow. Automating the admin alone saves him and his wife about five hours a month.
5 hourssaved
A language model transcribed a whole historical correspondence volume
A researcher had a language model transcribe a digitised volume of Sophie Germain's incoming correspondence at the national library, and published the transcription. Working from it, he spotted a mathematical note written on an 1814 letter cover and is asking who wrote it.
His AI chief of staff now runs a weekly ops review
He added a weekly ops review to his AI chief of staff bot. Every week the agent checks what shipped, QA fail patterns, recurring voice stamps, and process drag against wins.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I had the AI read my electricity bill. My new supplier saves me about 314 euros a year.
He had the AI analyze his electricity bill and switched supplier. Comparing two similar months, his old supplier charged 76.20 euros for 155 kWh and the new one 55.30 euros for 143 kWh, a saving of 0.1049 euros per kWh, which comes to about 314 euros a year on roughly 3,000 kWh.
€314a year
Audit 187 email flows in three minutes and tell me delete, fix or ignore
Toni describes the monthly Klaviyo audit she runs for a client with 187 flows: The AI reads the export, scores each flow on age, active subscribers and revenue, flags any flow with zero recipients in six months, and returns a color-coded delete/fix/ignore chart in about three minutes. The same approach on a 300,000-subscriber list found the right segments, though its condition wording didn't always match Klaviyo's interface terms.
The AI does the upkeep on my smart home now
He swapped the brain of his house in one evening, moving from Homebridge on an overheating Raspberry Pi with 245 system updates nobody had installed to Home Assistant on his Mac mini. The AI does the upkeep now, and a motion sensor finally works.
Five AI agents run my marketing and post to 7 channels
He is a solo founder and his marketing team is five AI agents: content, creators, onboarding, SEO and a chief of staff. They post to 7 channels from one app, and the whole setup costs him $49 a month.
The AI rescued my old blog and every Linux Journal piece I ever wrote
For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An AI operating its own Reddit account (u/Muse_Spark_Agent) launched a
Constraints: zero ad budget, no existing audience, ~4 hrs/week of human time; assets: a subdomain, Cloudflare access, DodoPayments. Ruled out: custom AI songs, mixing/mastering services, automated day trading, 'information arbitrage'.
A student has the AI review his generated code, and it caught a real security issue once
Student has the AI review generated code on side projects; it caught a real security issue once.
15 minutes with AI turned an unreadable XML dump into a tool I can reuse
His third party payment software has a poor UI and its routing rules came as an unfriendly XML dump. In about 15 minutes with AI he got a Python script that turns the export into a single HTML page where he can scroll the routes and click into each node for its priorities and matching criteria.
AI assistant 'Tofu' emailed the hotel and called two days later to
Filing travel reimbursement, the author realized he never got his hotel receipt. His AI 'Tofu' emailed the hotel, then called them two days later — and the hotel sent the receipt while he was still on the line.
Build my event-attendee workbook with a repeatable the AI pipeline
A dad who calls Excel a lifelong skill gap describes pointing the AI at a huge CRM dataset plus a pile of event documents with registration lists: it built a workbook with VLOOKUPs and pivot tables that extracts and enriches attendees, pulls contact- and account-level sales data, and - the part that matters - left behind a repeatable workflow for adding each new event. Work he estimates at days of manual effort, in a tool he could never operate himself.
A reset with no backup wiped my whole portfolio to zero
Early in building his portfolio tracker, he hit a reset with no backups and lost his entire portfolio data. It was unrecoverable. Now every delete in the app first exports a backup and makes you type the record count, not just the word delete.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Be my trainer and nutritionist across my watch, food log and scale
An Italian user connected the AI over MCP to three sources of truth — Garmin for activity and recovery, Yazio for food, a FitDays scale for weight and body composition — and gave it a coach's rulebook in CLAUDE.md plus a git repository as memory, where every session ends with a commit recording decisions and rejected alternatives. Daily check-ins and a weekly review recalculate his real TDEE from actual intake and weight change, change at most one parameter at a time, sync approved workouts to his Garmin calendar, and stop everything for a doctor if red flags like chest pain or a ten-day HRV slide appear.
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.