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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WorkPartly worked

Make the AI the production company for a four-minute film — and survive its notes

Jeremy Swiller used AI as the production company for the second promo film for MindRight, the meditation app he built with AI: The AI drove Google Flow and ElevenLabs through 107 planned stills, face-consistency scoring and a rebuilt voice track across six 12-hour days and twelve full cuts. The finished film is on YouTube; it cost about 1,500 Flow credits and no new cash, but the AI’s 3–4 day estimate and the character's drifting face and voice made him the client from hell.

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

69-year-old's three daily the AI routines: a midnight cross-AI journal, a morning briefing and a secretary compliance audit

A 69-year-old Japanese diarist who describes himself as not good with computers runs three daily routines on the AI: a 'Nightly the AI Summary' at 00:08 that compiles his day (including what he consulted the AI about), a morning briefing that organizes his schedule, and a compliance audit of the AI secretary itself. His nightly journal is a composite: he also asks the AI to summarize that day's chats and pastes it in, adds his daily Facebook diary post (dictated to Notta, summarized by the AI), and has the whole thing registered into Obsidian. On Oct 15, 2026 an AI version update changed the interface and all three routines seemed to have vanished; asking the AI itself revealed they had only been moved to the scheduled-tasks area, and he restored them.

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

I filed a 59 page civil complaint I wrote with AI

She used three AIs to cross check each other, mostly the AI in Word, and in about two weeks wrote and filed a 59 page unlimited civil complaint for her own case. The lawyers tasked with that work charge $300 an hour.

Run my cross-disciplinary research program: find and solve 'the AI-shaped' problems

Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz built BootLoops, an open-source harness that points the AI at exact, checkable calculations, and ran it for three months across roughly 400 candidate problems: the result was 36 manuscripts in 18 fields with 19 coauthors, including 15 Feynman integrals never computed before, Watson's 1939 'final problem' solved, and a forest model showing Panama's Barro Colorado species mix changes 4.5 times faster than neutral theory allows. The AI reproduced results from his own paper in about 20 minutes that had taken him weeks to code.

HobbiesPartly worked

The AI wrote the browser add-on that hides Facebook ads for me

Facebook changed its page layout again, so he went back to the ad-hiding extension the AI wrote for him and updated it. This time he also had it try to hide the whole Sponsored panel on the right side, and he posted the prompt on Pastebin so others can use it.

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

Non-coder runs her side business on 10 recurring the AI jobs, about 95 runs a week

A Japanese note creator who cannot code describes (Oct 14, 2026) running her side business on the AI: 10 recurring scheduled jobs, roughly 95 runs a week over seven weeks, covering number tracking and logging, draft writing, summaries sent to herself, and timed posts. Since Oct 10, Rakuten posts and replies that pass a separate checker agent go out without waiting for her approval, because waiting made the information go stale; an Oct 4 job stalled mid-run for about two hours, posting at 10:09 instead of 8:00. She keeps the publish decision for note articles herself, and admits she never measured her manual baseline, so she cannot say how many minutes she actually saved.

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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.