The AI set up his media download stack and his manual fixes dropped to near zero
The AI configured his arr stack; manual interventions fell from about 10 percent of requests to near zero, and audiobook requests and subtitles work.
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.
My agent vetted cheaper car insurance policies and started my quote, saving $650 a year
Answering a money saving thread, he says he just had the AI check cheaper auto insurance policies for him and start a quote. On the new policy he will save $650 a year. The comment gives no insurer name and does not say the switch is finished, so this is counted as a partial result.
$650a year
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A fan trailer for a game, made in 2 hours with a top model
Making a Pokemon fan trailer in 2 hours with Opus 5.5, a finished artifact.
2 hourssaved
Track my personal data points and report daily
The MBI Deep Dives author writes that the AI tracks a set of data points he cares about and reports daily, including GPU prices, the App Store ratings race between the AI, the AI and the AI, and insider buy/sell transactions in stocks he owns. He describes using roughly 200 million tokens a week on a $20/month plan.
Grow my startup's social reach 2% a week
The same founder gave a marketing bot a single standing goal - grow PromptBase's social reach 2% per week - and permission to experiment: it started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel, tries formats, and doubles down on whatever works, doing content marketing he never had time for as a one-man company.
Audit my subscriptions — 22 charges down to 5, saving about $100 a month
Karol says she asked her AI 'Hedwig' to audit her forgotten subscriptions. Screen recordings show a 'Subscription Before and After' dashboard dated Oct 11, 2026: recurring charges cut from 22 to 5, and monthly cost from $149.11+ to $58.73+ — about $90 a month saved — after which she lists the services she deliberately kept.
$90.38a month
The AI does my invoicing now and flags the bills that are missing
He says the AI now does the invoicing work his tax advisor and the Easybill app used to do. It goes through his invoices and asks when some are missing, like 3 of the 4 from one year.
An invoice agent read 688 documents in 30 days at about 11 cents each, with 3 errors
His invoice agent processed 688 documents in 30 days at about $0.11 per document and made 3 errors, with no retry storms. He is open that a document marked completed does not prove every field was read right, so the numbers count finished documents, not verified ones.
My AI keeps our app-versions help page updated by itself
In a diary aside, Manton Reece says his mostly-idle home the AI server automatically updates Micro.blog's 'latest app versions' help page. It checks the currently shipped version and whether an app is in review, while he still writes the release notes by hand.
Negotiate a $200 mortgage late-fee refund
A user’s the AI negotiated a $200 mortgage late-fee refund for him; the same setup also auto-books his kids’ activities, runs his calendar and inbox, and nudges him three times a day. The refund came from the bot arguing his case with the lender.
$200one time
Scrub my phone number off data-broker sites, on a schedule
A directory-listed the AI called Spam-Call Scrubber finds its owner’s phone number on people-search and data-broker sites, submits the opt-outs, finishes the confirmations, and re-checks on a schedule. It replaces a paid data-removal service with a standing bot.
He emailed 300 CPAs offering sales help and landed a paying client
He fed in what he had learned across his business degrees, built a plan to sell business development to accountants, and had it help him email about 300 CPA firms in his area offering the work for straight commission. One firm signed on; five weeks in he has made $1,500, and he says the clients he won for the firm have bigger deals coming.
$1,500
Build my own grading LMS on top of Google Classroom
A teacher built his own LMS layer on top of Google Classroom using AI and Apps Script (he names the AI and the AI as both able to drive it): far deeper grading features than Classroom offers, a quick-select comment bank where any feedback he writes can be saved for reuse with one click, and on return each student automatically gets a formatted read-only feedback document both emailed to them and attached to the Classroom assignment. Student data never leaves the district's Google ecosystem.
My Dot compared 1,500 train fares and found cheaper split tickets
A man set his Dot, Bob, to research two UK trips across flexible dates, three stations and both directions. Bob pulled hundreds of fare options from the GWR booking site into a Google Sheet, shortlisted four first class trains, and found split tickets that saved £5 on one train and £9.40 on another.
£14.4
Generated the monthly financial statement from all accounts via Plaid read-only access,
Connected through Plaid to all accounts (read-only); the AI asks about gaps like cash transactions. Replaced 25 years of manual monthly Excel statements.
It updates my QuickBooks from my online receipts for my contracting business
A small contracting business owner, replying to a day to day uses thread, says he has the AI updating his QuickBooks from his online receipts. Bookkeeping from scattered receipts is the classic end of week chore for a small contractor; his agent pulls the receipts and keeps the books current.
Plan my family's meals for my weight-loss challenge
A dad of two under two steered the AI to build Forkcast, a weekly meal-planning and calorie-tracking web app, because existing apps plan only a day at a time. It generates his grocery list from the week's plan and imports recipes from photos and labels for his 90-day weight-loss challenge.
An LLM wrote tests against the kernel's own tables and built him a hardened kernel config tool
LLM wrote tests comparing his code to kernel syscall tables and wrote a tool tracing all kernel calls to generate a bare minimal hardened kernel config, saves him security review time.
Compare grocery unit prices across stores — blocked by Giant's drag CAPTCHA
Eleanor Konik writes that the AI runs complex unit-price comparisons between grocery stores for her, with one exception: Giant's website has a drag-style CAPTCHA that neither the AI nor she, remoting into the browser from her phone, could get through. The comparison workflow works elsewhere; Giant remains a hard wall.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI built a way to tune our instruments in an hour. We did it by hand for a decade.
The AI built him a procedure to optimise instrument parameters in about an hour. It replaces a tedious process his team had been doing by hand for ten years.
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.