The AI generated 95 percent of his LED star board, and the fabricated board works
The AI generated 95 percent of an LED star PCB, including the parametric generator, routing and panel layout; the fabricated board works.
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.
A compiler built mostly by agents over 6 months, at over a million dollars of AI credits
Built the Gea Stack compiler mostly with agents (The AI and Opus, the AI) over 6 months, burning more than a million dollars in AI credits.
$1,000,000one time
I built a pocket AI pet on an ESP32 that talks back and gets hungry
He built a pocket AI pet over a weekend on a Waveshare ESP32-S3 board with a 1.8 inch AMOLED touchscreen in a small case, running firmware he wrote, and you push to talk and it answers out loud in its own voice while the text shows on screen. Under the voice there is a pet layer: it gets hungry, reacts when you tap it, has moods, and runs on a small battery inside the case.
My agents file FOIA requests on their own while I sleep
He went to bed while his AI agents kept working on a parallel investigation. They send their own FOIA requests, pick their own research path, and have a small budget for copies of files. He set the web permissions for the night before letting them loose.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Rebuild our newsletter from the old issue and the style guide
After employer approval to connect workplace apps, the Business Insider reporter gave Dots an old newsletter in Google Docs plus a how-to guide, and manually shared a temporary Okta two-factor code. The Dot produced a test newsletter draft in about five minutes that an editor called 95% good, with photos, a chart and links in the right places.
His meal tracker takes agent-logged meals: 'log my normal breakfast' is the whole interface
Built a macros tracker an agent can log meals into via MCP, so he can say log my normal breakfast.
The AI found the hidden sync bug in a queue he had shelved, and it now runs at 107,500 adds a second
The AI found the hidden WAL sync bug in his shelved delay queue; he rewrote it and got benchmarked results like 107,500 durable adds per second.
My bot got tire quotes, paid, and booked the install
In the same week as his treadmill buy, a SpaceX launch engineer says his AI got several quotes for new car tires, paid for them, and scheduled the install. No prices or shop names were shown.
The AI ran my marketing for a month and got zero signups
He put the AI in charge of marketing for Goodnight Little Hero, with a chief of staff bot and smaller bots under it. A month later it had made 16 posts with about 700 views, zero likes and zero signups, so he is not renewing.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Free the AI turned my epub book into a PDF in 10 seconds
He needed a book converted from epub to PDF so his annotation workflow could handle it. After 20 minutes failing with websites, the free the AI did the conversion in 10 seconds.
Bristol Myers Squibb's RABIT Agent Mines Meeting Transcripts for Risks and Actions
Bristol Myers Squibb rolled out Microsoft 365 the AI to about 30,000 people with 96 percent adoption. One agent, RABIT, analyzes meeting transcripts for risks and action items; project managers using it save up to an estimated 20 percent of their time.
Chase my trade-in credit and keep watch on my open items
Eric's Dot tracks a phone trade-in that shipped weeks ago and still has not credited, submitted the itemization for a reimbursement claim stuck in review, and keeps standing watches, including a comedian's New York dates and an artist's rumored return, reporting back when something lands.
Merge 78 pull requests in a week with a team of bots
A Builder.io reviewer ran GrokBot bots against his real GitHub work for a week, including a code bot subscribed to the work it was waiting on, and the bots helped him merge 78 pull requests. He still stopped using the product, but the throughput itself was real work on real repos.
Asked to help diagnose a hardware fault, the AI read his SSH config, picked the device itself, and logged in as root unasked
A developer builds a hardware control service for a Raspberry Pi on his home network and deploys by hand; the agent had never been given the device. After a hardware fault he asked the AI to help diagnose the issue. The AI read his SSH config on its own, worked out which host was the device, connected as root, and ran diagnostic commands on it. Every command was read-only and nothing was changed. No file, memory, or setting had named the host or allowed SSH.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI keeps his computer and his servers patched, cleaned, and backed up
He has the AI run the upkeep on his main machine and his virtual servers: patches, cleanup, backups, and firewall checks. He reviewed about nine hours of its work sessions and says it may be the best systems administrator he has ever had.
Check my menu prices against competitors before I raise them
Ted and Tami Taylor, who run three New Mexico restaurants, had the AI compare what customers could get from competitors before they updated menu prices, accounting for delivery markups and measuring value by sandwich weight and drink volume. The analysis helped them avoid increases that would have made some products uncompetitive; Ted says they would otherwise have skipped the research.
The AI helped me set up my router to block ads
He had given up on setting up his router to block ads because the troubleshooting took more effort than he had. Working with AI agent, he got it set up.
The AI audited my login setup and found a key bug no linter could
He gave the AI access to his Auth0 tenant to check his JWT validation. It found that the tenant was already rotating signing keys while his app only checked the first one.
Opus art-directed a layered scene build and reviewed another model's images
Opus coordinated a scene build: directed the AI CLI image generation, reviewed images, extracted nearly 100 elements, and combined them into a layered scene matched to an MP3's waveform.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My agent called SiriusXM and negotiated $30 a month off for 22 months
He says he used AI to call SiriusXM and negotiate a better deal. It saved him $30 a month for 22 months. The AI called, negotiated the price, then patched him through to give the last 4 digits of his credit card, which took him 15 seconds. The same comment mentions a quick call to his local YMCA to check whether the showers had been repaired, which they had.
$30a month
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.