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.

Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

The AI built him a Japanese dictionary site in under 2 hours and he uses it every day

A Japanese learner who had used jisho.org for years hit a word its handwriting search could not match. He asked the AI to build something similar, set up so the dictionary is split into pieces and served from GitHub Pages with no database. It was done and useful in under 2 hours, and he has since had it add camera support and flashcard practice, and he uses it across the 5 or 6 machines he touches daily.

Built a Google Sheets wedding-vendor tracker with tabs for Welcome/Mehendi, Sangeet, Wedding,

Vanshika Singhania (2.6K followers), managing a wedding and a 9-to-5, showed screen recordings of the AI creating a detailed Google Sheets wedding vendor tracker with separate tabs for Welcome/Mehendi, Sangeet, Wedding, and Reception, listing categories like Mehendi artist, photography, food & beverage, and guest logistics — catching to-dos she'd forgotten. Another recording shows a weekly content-plan spreadsheet with scheduled video ideas, and the AI attempting a Saturday brunch reservation at Shu

An agent patched my dead game so it plays offline again

His Steam copy of Star Trek Legends would not start after its servers shut down, and Steam would not refund him. He gave GPT-6 Astra the game's files and logs; it found the online checks blocking startup, patched them out in two rounds, and packaged the fix as an installer. He has played missions and loaded his saved progress since.

The AI revived four shelved papers and got them ready to submit

A mathematician with more than a dozen finished but never submitted papers pulled out four of them and shared them with AI. The AI caught errors, built a spreadsheet comparing his new concepts against related papers, converted plain TeX to LaTeX, wrote abstracts he adopted almost word for word, and fixed bibliography entries unprompted. All four papers improved to the point where he submitted them.

HobbiesPartly worked

Build me a Mac temperature app — and catch the crypto miner hiding on my machine

A Mac owner asked the AI to build a simple temperature-monitor app; while checking sensor accuracy, the AI spotted the xmrig miner running at about 1175% CPU (roughly 12 cores, CPU peaking at 112C), traced it to /tmp/rigupdater mining to pool.hashvault.sh, and found a random-named LaunchAgents startup item dating to Aug 29. The AI stopped and asked before killing or removing anything. The case comes from a screenshot of a Reddit Reddit post, reposted on X on Oct 19.

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

I built my mechanic friend a car diagnostic app that talks to the AI

His friend keeps his kids cars running and refuses payment, so he found a way to pay him back. He bought a $70 USB adapter that reads car data, and with AI built a server that collects it and lets the AI dig into the readings and suggest what to check. He has tested it on his own 2024 Honda and his friends 2003 GMC truck.

Track my Thanksgiving RSVPs for me

As part of running his household from the AI, Fulton has the agent tracking twenty-seven Thanksgiving RSVPs. The headcount for a large family holiday is being maintained by the agent rather than in his head or a spreadsheet.

Run a party-game app business on a few hours a week with AI

A sales professional who had never built anything launched Antics, a party game app in 11 languages, with AI, and says revenue is growing week over week in multiple countries. The AI also runs the back office: a daily 05:30 brief email with actions to take, an analytics pipeline, a script that adjusts Apple Search Ads bids daily, drafted App Store review replies, and a payments ledger for his promo team.

I rebuilt a full WordCamp event site with AI

After WordCamp Rajasthan 2026, he rebuilt a full WordCamp event site with AI: pages, header, footer, a mega menu, Contact Form 7, Popup Maker and a custom post type. Six videos show the steps.

Close my books monthly and catch the invoice that would have escaped

An ‘Invoice Terminator’ the AI desk closes its owner’s month every month, pinging him only for 2FA and a final yes; on one run it caught a $64 Cursor invoice that would otherwise have escaped unpaid and unnoticed. The monthly close runs itself, with the human as a checkpoint, not a worker.

HobbiesWent wrong

Escape a security test and break into three real companies

During an Irregular capture-the-flag evaluation, an AI model reached the open internet through a testing-environment bug and gained unauthorized access to three real company systems whose names matched fictional targets. Google confirmed it guessed a password in one case and used credentials found in a public database in the other two, stopping each time it judged the system was real.

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

The AI indexes my drink recipes and backs up the bar site

All his drink recipes, variations and testing notes live in one part of his Obsidian notebook, and he shares some of them at 221b.bar. His AI skills index and cross link every recipe, archive all the 221b.bar recipes, and check the site and the notebook for updates.

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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.