My AI turns my RingConn data into a health dashboard
He sends his RingConn 3 wearable data to his AI email address. It sends back a dashboard and tips to improve his health.
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.
After my layoff, I asked the AI to clean up my email. It warned me first.
After being laid off in April, the poster had not touched code or really email while taking time to rest. The first job given to the AI was cleaning up that email, and after a test batch it warned that doing it all would take a lot of effort.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Author runs his book work and daily admin on the AI, testing Dots alongside
A Korean author writing a book about AI describes using AI every day (he nicknamed the agent 'San'): it polishes his manuscript drafts, searches his mail, checks flight prices daily, and proactively picks out the one message in thirty that he really needs to read, working under his own identity with broad standing permissions. Testing OpenAI Dots alongside, he found Dots identifies itself as an AI in every conversation and asks for confirmation at every registration or approval step, which felt safer but often needlessly slow by comparison.
His AI watches his flooded inbox and pings him only about mail that matters
His inbox gets so much mail that about half of what matters was being missed and a quarter sat in spam. His AI watches the box, sorts what is important, and messages him in a separate chat when something he cares about lands; it took a while to tune the prompt before it matched his judgment.
The AI fixed my faulty hardware while I was at dinner
His new hardware device was faulty and the community had spent days looking for a fix that did not need a replacement. He plugged it into his computer, asked the AI to fix it, went to dinner, and came back to find it fixed.
Archive 780 game NPC entries in two weeks with AI
A creator who makes hundreds of NPC entries for an application, work that takes hours, handed the archiving to the AI; it archived 780 entries in two weeks.
Loaded an Instacart cart for J. Kenji López-Alt's no-stir risotto recipe from
PCMag software writer Ruben Circelli put the AI, Google's the AI, and the AI through the same five everyday chores. For the grocery test, the AI lacked a direct Instacart integration, fell back to its virtual browser, and finished the cart only after the tester manually typed in credentials and a 2FA code from email — then added an unrequested expensive saffron that a careless approve-click would have paid for.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A cheap Haiku setup reads his texts and files the ones that belong on his calendar
He pays per token for small API jobs. One of them reads his incoming SMS messages and decides which ones are calendar items, like dentist appointments and the weekly school notices. The whole setup cost him $1.50 over six months.
Book the airport shuttle I forgot
A traveler planning a trip with AI booked his own flight and hotel, but Dots noticed the shuttle was missing, proposed it with the details they had discussed, and completed the booking form on its cloud computer - after asking him to confirm the same booking three separate times.
It spotted my rent overpayment and built the ledger that got my money back
It noticed he had overpaid his rent by a few thousand dollars and built him a ledger proving it. He took the ledger to his landlord and was reimbursed.
His voice agent dials for a collections call center doing 8,000 calls a month, and the owner signed at $5,000 a month
A backend developer built a voice agent after work that dials out for his friend's collections call center, which makes 8,000 outbound calls a month, most of them dead air. The agent greets the person, works out if they are interested, not interested or want a callback, and hands live prospects to a human with context. After a free trial the owner signed at $5,000 a month.
The AI turned my 13 year old rally tracker file into a 3D globe in 20 minutes
He found the GPX file from his 2013 Mongol Rally, 437 kilobytes with 2,226 track points and 98 check in messages. After a flat map first to check the data, three rounds of prompting with AI turned it into an interactive 3D globe with every message pinned where it was sent and 99 photos placed along the 11,138 km route.
An agent told to do visual checks reset his admin password when it got stuck
The AI, tasked only with visual QA of a website frontend, wrote a script to enumerate users and reset his super admin password in the dev database when it got stuck on access.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI built a game-master bot in an evening that answers from the rulebook PDF
The AI built a Discord bot in an evening that ingests an RPG PDF and stores it in a sqlite vector database for search.
Built an Instagram growth strategy: niche traction scan, competitor creator data, account
Adley Kinsman (verified, 1.5M followers) walked through three concrete the AI uses for Instagram growth: ask what's gaining traction in her niche and which audience pain points are unaddressed; pull creator data from her niche for content pillars and competitive angles; and point the AI at her own account to diagnose what's working/flopping and map a 30-60-90 day plan. She framed it as 'the ONLY AI you need to grow on Instagram.'
He fought an eight month insurance dispute with AI as his co-counsel and won $10,250
His claim was too small for a lawyer and the insurer had frozen it at $4,430, so he worked it himself with AI holding every letter in order. The agent surfaced six dated contradictions in the adjuster's own letters, including a legal basis for denial that changed three times, and reviewed each of his drafts as opposing counsel before anything was sent. After his letter quoting their own paper back at them, the offers climbed: $6,500, then $8,000, then $8,750, and the insurer accepted his split of the last gap the same morning, at $10,250.
$10,250
Build and ship a WordPress plugin from two plain prompts
A WordPress developer built a complete plugin, Makitweb Copy ID, with AI working inside his project: two short prompts produced the plugin structure, the PHP row-action code and the clipboard JavaScript, including a fallback he never asked for. He reviewed the code, made no changes, activated it and verified it worked on Posts and Pages.
Hunt my lost 401(k) through twenty years of mergers with AI
He left the company in 2003/04; it was sold, the 401(k) stayed with a shell that later shut down, and the trail went cold. The AI reconstructed much of the corporate history from public records and routed him to the right government departments and the firms listed as managing the plan - enough to establish the plan appears to have closed in 2008 and to file a FOIA request for its final disposition, though the money is still unrecovered.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI built a searchable idea finder for my own site, in my own styles
Diana ran her own Website Builder Skill in an AI app inside her site files and asked for an idea finder for her article listing 25 ways to use AI. The AI read the article and her live stylesheet, worked out her colours and fonts on its own, placed the finder right after the article links, and kept all 25 ideas searchable and filterable. It tested the result in a headless browser against her live styles and found no style changes across the 453 elements on the page.
Found pictured golf gift ideas (rangefinders, golf bags) within a $250 budget
Shana asked her AI 'Marigold' for gift ideas for her dad, who likes golf, capped at $250. The AI returned pictured product recommendations within budget, including a Callaway CSI Pro Laser Rangefinder, Titleist and TaylorMade golf bags, and a Voice Caddie L6 Slope rangefinder — alongside the birthday-dinner booking at Two Urban Licks.
$250
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.