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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BananaGroup now runs its Medigap sales on an app the AI helped build

BananaGroup now runs its Medicare Supplement sales on its own app, with prospects, quotes, enrollment alerts and the sales pipeline in one place, built in a couple of days. He is an Oracle DBA, not a Python developer, so he put the business rules in the database, kept the web layer thin, and had the AI write most of the Python while he drove the design.

Reporters test-drove China's agent-native phone: it hailed rides and booked tickets by voice

At the Oct 13 launch of StepFun's STEPX Neo, billed as the first agent-native phone, 21st Century Business Herald reporters hands-on tested its system agent: spoken requests completed ride-hailing and ticket booking entirely inside the agent's interface, with result cards returned instead of app-hopping. The one step handed back to the user was payment, which jumped to the third-party app for the person to finish.

WorkPartly worked

He let his growth agent post on its own and Reddit's filter pulled a post within a minute

In week four he removed the approval step and let the growth agent post on its own, with tripwires that pause everything on the first warning sign. Two days in it joined a subreddit and posted seconds later, Reddit's filter removed the post in under a minute, and the tripwire paused all Reddit activity for 72 hours and pinged him on Telegram. Weekly users grew from 37 to 64 over the same stretch.

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

The AI rewrote SimTower from a decompiled binary and put it in the browser

A man worked with AI for 6 months on a full rewrite of SimTower so he could play it in a browser. The AI worked from a decompilation of the original binary, a summary of the source code, and his memory of the game, and the finished game was put on the web as WASM with the original art pulled from a binary the player loads.

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.

HealthPartly worked

My agent checks every day whether the gym I want has opened

Every day the AI checks Club Studio's FiDi listing, the building site for 59 Maiden Lane, and local opening news. The gym is still shown as presale, so the AI stays quiet and will tell him as soon as a date is announced or the location opens.

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

Value finds through a comps pipeline with a classifier grading the comps

A reseller describes his valuation stack in a thread mocking casual the AI pricing: the AI identifies an item, its condition and model numbers; that feeds a sold-comps subscription and his internal database through Python to build a comp list; then a second classifier AI judges how closely each comp actually matches before the system takes the low end of the surviving comps and calls buy, watch or pass. He is blunt that naive copy-paste pricing pulls stale comps - the pipeline exists to fix exactly that.

Plumbing owner's agents run the back office, but big quotes stay human

Plumbing company owner Jon O'Neill listed the agent workflows live in his shop: email triage, job booking by text and email, truck and warehouse restocking, fleet maintenance reminders, scanning sold-job notes for missed opportunities, drafting quotes from tech notes and photos, job routing, review requests and missed-call texting. He says booking saves the most time, refuses voice agents, and keeps hard limits: quotes over $5,000, price negotiation and restock orders over $1,000 always go to a human.

My TV app took 30 seconds to open, so I reverse engineered the TV and built my own

His 2019 LG TV has a great screen, but the official Plex app took about 30 seconds just to show the profile picker, because it is really a web page. There is no public native toolkit for the TV, so he rooted a spare set, read the TVs own software with analysis tools and the AI, and built a native Plex client of his own. On the same TV it shows the profile picker in about 3 seconds.

HobbiesPartly worked

Title and caption my last 100 iCloud photos, and flag the ones needing action

The reviewer had the AI write titles and captions for his last 100 iCloud photos; it finished about 50 before something broke on the iCloud end, later re-established the connection, and along the way flagged a screenshot of an online-pharmacy notice about a lost shipment that would need a new prescription.

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

Microsoft's Ask Microsoft Agent Expanded Across Ten Product Sites

Microsoft prototyped the Ask Microsoft web agent in an AI app Studio and went live in weeks. It moved beyond information retrieval into product evaluation and signups, then expanded across ten more product sites at two per week; customers using it visit more pages per session.

A caregiver built a million word neurology course that teaches doctors about a condition patients keep getting dismissed for

He is a caregiver, not a doctor, who has the free time to read the research. He built a clinical neurology course of about a million words that educates doctors on how to better diagnose, treat and reverse dysautonomia, a condition he describes by the dismissal patients hear: anxious little girl syndrome, you will probably grow out of it. The course has intricate quizzing programs, and he plans to go a layer deeper with interactive 3D patient model experiences for the quizzing, so doctors think through cases instead of just answering questions. He calls it his proudest thing.

My agent made the charity poster that raised 250 pounds for a child's wig

A father's son grew his hair since Covid and cut it to donate to a charity that makes wigs for children with cancer. The father kept putting off making a poster, then gave the AI a couple of photos and a video link and it built the poster while he worked. His boss put it up, workmates pledged enough to fund the wig, 250 pounds. Later, from the car, he voice prompted the AI to remake the poster in his son's words for the boy's school, and forwarded it on WhatsApp when they arrived.

£250one time

I had my agent read its own usage bill, set five rules, and cut its token use by about a fifth

He exported 10 hours of his AI usage (8,915 model calls, about 1.15 billion tokens) and had the bot study it. Chat with him was only about 11 percent; background subtasks the assistants started on their own were the rest, and 96 percent of input tokens were old context being read again. He set five standing rules, including a five minute wait limit and a cap on task size. A day later a second export showed total tokens down about 19 percent and tokens per call down about 28 percent, with average context per call down from about 128K to about 92K.

Her agent 'Jarvis' runs her day (gym, meals, proposals) and built a

Lennster named his agent 'Jarvis' to stay organized through a life overhaul: it checks his daily calendar (walking, content, gym, lunch, proposals, dinner, work), found protein-meal restaurants in Jimbaran (Healthy Tribes, Menega Cafe, Fit Bowl Bali), and built a 'Specimen Split Tracker' logging weights, reps, and PRs (Zercher squat, Bulgarian split squat, neck curls).

HobbiesWent wrong

155 apps formally refused to let the Doubao phone agent operate them

ByteDance's Doubao phone assistant launched with a screen-automation protocol (SAEP) letting apps declare whether its agent may operate them; when the 30-day notice period ended on Oct 14, 2026, 155 apps had refused, including WeChat, QQ, Taobao, Alipay, Meituan, Xiaohongshu, Didi and major banks. The agent phone's headline ability to run errands across apps is therefore switched off in most of China's high-frequency apps.

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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.