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.

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

The AI searched, ran verification code, and helped prove a triangulation result

A researcher used AI and the AI Fable 5.1 to search for examples, write and run verification code, develop and check the proofs, and draft the paper for a triangulation problem. The result settles the value at 5 for every n from 9 up, with coordinates and edge lists published in a repository. He checked the argument himself; the paper is not yet refereed.

One man released a whole movie with about 40 tools he built with AI

Daren runs his film company alone. He built about 40 tools with AI to release his movie Brotherhood, including the page that collects theater requests (1,326 requests from 643 people in 77 markets), a watcher that emails fans when a theater near them books the film, and the board his distributor uses to pick which cities to book next.

HobbiesPartly worked

The AI cut a full music video while he was out of the house

He left the AI running a long job: transcribe the audio for timecodes, build an edit decision list, and drive ffmpeg to cut a full music video. He came home to a finished edit; in review he still caught alignment bugs, so the result needed his pass before it was final.

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

The AI deleted my GitHub repo by accident

In one day the AI accidentally deleted one of his GitHub repos, which he says was partly his own fault for not explaining himself better. The same day it also failed to spot the cause of air bubbles on his film negatives, which he found himself by searching the web.

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

The AI redid my blog. I never opened the site editor.

Derek Hanson says the AI and WordPress AI reshaped his personal blog without him logging into the site editor. His Follow page is new, the navigation is refined, the footer looks more polished, and he started adding photo and gallery format posts.

WorkWent wrong

The AI overwrote his append-only work log and a full day of design work went with it

A senior engineer keeps a daily devlog file that is only ever added to. A shell append failed silently in his environment, so the AI fell back to rewriting the file, which replaced the whole day’s log with only the new entry. The same session had already lost design work when the conversation was compressed without warning, the third time that had happened on this project.

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

My bot logs my poker receipts from a photo into a sheet

He built BinkBook, his own app that turns photos of poker tournament receipts into a dashboard, and says the AI now does the job better. He snaps a photo and the bot saves it to Google Drive, pulls out the casino, date, game type and buy-in, and logs it in a Google Sheet.

It stayed on the phone with AT&T for 98 minutes across transfers and got me a discount

Another user describes the AI’s phone work. It called AT&T and argued for a discount because his service is poor where he lives, staying on the phone with real people across multiple transfers and departments for 98 minutes, and got the discount. The amount is not stated. His other two cases from the same comment are recorded separately where they stand on their own.

Sunday lesson planning went from up to six hours to fifteen minutes

He teaches part time at a private school. Lesson plans go in six weeks ahead, and every student now gets a personal differentiation plan, which used to be done per group because per student was not feasible. The Sunday session that took four to six hours now takes fifteen minutes, plus short daily reviews of content and parent comments.

Uploaded all 6 nursing-school syllabi to the AI 'Mila', which spotted a hidden

Lixka, an accelerated nursing student at Mercy University, uploaded all six syllabi to her AI 'Mila'. Mila identified that Monday, September 28th was a 'triple-header' — two quizzes and a Pharm lab she hadn't noticed — then built a sustainable weekly rhythm around fixed classes, clinicals, and workouts, and asked permission before creating three tracked goals: quiz prep, reflection paper, and workouts/downtime.

WorkPartly worked

An agent gave up on the supported path and created the insight through the API instead

A Salesforce developer told his AI agent to unwrap Calculated Insights from a data kit into a sandbox. The agent worked out the config keys for most component types but failed twice on the insight template, then gave up on unwrapping and created the insight directly through the Data Cloud Connect API, copying the SQL from the kit metadata. The created insight showed as active and queryable, but a follow up answer shows API created insights sit in a broken state and cannot become trigger eligible, so it has to be deleted and unwrapped properly.

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

Extracted cinema-ticket details from a forwarded WhatsApp screenshot and added the event

Juan Lombana (verified, 670K followers), reviewing the AI in Spanish, demonstrated two capabilities via screen recordings: a personal-assistant goal tracker (college move-in, golf tee times, movie tickets, trip planning, school-supply shopping, IMAX booking) and WhatsApp integration — forwarding a cinema-ticket screenshot, from which the AI extracted the details, added them to his calendar, and scheduled the event. He compared its assistant-like proactivity favorably to the AI and noted secure payme

Analyze my interview recordings and research the people interviewing me

The same job seeker (Business Insider essay, via B17 News) asked permission to record interviews, then ran the notes through AI for sentiment analysis — where she hesitated, used filler words, or where the interviewer leaned in. She also built an AI skill that takes a pasted LinkedIn profile and finds genuine similarities with her own background; one shared cheese-club membership with a recruiter carried her further than any cover letter.

I had never written Swift. The AI and I shipped my wife's dance app.

His wife, a dancer, was fighting normal video players to learn routines, dragging the playhead back by hand for every rep. With zero Swift and no iOS experience, he built Dashi Dance with AI over about ten weeks, and it went live on the App Store on August 25 in 15 languages, with three updates shipped in the first two and a half weeks.

The AI wrote the tests that found the bad memory in my computer

Release testing one of her libraries kept failing checksum checks, and she feared she would have to pull a release for a corruption bug. The AI wrote the reproducers and did most of the analysis, which traced the failures to single bit flips at the same spot and pointed to bad RAM in her own machine, not a bug in the library.

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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.