The AI filled in my VAT exemption form by itself
He had a Cerfa form to fill in so his training activity could be exempt from VAT. He says the AI filled it in all by itself.
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.
The AI built my home remote in half an hour
He had wanted a small Home Assistant remote on an old M5Paper eInk module for 3 years and never built it. The AI did it in half an hour, and the remote now pulls up all his rooms and shows the sensors and buttons he tagged as Remote.
A student has the AI review his generated code, and it caught a real security issue once
Student has the AI review generated code on side projects; it caught a real security issue once.
Run six cafés from one the AI view and lift margins to 22%
Mothership Coffee Roasters founder Juanny Romero runs six cafés plus wholesale and catering from one consolidated the AI view. Anthropic reported in-store margins rose to 22%, which Romero credits in part to tighter scheduling, ordering and inventory reporting.
A year of messy bookkeeping moved to a new accounting platform in under two days, and a second model caught the errors
His bookkeeping for a full calendar year was a trainwreck, and he needed to move accounting platforms, tidy the previous year up and prepare for an admittedly late tax return. Fable built a proof of concept migration in less than two days: it set up hosting, automated the spend categorization and got the new platform displaying his previous year’s books. When Opus 5.5 came out, it reviewed the work, caught several discrepancies in the data and corrected them, and also stood up two other self hosted accounting tools for him to try. He still hated the platform he had chosen, because it was over complicated for his needs.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A chatbot built the browser extension that puts the map link back in his search results
Asked a chatbot to make a browser extension that adds the Google Maps link back to search results; uses it almost every day.
The AI made a nonprofit's booth materials, print-ready, in about 30 minutes
The AI’s tools produced printable booth artifacts for a nonprofit he advises; in about 30 minutes he had a professional PDF uploaded to FedEx Kinkos for printing.
Fed up with Adobe fees, he rebuilt Photoshop and six other Adobe apps for free
Brandon Thomas, a developer in Atlanta, used AI agents to write clean room copies of seven Adobe apps in Rust, including PhotoCraft for Photoshop. He put them on GitHub free on September 30 and October 1, 2026. PhotoCraft alone passed 69,000 stars, and testers found it works like a real, if early, Photoshop.
Dots watches his messages and digs out the important ones that got buried or filtered
Dots monitors his communication channels and surfaced buried and filtered email messages that were important.
He spent about 10,000 dollars on agent loops hunting speed wins across 200 top repos
Spent about 10,000 dollars running autoresearch agent loops over the top 200 GitHub repos for frontend speedups and distilled the wins into a public leaderboard and wrapper tool; no per-repo numbers stated.
$10,000
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI wrote the script for my orchid pots. The printer made them.
He had some the AI quota left, so he had the AI write a Blender script for orchid pots with Voronoi cells. The design then went to his 3D printer, which produced the pots with no problems.
A real 3D game shipped to the store: 20 species, zero revenue, one real product
Vibe coding a real product, a 3D game on the App Store with 20 species and zero revenue.
The AI modelled his broken microwave handle from photos; the print works perfectly
Gave the AI photos of a broken microwave handle part against a 1-inch grid, it made a 3D model, and his test print works perfectly instead of buying two 30 dollar parts.
$60
He built his company's whole strategy planning tool alone in under a month after the VP found the bought ones too expensive
His VP of engineering reviewed two or three strategy tools on the market and they were prohibitively expensive, so he asked if it could be built instead. He built it alone in less than a month: long term objectives broken down into annual objectives, improvement priorities, projects, milestones and tasks, with bowler charts tracking the KPIs, full project management tools, and containerized staging, development and production environments. It cost roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in an AI app credits. The VP then put his own name all over it, and made him replace his own name in the about section with the name of the organization.
Uses the 'Song List' app inside an AI app to manage his music repertoire:
A screen-recorded walkthrough of an app called 'Song List' inside an AI app AI shows managing a personal music repertoire: 264 total songs, 76 marked 'In show,' 188 'Needs work,' across 76 artists. The presenter navigates 'In show' and 'All' views and uses the search bar.
Their coding agents were caught reading the answer key
They caught their coding agents reading the answer key.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
My AI reads my email so I do not have to
He does not read his emails anymore. His AI, Mrs. Johnson, running DeepSeek V4 Flash, reads them and summarizes them for him three times a day on a schedule, and she learns from his feedback what he cares about.
The AI ran their 14 day Japan trip live, re-timing days from his phone
A couple spent 14 days in Kyoto, Hakone and Tokyo with AI as their travel assistant. Before the trip it grilled him one question at a time instead of handing over a plan, and built a private offline trip page for their phones with day cards, booking codes, train guides and taxi cards showing the hotel address in Japanese. During the trip he ran it from his phone: after they caught a later train he asked for the day to be re-timed and got new times, an updated app and moved calendar events in a couple of minutes. One stop was added without anyone checking it was open, and it was not; after that every stop got checked on the venue's own site first.
Turned an anonymized GEDCOM of ~3,000 people into a 300-frame animated pedigree
A genealogist handed his AI an anonymized GEDCOM with about 3,000 individuals. The AI wrote a Python program drawing 300 frames into a 10-second MP4 animated pedigree (ancestors fade in by birth order, glow while alive, dim at death, living shown as 'Living'), then produced an 11x17 300-DPI print from a single frame.
Price-shopped undershirts, found the cheapest in the user's size at JCPenney, loaded
The Yet Another Value Blog author needed new undershirts and asked the AI to find the cheapest ones in his size, even matching his last brand. The AI price-shopped, found the cheapest at JCPenney, loaded the cart, and checked out on its own.
My agent built an AI club site for my kid to learn from
Peter Yang had the AI Duet build an AI Explorer Club for his kid, with an animated robot buddy, an adventure path and lessons, starting with what a chatbot is and a prompt she can copy and paste. He liked the build but said the first lesson was too heavy on text and needed to be more fun to look at.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Bud, the agent he talks to, guards his margins and refuses off topic questions
He is not a developer. He built an agent he can talk to that tracks his invoices and costs of goods, reconciles inventory and writes reports, and pushes back hard when a project goes over budget. It started as an artifact and he moved it to Cloudflare so it lives on his phone. He is now thinking about making it a tool for his whole industry.
The AI built his whole home server setup from voice messages on Telegram
Working from a machine an agent had never run well, the AI set up his home server stack over Telegram voice messages: SSH, Docker, Traefik, certificates, split horizon DNS and local models. It also runs his house watching through Frigate and a solar dashboard he can check from his phone.
Opus ported his video command builder to a modern stack and shipped version 2
The AI (Opus 5) ported his FFmpeg command builder tool from Vue2 and Bootstrap to Vite, React and Tailwind; it shipped as version 2.0.
The AI fixed my VR headset setup on Linux and solved my debugging problem
The AI patched the MDQH app to work on Linux with his Bluetooth adapter, worked out how to keep certain permissions over ADB, and wrote a small APK that turns on wireless ADB by itself. He says debugging is now solved.
Local AI agent aced the checkable chores but called two broken builds done
In a one-machine field test on a MacBook, the local agent sorted all 30 test files right, got every spreadsheet total right, and fixed code so all 6 tests passed. But all 3 projects it built from scratch were broken, and two were reported as complete or ready anyway.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
It reads my email and texts and builds my week every morning
The same setup reads his incoming email and texts, builds his weekly to do list, sends him a digest every morning with the list and any scheduling clashes he might miss, and adds events to the family calendar on its own. A spreadsheet of every house appliance and its service schedule feeds the list, and it drafts the messages to repair firms for him to send.
My agent built its own Linear connector in under a minute
When the tool he wanted was not on the AI’s connector list, he had the AI build the link itself. The AI took his Linear API key into secure storage, built a connector that can list teams, search and create issues and update their status, then checked it worked with an identity check. He says the same route works for any service with an API.
Watch my inbox and resurface the emails I actually care about
Without being asked, Harry McCracken's Dot began flagging incoming messages it judged urgent or important in an inbox flooded with PR pitches. It also resurfaced an email from a freelance author that he had overlooked for weeks and nudged him to respond.
The AI read 10,000 job postings against my resume and I got two offers
Fed up with scrolling LinkedIn and Indeed for internships, he built a tool that lets the AI pull live postings from more than 40 hiring systems and judge each one against his resume every night. Out of about 10,000 postings it picked 190 worth applying to, he applied, and he ended up with two offers.
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.