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.

HobbiesPartly worked

Whisper and an LLM rebuilt a 1973 lecture blackboard from tape audio

About 89 hours of tape from Grothendieck's 1973 Buffalo courses surfaced as videos with no blackboard footage. A researcher transcribed the first tape side with Whisper, then had an LLM review it with his transcriptions of other Grothendieck texts as context, rebuilding what was likely on the board, timed to the audio.

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

Security-review a suspicious email that passed every check

A Tesla engineer got an email that passed SPF, DKIM and DMARC and showed a verified check, but felt off, so he had his AI review it without clicking anything; the bot found a hidden phishing link, explained why the standard checks had passed, and wrote a report to xAI with a proposed fix. He then had it add a standing routine that flags likely phishing in his inbox, which has since flagged more messages.

The AI remade my class video so every pupil's work shows

His 5th grade class studied Maricarmen and her eviction, a real case, and the pupils made work about it. He gave Notebook the AI directions to redo the class video so all of their work can be seen, and the video is posted with a PDF of the work on his class blog.

Two kids at two schools and three email addresses became one shared family calendar that fills itself

His son is in half a dozen orchestras and bands, plus cadets and Explorers and Scouts, and his daughter is in reception class at a different school. Both schools send everything by email, the important details are often buried inside one of several PDF and Word attachments, and he kept missing things. Over the years the schools had collected three different email addresses for him, which made it worse. He got the AI to help him build a system that runs on a schedule in GitHub Actions, reads the school emails and drops the events into a shared Google Calendar. It costs him about $2 a month in API credits, which he calls much cheaper than a missed guitar lesson.

My dot built and published my review lab page from one prompt

Diana gave her dot Sparky one brief for a standalone review lab page, with a ten test grid, the scoring rules, a checklist and a clear note that it must not invent test results. Sparky built the page in an AI app Sites, published it, told her on its own that the page was set to private, and gave her a link she could share.

MoneyPartly worked

The AI helped me track down 6 of my 9 old pensions

She had pension paperwork scattered from 9 permanent jobs since 1990. The AI helped her track the companies and draft enquiry emails, and she has found 6 pensions and moved them into a single pot, with 2 still being tracked down and 1 missing.

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

Run my moving-company marketing with three always-on bots and a 35-minute morning approval pass

A moving/junk-removal owner says three the AI run his marketing agency work: a Google Business Profile posts bot drafting daily posts in each client's voice, a review-replies bot generating three reply options per new review, and a GoHighLevel bot logging leads, creating call-back tasks and drafting follow-ups. His morning pass runs 6:30, 6:45 and 7:00 AM approving posts, picking replies and sending follow-ups, done by 7:05 with nothing left open; the bots are logged into Gmail, Quo, Stripe, Wix, GoHighLevel and Google Business Profile.

The AI wrote the system docs I owed before I could retire

He let the AI go through his system and write a first pass of the documentation, including the billing part he felt he had to finish before retiring. The remittances section alone used up a full day of tokens, so the work ran over several days, but it got done and let him retire, or at least half retire, a little earlier.

MoneyWent wrong

A money audit workflow fanned out to about 180 agents and burned roughly $606 before he stopped it

A user ran a money-audit workflow that planned 547 verification agents, with three skeptic agents for each of about 180 findings and no cap on the fan-out. About 180 agents ran, using roughly 36.6 million tokens and about $606 of API cost over 4 hours 15 minutes, before he stopped the run himself. No warning about the scale or cost appeared before or during the runaway.

$606at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
FoodNew

My AI logs every meal by voice, text or photo into my own spreadsheet

After years of building his own food logging apps and never liking them, he set up an AI as his food logger in about half an hour, and now sends it a voice note, a text or a photo of each meal. The bot works out what he ate, looks up the nutrition numbers and logs it in a Google spreadsheet it made for him, and its guesses are usually right.

HobbiesWent wrong

I asked the AI to fix my laptop fan. It disabled my keyboard.

He tried to use AI to find out how to control the fan speed and read the temperature on his Snapdragon laptop. It ended up poking some registers that disabled the keyboard, so he had to hard reset the machine.

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

The AI ported my 1993 Amiga game to phones. It is out now.

The creator of Babylonian Twins had the AI port his 2010 game engine and the original 72,758 lines of 1993 assembly into Godot. The Definitive Edition is live on iOS and Android, the 1993 original is free on itch.io, and a fix found from a one star review shipped as version 2.0.3.

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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.