The AI brought back code I lost 30 years ago
He lost the source code for his macOS 8 PowerPC programs three decades ago. The AI decompiled the binaries, turned them into a web app, and then converted them to Dylan with OpenDylan.
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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
I built a game solo with AI. It launches on the Epic Games Store.
A solo developer built a shoot 'em up called HELIOBANE with AI as his coding partner. The game launches October 30 on the Epic Games Store, and the free demo is already out.
Had the AI 'Buddy' style an outfit for an Art Hop with a
Tiffany, a travel/local content creator, sent closet photos to her AI 'Buddy' to style an Art Hop outfit around a 'touch of purple' theme. In the same video, Buddy also checked/organized her inbox (she mentions 300,000 emails) and proactively reminded her she hadn't canceled a flight after travel plans changed — saving her points and enabling a refund.
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.
My cat feeder clips cost $0 a month now instead of $5
His cat feeder camera charged $5 a month to store motion clips. He had the AI reverse engineer the feed login so his home server could pull the video, spot the cats, cut clips, save them to R2, and play them in an iOS app, all for $0 a month.
$5a month
Six AI bots run his desk: mail, expenses, calls and tasks
A Business Insider Japan writer set up six AI bots besides his main one and has run them for about a week. One checks his to-do list and pushes him to reschedule, one picks out mail that needs a reply and drafts it, one pulls expense items from mail into a spreadsheet, and one looks up missed call numbers in his mail and contacts and sums up who called.
Run an 8-bot crew to haggle my car purchase down $4,200
A buyer ran an eight-bot the AI crew for his car purchase: over nine days a SCOUT bot watched 1,412 listings, a VALUER bot built a price curve, and a HAGGLE bot sent 11 messages to the dealer. The dealer came down $4,200.
$4,200one time
His autonomous agent business settled 410 deals and still lost money
He ran an agent as a business that negotiated and settled deals on its own: 410 settlements, 2.19 dollars in against 4.46 dollars out. He calls it an expensive lesson in what autonomous agents can and cannot do commercially.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
An agent watches his client's WordPress server around the clock for intruders
Runs an AI agent continuously scanning a WordPress VM and its host for intrusion signs, costing a few dollars a day billed to the customer.
Booked Savoca & Sons via OpenTable for a 7pm date night, then
Cole Bennett's agent 'Milo' sent a Monday morning summary, suggested a date night, curated Italian options from his saved reels (Rosetta & Vine, Savoca & Sons, Marchetti's), booked Savoca & Sons at 7pm via OpenTable under his name, then offered to order white roses and had Moon's Flower Shop deliver a $238 bouquet the same day via AMEX authorization.
$238
The AI built his Bluesky bot that posts articles and archive picks, and it is live
The AI built him a Bluesky bot that posts HN Wikipedia articles and posts an archive pick after 48 quiet hours; it is live and posting.
My agent called my carrier, cancelled my iPad data plan and got me a $10 monthly credit
He says he had the AI call his carrier to cancel the data plan on his iPad. The AI called him in when the agent needed a human to confirm. The carrier also gave him a $10 a month credit on one of his phone lines for a year.
$10a month
He replaced a paid chat service with his own, built with AI in a week of evenings
Built his own IRCCloud replacement with an AI Pro subscription, MVP in a week of evenings, then cancelled IRCCloud and now runs his own TUI, web, Swift and Tauri clients on a VPS around the clock.
Agent-built tooling sifted tens of thousands of property listings and found the mispriced few
Agent-built tooling sifted tens of thousands of real estate listings and surfaced the handful that were mispriced, behind two successful property flips.
A subagent deleted the root of his Windows drive and kept deleting for 5 minutes after he stopped it
A Windows user asked the AI to test changes on a copy of his work in a sandbox folder. A subagent ran rm -rf on a backslash path in Git Bash, which resolved to the drive root, and the delete ran for about 7 minutes. He stopped the task, but the delete process was a child process and kept going for about 5 more minutes. He got his files back from a Windows shadow copy.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A dashboard sorts his whole manufacturing business into the next card to do
He runs a manufacturing business with 17 employees and a day that bounces between projects and problems. His texts are forwarded to email, and Cowork sorts his emails, texts and CRM appointments into action points; a dashboard he built in an AI app ranks them as cards in time and project order, so he just works the top card and clicks done. It is learning how long his tasks take and how far away each one sits.
215 notifications a day became a triage bot of his own building
He gets 215 GitHub notifications a day, so he built a bot to triage them.
I stopped writing my listings and let AI read my buyer messages instead
His shop sells electronics accessories into Thailand and Malaysia, and one wrong word, waterproof instead of water resistant, once cost two months of returns. Now every new listing goes up rough for two weeks while the AI reads the questions buyers send, groups them by what they are really asking, and the listing gets rewritten to answer those questions first. Buyer questions and returns both dropped.
Tracked when tickets go on sale for events like the US Grand
Austin Evans, a verified tech creator (510K followers), showed his AI 'Lotus' tracking when tickets go live for events such as the United States Grand Prix in Austin, alongside a Collectibles Tracker database and morning tech-news briefs. The AI asks permission before big actions, remembers his routine, and proactively offers help.
An AI searches for jobs while I sleep
He wrote down what he is looking for in a criteria file and an AI on his VPS does the searching 3 to 5 times a week. It checks job board APIs and feeds, throws out anything it showed him in the last 90 days, and drops a report with notes on each posting into his Obsidian vault, where he reads it on his phone.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Handle my Ralph Lauren coat return end to end and send me the barcode
Jen Lehner says she asked Instinct to handle returning a Ralph Lauren puffer coat. The agent managed the entire return process and sent her the required barcode.
My Dots agent writes up my week and posts it to Slack on its own
His AI pulls from GitHub, Jira, Asana, his calendar and his email, writes up his week, and posts it to Slack without him asking.
The AI stripped a bloated camera app down to the bare video editor he wanted
Stripped the Insta360 Android app down to a bare video editor with AI's help.
My calendar fills my work blocks and switches my Mac to Focus on its own
An AI Skill reads his main Google Calendar, works out the free time in his day, and after he confirms, fills a separate calendar with 50 minute focus blocks and 25 minute chore blocks based on the Pomodoro technique. A script that runs every minute then turns his Mac's work Focus mode on and off to match those blocks, and he says it is running well so far.
My budget runs itself. The AI downloads the bank PDF.
Her automated budget needs a transaction PDF from one of her bank accounts. Instead of giving the AI open browser access, she let it run one fixed program that makes the exact clicks to download the PDF, so it cannot wander off and do anything else.
The AI helped me fix more than 20 websites in one night
During a long, frantic night, he worked with AI to mitigate and upgrade more than 20 LAMP websites. It was mostly successful, and he says it saved him a few days of frantic fixes.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Turn my podcast walks into wiki notes and a quiz
A developer built Idea Leash on an AI profile running locally on his Mac: he sends a podcast link by Telegram before a walk, and the agent transcribes it, writes notes into his markdown wiki and prepares a five-question quiz. After four real walks it had logged 7.66 km, nine voice ideas and sent after-walk summaries with web searches for ideas he dictated.
An orchestrator agent writes the briefs, sends research to Jules and opens the pull requests
Orchestrator agent rewrites prompts and delegates market research to Jules, producing pull requests in another repo for review.
GPT helped me fix my Bitcoin miner and build it new firmware
GPT helped him fix his Bitcoin miner. He also created his own improved, branded user interface and firmware for it.
Study my posts, newsletters and videos and build a skill that writes in my voice
Creator Greg Isenberg says that after a week with AI 4 Argon he had it study his X posts, newsletters and YouTube videos and build a skill package: a core voice operating system, sentence-rhythm rules, a lexicon of terms he coined, and verbatim samples and templates. A post it then wrote on marketing engineers was self-scored 9.2/10 by him.
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.