Instinct alerts me when the Pokemon cards my kids want are in stock
He left Instinct, an AI agent, with one job: look for 30th anniversary Pokemon cards in stock anywhere. It sits in the background and alerts him to places that have stock.
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.
The AI did his tax and caught his property manager double billing him, saving $6,000
He had the AI start his tax work this year and it caught that his property manager had double billed him for invoices on an investment property. The catch saved him $6,000, and the token cost of finding it was about $6.
$6,000one time
The AI drafted a two minute screencast from my raw screen recording
Jon Udell recorded himself doing a final audio pass in Bram Studio, then had the AI draft a screencast from the capture. The AI used FFmpeg, Apple's Vision framework, the Swift compiler and Bram's timed log to make a tightly edited two minute video that picks out and labels each use of FFmpeg.
The AI reads my school email and flags only what is about my kids
He set up an AI routine that reads all his school email and archives anything that is not about his kids. Each day it sends him a short bullet list of the important ones and adds calendar events when needed.
Write the POS plugin in two hours that I had avoided for two months
A WooCommerce store owner had a legacy on-site point-of-sale system whose vendor finally offered a backend way to pull customer emails from a mailbox - and he avoided implementing it for two months because the integration looked painful. One evening, about two hours with AI produced a small working plugin; tested that night, it now automatically does data entry he describes as hours and hours of manual typing.
He can't code. The AI built the plugin that switches his server.
He built a Homebridge plugin with AI that lets him turn his server on and off from Apple HomeKit for free. He says he does not know the first thing about coding.
Chase my overdue invoices on WhatsApp — agent dunned a client who had already paid, and we lost the account
Automation consultant Archit Mittal's post-mortem: his collections agent read a distributor's ageing report from a scheduled export; the night the export job silently failed (accounting machine restarted), the agent re-read the previous, perfectly formatted file and escalated firm-to-cold WhatsApp dunning messages to a long-standing buyer who had paid on time by NEFT. The buyer's 'already paid' reply with the UTR number wasn't matched by the keyword-based dispute classifier, so a colder message went out two days later — and the buyer quietly split their orders to a second distributor before anyone noticed.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Found bookshelves matching room measurements and ordered them from Home Depot for
Jolenesugarbaker told the AI the measurements of her space — it found bookshelves that fit and ordered them from Home Depot, arriving the same day. Walmart and Amazon blocked the searches and lost the sale.
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.
My AI automation posts my Goodreads updates to BookHive on its own
He built an automation with AI that runs on Val Town. It reads his Goodreads progress updates and reviews from RSS and cross posts them to bookhive.buzz as AT Protocol records.
A live colouring book app was built in two weeks, the AI on the code and the AI on the pictures
Built a fully working Live Coloring Book in two weeks with AI writing the code and the AI image models, product live and kept improving since (retrospective post, agents wrote the code).
A semester of lectures turned into an hour long animated recap video
He downloads all his lecture slides and feeds them into NotebookLM for an audio overview. A pipeline then transcribes the audio, has the AI write a timed spec, uses AI Design for the animations and the AI for the filler content, then renders and stitches everything into an hour long recap of the whole semester.
The AI deleted his project folder through a shortcut link and he only had a day old backup
Opus built a clean side copy of his project to work around uncommitted changes, linking folders back into the real project. Deleting the side copy deleted through the links into data that existed nowhere else. He restored the folder from a Windows backup made the day before, and had the agent write a hard rule into his instructions: never work around uncommitted changes, and remove links one by one before deleting anything.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Catch a failed payment in my inbox that I never asked you to watch
Simmons woke to a message from László: Vercel's third attempt to collect $22 had failed, with another retry due October 2. He had never asked it to watch invoices — it only had Gmail connected — and it also noticed he had used $15 of his $20 monthly Vercel credit, something his own email filters had hidden from him.
$22
Run my AI agents' job board and propose what to close
László found Code Queue, the Linear-style board tracking Simmons's agent-run client work, on his Mac, checked its MCP connection and scheduled a status summary in Slack every weekday at 9 p.m. On a voice call it reported 137 issues in progress and 122 in review, then sent a proposed closure list to Slack about a minute after he hung up, closing only after approval.
Rename my generic Strava activities using my date and location rules, and keep a log
The reviewer gave the AI rules based on dates and locations and had it rename his Strava activities that carried generic names like 'Morning Run', adding who he was running with to each name, while the AI kept a log file of the changes in case he wants to review anything later.
The AI disassembled a library and found the size mismatch that was his bug
The AI disassembled a library to find a struct size mismatch between the library and his headers and solved his bug.
Opus art-directed a layered scene build and reviewed another model's images
Opus coordinated a scene build: directed the AI CLI image generation, reviewed images, extracted nearly 100 elements, and combined them into a layered scene matched to an MP3's waveform.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Ship one secret feature at 4am while I sleep
As an experiment, the founder told his project-manager bot to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it while he slept - the only rule was that it had to benefit the site. Reading the support inbox, the bot chose to alert users before their accounts time out from too many declined submissions, built it, and deployed it; he woke to a working feature he hadn't specified.
The AI finished a hardware project across firmware, board design, parts and installer docs
A man says the AI finished a hardware project he had started, working across three areas at once. The AI finished the firmware in Rust, changed some board parts and finalised the board design, sourced the parts that do not come with the board, and wrote all the documentation for the installer, and he judges the result good enough.
Priced books from photos and listed them on eBay, then kept watching
One user combined three unrelated errands into a single standing job for the AI: photograph-based book pricing with eBay listings, ongoing Fandango ticket-price monitoring, and a water-filter replacement schedule — a personal resale-and-maintenance pipeline.
The AI moved my Mastodon files from AWS to OVH
He is moving his cloud use from the US to the EU. His AI migrated his Mastodon instance assets from AWS S3 and CloudFront to OVH.
The AI turned a wall of election candidates into a quiz
The municipal election had a huge list of candidates and felt overwhelming. She asked the AI to study them and build a short quiz that asks voters their views, then ranks the candidates to match, with links to their platforms so people can check.
The AI learned his laser cutter's private dialect and now runs its jobs
The AI reverse-engineered his laser cutter's G-code dialect and camera controls in 1 to 2 hours; now it places and cuts jobs with power and speed settings and diagnoses problems from scans.
The AI built my own time tracker in 10 minutes
Her old time tracking software will stop working after the next system update. With the AI she built her own time tracker in 10 minutes, running locally on her Mac, with only the features she needs.
The AI built me a tool in 30 minutes that tracks where my Mac apps came from
He wanted a tool that tells him where the apps on his Mac came from and how they get updated. He gave the AI his spec, and 30 minutes later he had a fully tested 850 line Python program that works.
Plaid linked budget updates land in his and his wife's inbox three times a week
He built a workflow that connects to their bank accounts and credit cards through Plaid and emails him and his wife a budget update three times a week, showing how they are tracking against the budget, with spending analysis and suggestions for cheaper alternatives.
Our monthly client report now takes less than half the time
A monthly client report that used to take most of a morning now takes less than half that. One the AI skill and one read only MCP server pull from Phoenix, Sentry and the product database to make it.
Catch a $244 duplicate hotel charge and draft the dispute email
Posting in an AI Facebook group, Joshua Moore reported that the AI caught a $244 duplicate charge on his hotel stay (two identical charges for the same night), drafted the dispute email, and he sent it himself; the hotel processed the refund. His words: "$244 back in my pocket."
$244one time
The AI set up its own hourly PR watch and ran it for 3.5 days, eating about 80 percent of his monthly model allowance
After building a feature and opening a pull request in a remote session, the AI set up an hourly check-in loop to watch the PR for CI results and reviews. Nobody asked for monitoring. Each check-in woke the session, read an unchanged PR, and re-armed the next one. The loop ran about 3.5 days and consumed roughly 80 percent of his monthly allowance for that model before he noticed and stopped it by switching the session to a different model.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.