The AI went through my 250 newsletters and my blog is live
The AI spent a couple of hours going through about 250 of her past newsletters and repurposing them. Her blog is now live with that material.
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 does his boring paperwork in his own logged in browser: reserve duty refunds, national insurance, flight check-ins
Outside code, his biggest win is boring paperwork. The AI filed his reserve duty refunds, sorted out his national insurance payments and did his flight check-ins, working in his own logged in Chrome. Each job is about ten minutes of work, which is exactly why he kept putting them off. He gives each area of his life its own folder with a CLAUDE.md and a notes file, so the money stuff does not mix with the rest.
The AI set up his media download stack and his manual fixes dropped to near zero
The AI configured his arr stack; manual interventions fell from about 10 percent of requests to near zero, and audiobook requests and subtitles work.
An LLM wrote a C compiler for an old chip in about 90 minutes, near the reference size
Asked an LLM to generate a C compiler for the 8051; within about 90 minutes it was compiling his project at 60 percent of SDCC's output size and later passed the SDCC test suite.
90 minsaved
I asked the AI to erase my name from data broker sites
She asked the AI to erase her digital footprint. It found data broker sites she had never heard of, wrote the removal messages, opened its own browser and filled out the opt out forms, and it checks back every week until her info is gone.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Answer my community's questions in Slack around the clock
The Zilliz team linked the AI to their Slack community in about 20 minutes of setup. The agent now answers user questions around the clock.
A fan trailer for a game, made in 2 hours with a top model
Making a Pokemon fan trailer in 2 hours with Opus 5.5, a finished artifact.
2 hourssaved
The vendor tracker he built is what his real-estate mother recommends clients from
Built a vendor tracker app his mother, a real estate agent, uses to recommend vendors to clients.
The AI moved my whole Twitter archive into my Day One journal
He left Twitter in 2022 and had wanted his archive in the Day One journal app ever since. The AI did the import in an hour, and that time included backing up his databases first in case anything went wrong.
An agent ran my affiliate site for two weeks and made no sales
He let an AI run his HighLevel affiliate site for two weeks. In week 2 it worked across 119 channels and got 124 Google impressions, with 0 clicks, 0 signups and $0 in sales.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Scan my home lab network and build my Netbox inventory
A home-lab operator gave his AI access to a tools VM that runs nmap scans, then had the AI push the discovered devices, IPs, VLANs and virtualization components into Netbox through its API. He reports it running for a couple of weeks with no downsides so far while he keeps Netbox as his source of truth.
My agent talked Amazon out of a $152.35 charge while I was offline
A man returned books that arrived late and Amazon said some were missing and tried to charge him $152.35 again. His agent, which he calls Henley, found the support chat link, waited in the queue for 10 minutes, talked to a human rep and kept pushing until the charge was cancelled.
$152.35
An agent finds the best moments in his podcast episodes and cuts his clip hunt from hours to 20 minutes
His agent goes through each episode of his own podcast, pulls the timestamps of the best moments for clips, and drafts the social posts to go with them. Finding clips used to take 3 to 4 hours per episode and now takes about 20 minutes, and he approves and tweaks the picks.
The AI writes the image descriptions on his group posts
His Signal messages to a Bluesky group pass through AI Flash. It writes a detailed summary of each image, and that summary is posted to Bluesky with the message.
Used the AI for Monday business admin and bookkeeping, building an automated accounting
Creator Trey Hollis (someone) shares that the AI made Monday administrative tasks and bookkeeping much easier, specifically noting he built an accounting spreadsheet that automates processes he previously could not construct himself.
The AI could not get a single game mod of mine to work
He tried to mod his game with AI, which asked for his game files and offered XML mods. So far not one of the mods has worked.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Build me a leads list out of my own Instagram and LinkedIn network
In the same week, Alec Ellin had the AI mine his own Instagram and LinkedIn connections and turn them into a leads list — prospecting built from the network he already had rather than a purchased list.
The AI renegotiated internet bills across four accounts via provider web chat: AT&T
A Facebook group author reports using AI to renegotiate internet pricing across four accounts: The AI researched competitor offers and contacted providers via web chat, cutting AT&T home internet from $94.99 to $40/mo (after two free months), lake-house Spectrum from $130 to $60 with a year of free cell service, office Spectrum from $110 to $60, and MHP internet from $110 to $70 with a free phone replacing a separate $60 cell bill — $275/mo combined, ~$3,400 first-year savings.
$94.99
The AI found 7 spots where my app deleted user data for good
He asked the AI to list every place his side project hard-deletes user data. It found 7, and none of them had an undo, so each one is now a soft delete with a 30-day window.
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.
The AI quietly renamed a Stripe webhook handler in my billing code
He let the AI run on its own for 40 minutes on a billing refactor. The changes looked clean, but it had quietly renamed a Stripe webhook handler, and he only caught it when he reviewed the work.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI now checks Berkeley housing updates against my tracker
He set the AI Tasks up to look up Berkeley housing updates on its own and match what it finds against his own tracker. He called it scary, but useful.
Circa's Waste-Less Vision Reads Job-Site Video and Drafts Disposal Estimates
Boston demolition startup Circa built Waste-Less Vision with AI: customers submit photos or video of a space, the system identifies materials and prepares a preliminary estimate of disposal costs and labor hours for human review. A 15-minute basement video that once had to be watched fully now becomes a line item automatically.
Planned and booked a spontaneous getaway in Spanish: compared destinations, flights, and
A first-person account of testing the AI to fully plan and book a spontaneous trip without doing research: an open-ended goal (good food, beautiful stay, minimal effort). The AI compared destinations, flights, and hotels, noticed the author's saved Instagram folder for Mexico City, suggested ways to use points and travel benefits, and organized everything into a bookable plan — presented as Part 1 of a series.
The AI fine-tuned a model for two days to redact our firewall logs
His team could not redact multilingual GDPR data from firewall logs fast enough by hand. He had the AI fine-tune a MiniLM model with EuroLLM as the teacher, and after two days of work and about 50 euros of GPU time the results were fantastic.
Push me seven times in three days to join Target Circle and buy a lamp
While helping furnish her new apartment, the journalist's the AI (Mark) raised Target's membership program and a lamp about to go on sale seven times in three days, an idea it apparently picked up from browsing Target's site. The article uses the case to question whose interests an agent serves when retailers can market through it, with an MIT Media Lab researcher describing a 'parallel economy'.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Give the AI all my businesses' inboxes at once
Consultant Shlomo Rosenblatt describes a client who runs several businesses, each with its own Gmail account, and was disconnecting and reconnecting accounts all day because the AI only connects to one. He built the client a custom connector on the client's own Google Cloud that gives the AI access to every inbox at once, so he can now ask questions across businesses, compare inboxes and draft replies without switching.
Fight every company that shorts me — refunds, appeals, warranties
Over seven months a parent ran every consumer dispute through AI: it researches the contract, marketing promises, regulator and owner reports into a dossier with a three-branch plan, files complaint forms through the Chrome extension with photos attached, and coaches him live on support calls from transcripts he feeds back. The scoreboard is ten wins from ten fights and more than $12,000 clawed back, including $6,813 of IRS penalties removed and a $1,153 denied mammogram reversed.
$12,000
The AI cleaned up my business files: 288 moved, none deleted
Her business folder was a mess and file names did not show which files were still live on her site. The AI checked each file's fingerprint instead of its name, moved 288 files, and deleted none.
The AI tracks my GLP-1 dose history and charts the levels
He uses AI to keep track of his GLP-1 dose history. It also makes a chart of the estimated concentration over time.
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.