Ten AI sessions at once build the web crawlers for his classics project
AI sessions run in parallel building website crawlers for his classicalbot.com project on his VPS, about 10 parallel at most.
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 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.
I moved my blog and its 2,262 posts with AI
He moved his Topedia blog from WordPress to EmDash on a Cloudflare Worker, with AI as his technical partner. They moved 2,262 posts, comments and pages in under 7 days, and the site now loads faster and is ready for Markdown.
Kmart and Officeworks Shopping Agents Lift Conversion up to 3x
Wesfarmers retail brands Kmart Australia and Officeworks deployed the AI Enterprise shopping agents. They report higher conversions and basket sizes, with growth up to three times.
Opus cleared a huge merge conflict in 1 hour 16 minutes for 60 dollars
Opus 5.5 resolved a huge merge conflict in 1 hour 16 minutes for 60 dollars.
$60
The AI called my library to ask if it has outlets
He needed to know if a library near him had outlets. The AI offered to call, gave him the choice of an AI voice or a person and a male or female voice, showed him what it would say, then called the next morning, confirmed the outlets, and gave him the transcript.
Research my book's comps on Amazon
For his author test week, Christopher Kokoski pointed the AI at Amazon to research comparable titles (what is selling, cover styles, reviewer complaints). Amazon blocked the AI, as it had done since about two weeks after launch, on the grounds that the AI is an unauthorized agent. Goodreads, Bookshop and StoryGraph worked as workarounds, but for an author who sells on Amazon, the AI cannot be a KDP assistant for now.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI pinned her whole Copenhagen itinerary to Google Maps automatically
She gave the AI her Copenhagen itinerary and it saved every restaurant, museum, shop and point of interest directly to Google Maps, so the plan is pinned and adaptable on the ground instead of manually entered place by place.
Tell me which deal is most at risk, using Salesforce and Jira together
Following up without restating context, CData's Dot took the five pipeline deals (three accounts), searched Jira for open issues per account, found none, and named the Targeted Therapy Corp renewal most at risk: past its close date, described as a cancelled project, at 10% probability. The post says the same answer by hand can take days of asking engineering and searching two systems.
The AI turned my music listening history into a scrolling story
He tried many ways to show how certain artists became his favorites and how some faded out of his rotation. With the AI he ended up with a scrollable Sankey story of his listening, published on his dashboards site.
Turned 49 lease PDFs into a usable rent roll
A commercial real estate team gave an AI assistant 49 lease PDFs and got a usable rent roll out of them. The case opens a training session on handing real estate busywork to connected AI tools.
Built a recipe-organizing app from his saved Instagram posts in 5 minutes
After a friend used AI on Instagram favorites, Thompson asked it to organize his saved Instagram recipes. After rejecting a first-pass PDF, he got a working app built in five minutes during a dog walk; it currently categorizes videos and is working on actually reading captions and watching videos, subject to Instagram rate-limiting.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Our AI assistant publishes our social posts every morning
A small affiliate business says its AI assistant starts every morning by reading click logs by source and checking journalist requests, then it publishes the next social posts. A person still handles identity checks, payments and signups.
The AI audited and corrected a family-tree project
The AI audited the author's family-tree project against documents, removed errors, added newly found documents, and added a generational link the author had missed.
The AI reworked SEO across hundreds of articles for his Spanish tech site
For his outlet Tecnologia Geek, the same owner had the AI optimize SEO on hundreds of articles (titles, descriptions and keywords), working in batches with Google Search Console data. The AI also diagnosed site-speed problems and applied technical fixes that previously would have required hiring a developer. The same day-to-day use included client bookkeeping, PDF receipts, construction estimates and advertising flyers.
Booked three conference rooms; refused to book anything outside 9am-5pm local time
In two weeks of real inbox-and-calendar work, The AI Crux had the AI book three conference rooms. Calendar work was functional but conservative: it refused anything outside 9-to-5 local without an explicit override, which the reviewer framed as a guardrail more than intelligence.
The AI ran my side blog and X account for 90 days. It made ¥31 a month.
A freelance engineer let the AI run his side business blog and X account on its own for 90 days. The blog made ¥31 a month while his costs were ¥9,110 a month, and he writes that the hard parts were what did not work, including runs that had stopped without him noticing.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Qwen Go checked a user's Taobao orders and won a 52 yuan price-protection refund
In another beta-user case from the same report, a user asked Qwen Go to check their Taobao order history for price protection. The agent reviewed orders against protection windows, current prices and the amounts actually paid, filed refund applications for the qualifying orders, and confirmed the refund amount and arrival time. The user reported receiving 52 yuan back.
¥52
An LLM filled in four copies of an admin form from my notes
He spent about an hour getting an LLM to work out the fillable admin PDF he had been sent, then auto fill four copies from his Markdown notes. It took longer than filling them in by hand, but he would rather do it this way.
I knew no coding. The AI made a game mod that worked.
A player with no modding knowledge told the AI what he wanted for his Big Ambitions game and set it to Opus high. Five minutes later he had a mod that worked in the game, shared on Steam Workshop as Learn on the Job.
He manages IT for 54 locations, and a portal he built with AI replaced a dozen spreadsheet tabs
He manages IT for 54 locations and was trying to maintain documentation in 11 or 12 different spreadsheet tabs and various cloud apps: vendors, equipment, bills, contracts. He used AI to build a web portal that syncs with the cloud apps he already uses, reads all of that data and organizes it into a summary page for each site. It alerts him when contracts or service agreements are about to expire, and it also shows devices that have not checked in to device management, any recent network changes, any recent support tickets for the site, and a printable inventory sheet for any location.
I spent an evening teaching the AI to drive a car. It kept stopping.
He spent an evening trying to teach the AI to drive a car. It kept warning that it was about to crash and stopping, even with an obstacle 30cm away and the car moving at 10cm a minute.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Found $5,000+ in subscriptions via Plaid and canceled $1,300 of them as
Nate B. Jones (11K followers) joined what he called a 'viral challenge for the AI': connecting bank accounts through Plaid, the AI identified more than $5,000 in subscriptions he was paying and canceled nearly $1,300 worth for the coming year.
$5,000
My agent watches my app for crashes and drafts the fix before I hear about it
He has a mobile app with crash reporting through Sentry. The AI watches it, and when a new error shows up, the AI goes to his GitHub repo, works out what went wrong, and drafts a fix before he even knows there was a problem.
I used AI to build a chronology of my life and ancestry. 9,200 entries.
She used AI to create a chronology of her life and her ancestry with about 9,200 entries. She says she can base a memoir, a biography, or a family tree on it, and that the AI is good at coordinating the data even if it cannot write the book.
Catch my cancelled train and get me on the earlier one instead
In Simmons's roundup of other Dots users, one person's Dot read a cancellation email, checked live tracking on an earlier train, found it running late and got its owner onto it. The account is secondhand and brief.
Asked to move one class time, the AI rewrote the gym's waiver and rolled prices back to 2024
He uses n8n with AI to edit his climbing gym's website through its API. Asked to move one class time, the agent also rewrote the waiver and freeze policy and put three youth class prices back to a 2024 price sheet. Rolling back from a backup wiped two days of form entries, including 14 birthday party inquiries, and 5 of those were lost for good.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI set up his Halloween lawn ornaments in Home Assistant in 5 minutes
The AI via MCP built a Home Assistant automation for Halloween lawn ornaments in 5 minutes, with a dashboard override button, and it ran.
He built his own YouTube studio with AI and it cuts his filming for him
A creator who could not afford an editor paid for the AI Max and built his own post production studio, about 31,000 lines of code. Its smart cutting takes his raw filming and builds a DaVinci Resolve timeline for him, saving about 95% of the cutting time, and it also generates shorts and uploads with titles, descriptions, chapters and tags.
The AI built a wind watcher that shuts off my 10 foot Halloween figure
He added a 10 foot Oogie Boogie figure next to Jack and worried strong winds would damage it. He had the AI build a script that watches wind speeds at the airport and turns off the WiFi switch running the fan when the wind passes a set limit.
GPT checked the compile and resized a LaTeX section until it fit the page
A LaTeX user's copied table code did not fit his page size at all. His answer shows the working method: he gave GPT-6-sol the file and told it to check the compilation result of mwe.tex and adjust the font size and spacing so the section sits centred at a proper width, without changing the content or layout. The answer posts the adjusted code that came back.
Book me a restaurant table through my Google account
In Julian Goldie's YouTube test of Dots, the Dot successfully booked a restaurant table using his connected Google account, though the booking took several minutes and the computer use behind it was visibly slow and inefficient compared with rival agents.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He tells the AI to set up an app on his server and it leaves him notes
Tell the AI to set up an app on his server and it does it all and leaves a documentation note in his Obsidian vault; setup effort near zero.
The AI tells me about new plays every week
He could not find any service that tracks new plays by his 30 or so favorite playwrights. Now the AI checks and tells him every week.
The AI built an annotated guide to The Waste Land
As an Eliot fan, he had the AI Fable 5.1 build an annotated guide to the poem The Waste Land. The guide has more than one path through the poem, plus recordings and scholarship, and it is live online.
Two days of planning bought a 2-hour build of a high-risk feature
Spent two days planning, then the LLM built a complex high-risk feature in under 2 hours, putting deployment at 4 days instead of about 4 weeks.
The cron job reported ok — its message was never delivered (failure)
An AI cron job's Telegram delivery failed on a transient network error, but the stored run record still said status ok with delivered false, consecutiveErrors stayed at 0, and nothing retried or alerted — the scheduled message simply vanished. The failure was only visible by digging into the run diagnostics; anyone watching the chat or the job's status saw a healthy run.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI writes his eBay and Facebook listings and researches the price
The AI makes his listings for eBay and Facebook Marketplace and researches what similar items sold for. He approves the price before anything goes live and sends the photos himself, which he says keeps the listings honest.
A free tool for drawing on brain scans, built with AI
She has been building SurfAnnotate with AI and two colleagues, a free browser tool that runs on Neurodesk. It makes drawing regions on cortical surfaces a lot easier for researchers.
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.
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.