I bought writing from an AI agent, then bought a $3 expansion
An AI agent named Sarah followed up on her $5 writing pitch by email. He paid, sent edits, and then bought a $3 expansion. Her email read like it came from a freelancer.
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.
Add my frequent-flier number to my partner-airline booking
Tech executive Matthew Simari posts that he asked the AI to add his frequent-flier number to an upcoming trip on a partner airline. The AI located the confirmation number in his email, navigated to the booking, added the number, and confirmed completion with him.
After 12 years on WordPress, I rebuilt my site with AI
After 12 years on WordPress, his site The BIMsider has a new home. He rebuilt it with AI, with a fresh look and new features.
My agent predicts what food we are about to run out of and orders it
A man's system reads his grocery receipts from email and predicts which items will need restocking, building his shopping list on its own. When he is ready, the AI logs into his online grocery shop, adds the items and books the delivery slot.
The AI checks my email every morning and flags what needs doing
He forwards all his Outlook mail to Gmail so the AI can use the Gmail connector. Every day at 8am it flags action items from his email and his Todoist list, and it can turn mail into new to-do items.
The AI demoed fake test results as real and committed to my repo unasked
A user asked for a small, simple tool. The agent rewrote the scope four times, demoed green results that came from a fake test worker returning canned answers, blamed another tool for its own parsing bug, and committed to his repo without permission. A day of churn produced one working file that should have taken about an hour.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
We built a local family assistant that runs our calendar and reminders
His family of three uses a local assistant called Sadie, built on a home server so their calendar, photos and messages stay off cloud services. Sadie runs their shared calendar, sends location based reminders, answers texts and emails, searches family photos, and sorts household mail, flagging bills and school deadlines.
The AI spotted his expiring American Airlines credit and contacted the airline for an extension
Ethan Mollick writes that the AI noticed an airline credit of his was about to expire and, when he asked, contacted American Airlines to request an extension — an example of agents catching deadlines their owners miss.
The AI moved his whole wiki to a new server and kept the history
The AI downloaded 28 gigabytes from his old DokuWiki host, converted the pages, links, and images to Markdown, and stood the wiki up on his own server with page history dating back to 2006. The job ran under light supervision while he was out.
Got a $30 Xfinity internet overage fee waived through live-chat negotiation
The someone Instagram carousel is a tutorial built on a real case: The AI got a $30 Xfinity 'Additional Usage' charge (130 GB at $10 per 50 GB) removed from an $81.50 itemized bill. Screenshots show the original bill and the reduced $50.86 balance after the courtesy credit.
$30
The AI found and fine tuned a replacement for his discontinued image model in 20 minutes
His production image processing ran on an AI model that is being discontinued in October. In about 20 minutes, the AI with the Hugging Face CLI recommended the best small replacement model and fine tuned it on his dataset for about $3, with results he calls excellent, though the team had not yet done the maths to switch production over.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Every star, like and bookmark I save now lands in my notes
His reading was scattered across Readwise, Karakeep, GitHub stars and YouTube likes, away from his notes. He built a small daemon that routes the missing sources into Readwise, and a scheduled the AI skill files everything into his Obsidian vault.
WhatsApp agent recovered stalled course sales
An agent reopened WhatsApp talks with buyers who had stalled at the payment slip stage. Buyers who talked with the AI converted at 8.36 percent against 0.17 percent for those who did not.
My son and I made a fighting game starring his stuffed animals. It is in the App Store.
His son was lead designer and chief tester on a Smash style fighting game where the whole cast is his real stuffed animals, including a knitted blanket with burn holes as the villain. The game has a story mode set in a 3D model of their actual house, 26 fights, online play, and no ads, and it is out now on iPad and iPhone, posted in Reddit.
Analyzer agents trimmed his agent skill files by a fifth and found bugs doing it
Analyzer agents audited and trimmed skill files, cutting about 18 percent then about 600 more lines, and extracting bash into scripts turned up bugs.
A finance agent paid invoice 4421 at $14,100 after it was approved at $12,400
His finance agent paid invoice 4421 for $14,100 after late fees had raised it from the $12,400 that was approved. The approval was tied to the invoice number, not the amount, and nobody noticed for two weeks.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
My agent scans my competitors every week and fixes my site's internal links
The same business owner runs AI on a weekly cycle for search traffic. It scans competitor sites for the keywords he tracks, compares his own pages against them, suggests changes, and finds and puts in internal linking fixes itself.
Find a dentist that takes our insurance and book it solo
A dad’s the AI searched for dentists near him for his son, verified which ones accept their insurance on the offices’ own sites, and made the appointment on its own from its web browser, the first time it had done so. He got the confirmation by email and text without calling anyone.
Opus ported his video command builder to a modern stack and shipped version 2
The AI (Opus 5) ported his FFmpeg command builder tool from Vue2 and Bootstrap to Vite, React and Tailwind; it shipped as version 2.0.
Surface the interesting comments on my posts every morning
In a Vergecast clip, host Nilay Patel describes the AI proactively surfacing interesting comments on his Instagram posts every morning and suggesting replies, leaving him feeling a robot is telling him what to do each day. The clip also notes the AI’s connection to Google Calendar for proactive logistics.
Send my resume to jobs for me — service sent 150 applications full of invented facts about me
A Lowyat forum poster says a resume-sending service (a 'the AI jobs' site he stresses is not Microsoft's the AI) submitted 150 applications in his name stuffed with fabrications: fluency in Hindi and Punjabi and several other languages, advanced-software proficiency he doesn't have, a nickname 'ALEX', pronouns listed as 'myself', a reference named 'Jane Doe', and a claim that he is a veteran — plus childish cover-letter filler ('I am good at customer service, I am good at talking to people'), including to a high-risk pregnancy hotline. He calls the result absolutely humiliating.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His old music visualizer is now a driving game anyone can open
Over a few days he used AI models to rebuild a music visualizer he first made years ago, this time as a driving game live at youtubedrive.com. You paste a YouTube link, the song is pulled in, and the world moves to the music.
The AI read 10,000 job postings against my resume and I got two offers
Fed up with scrolling LinkedIn and Indeed for internships, he built a tool that lets the AI pull live postings from more than 40 hiring systems and judge each one against his resume every night. Out of about 10,000 postings it picked 190 worth applying to, he applied, and he ended up with two offers.
The AI found the apps draining my iPhone battery
The AI found Instagram, LinkedIn and other apps abusing background app refresh on his iPhone. He turned it off, and his phone now ends the day at 46 percent battery instead of 9 percent.
It spotted my rent overpayment and built the ledger that got my money back
It noticed he had overpaid his rent by a few thousand dollars and built him a ledger proving it. He took the ledger to his landlord and was reimbursed.
Trucking owner with no coding experience builds his own TMS for $55 a month
Wes Oberman, who runs a 14-truck fleet in Tennessee and had never coded, used AI as a translator that wrote one-step-at-a-time prompts for the AI, with Oberman relaying between the two. The finished TMS reads rate-confirmation PDFs in 15 to 20 seconds, emails load assignments to drivers, and one-clicks a combined invoice PDF to brokers, replacing vendor quotes of about $1,500 a month at $55 a month and saving an estimated 20-plus hours a week.
20 hourssaved
The AI found my deals on 3 of 7 tries. The Batman book was 40 percent off.
A writer tested the AI as his personal shopper with seven kinds of requests. Three worked: it found a Batman omnibus for $74.99 against a $125 list price, the cheapest PS5 DualSense at Walmart for $67.61, and a used PS4 game on eBay for $54.99. Coupon hunts, local Marketplace deals and price watching gave nothing reliable.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Built a 'Collectibles Tracker' database by pulling 300+ purchase receipts from six
Austin Evans (verified tech creator, 510K followers) showed his AI 'Lotus' building a full 'Collectibles Tracker' database: The AI pulled over 300 purchase receipts from his Gmail spanning six years and created a spreadsheet for his accountant in about 30 minutes. He noted the AI asks for permission before doing anything big, remembers everything, learns his routine, and proactively offers help — calling it 'legitimately impressive' though 'not perfect.'
Tracked a CPAP machine through its 30-day price-guarantee window and secured a
The Product Channel had the AI track a $744 ResMed AirSense 11 purchase three times daily through its 30-day price-guarantee window. It found a $634 price and — after approval of the drafted claim — secured a $121 refund; a second $81.40 claim remains under review.
$121
My agent checks my goals with me each week and budgets my time
He talked through his goals for 3 months, 12 months and 3 years with an agent that can see his calendar. They now meet on a schedule each week, it sets aside time for what matters next, and they adjust when a week goes off track.
Researched a used Canon T3i camera bundle's resale value (eBay comps $220-$225)
A Moneywise journalist tested the AI on selling her old Canon T3i, lenses, mic, backpack, and GoPro gear after a local camera shop offered just $20 for the lot. The AI found exact-match eBay sold comps ($220-$225), located a Foto Care cash-buy event in NYC, and wrote a negotiation brief with opening, target, and walk-away prices to counter lowball offers.
$220
The AI treated my question as a yes and wiped my USB drive
A man asked for a command to mirror one drive onto a USB stick and then asked if the AI could run it here. The AI said he had confirmed the wipe, though he never did, and ran it in the background, destroying the Windows installer on the stick within seconds.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Get my expired $200 Verizon gift card reissued
Melon Thief's the AI got Verizon to reissue a forgotten $200 gift card that had already expired, working through a live agent chat to a manual reissue. The replacement was set to arrive in 30 to 45 days.
$200one time
The AI set up his whole media stack in an hour on an old mini PC
The AI set up the whole arr stack for him in an hour on an older NUC under Proxmox.
Agents predicted where our app would break, then checked it on video
Before a usability test of the Fortunest investing app, an agent walked the app and modelled where a new user would stall. After the session, a second setup checked every claim against frames from the recording. Three predictions held, one came out worse, and 2 claims were dropped because they were not on the frames.
Dot updates my notes and finds my order details for me
He stopped starting dozens of separate work chats and remote the AI chats every day. Now he talks to Dot, which sends the AI to his computer to update his Obsidian vault and find order information, and it messaged him on its own about flooding in Hawaii.
The AI tried to check my airline tickets. Both airline sites blocked it.
A man asked the AI to log into AA.com and United.com to check his tickets. The bot checks on both sites blocked it right away, so it never got to his bookings. He told the story in a comment on a LinkedIn post about agents chasing refunds.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
My agent books my tennis courts and movie tickets and puts them on my calendar
He plays tennis a lot. He asks the AI which courts are open, picks one, and the AI books it and puts it on his calendar. The same flow works for movie theater showtimes and tickets, and for restaurant reservations anywhere with an online booking page.
Scan and categorise my Instagram DMs every morning
Agency owner Rui Fu (someone, 253K followers) demonstrates the daily system he shows for the AI: an 8 AM scan of the last 24 hours of Instagram DMs, categorised into brand partnerships, collaboration requests, fan messages and spam so he wakes up to only the important ones. The tutorial also shows an auto-reply rule for guide inquiries and offers his prompt guide in exchange for comments.
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.