The AI reverse engineered a speaker app so he can queue music from his laptop
The AI reverse engineered the Bowers and Wilkins app so he can queue music over WiFi from his laptop instead of his phone, done in a couple of hours.
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.
A 35 minute call with Dots to make one task, and it still got it wrong
He spent 35 minutes on a call with Dots trying to create a task on his remote PC. Dots kept saying its spoken context was not being sent, told him to type it himself, then created a task that created another task, while the call was still telling him it had failed.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He sent a screenshot and the t-shirt was home the next day
Àlex sent his Instinct assistant a screenshot of an Obeses t-shirt and told it his size. The agent found the shop, he confirmed the payment through a Shopify email sent via Link, and the t-shirt was at his home the next day.
He rebuilt his parents’ blind controls so the house opens and closes itself with the sun
His parents’ ten blinds ran off one dumb radio remote. With a Flipper Zero he recorded the signals, the AI spec’d an ESP32 board to send them, wrote and flashed the software, and designed a printed case; the blinds now open and close at sunrise and sunset with a small web page for overrides. Later the AI built a phone app so his parents can just ask Siri to open or close them.
Negotiated with a local artisan for a ceramic piece
New York Times journalist Eli Tan (who nicknamed his AI 'Wren') asked the AI to sort his emails, assemble his fantasy football team, and 'fiercely negotiate for a ceramic piece with a local artisan.' He called it 'the most useful app [he's] ever used.'
The AI copies data from locked PDFs into a spreadsheet, cutting each item from 25 minutes to about 6
The AI copies data from varied non-editable PDFs into a spreadsheet for human review, cutting handling from 20 to 30 minutes to about 5 to 7 minutes per item and raising throughput from 2 to 3 to 8 to 10 items per hour.
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
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.
Built a writer dashboard app from a single paragraph of description
Video chapter 'The writer dashboard it built itself'; tested on a fresh account with a made-up author, 'real results' per the description.
Set up 'Journey' to watch Christmas airfare to Costa Rica and alerted
Allison Amini, a travel advisor (someone, 5.3K followers), asked whether to book now or wait for Christmas flights (LAX to SJO/Liberia, Dec 22-30). The AI’s 'Journey' asked clarifying questions, advised booking soon (fares ~$1,213 round-trip, peak demand), and with permission set a 3-hour watcher that only alerts on significant drops.
$132
The AI keeps my to-do list and reminds me on Telegram
He runs AI on his own server with Ollama, so it stays private. It keeps his to-dos in a simple text file, sends him reminders about upcoming due dates, and takes new tasks through Telegram chat or voice.
Plan and book my whole trip to China — I'll just click pay
An experienced traveller who hates planning had the AI plan his recent trip to China and book everything — flights, hotels, tickets and attractions — leaving him only the final pay button to click. Before travelling he ran the finished itinerary past a fresh session told to find errors, and it caught one: he was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
57 billion tokens spent rewriting a small tool, and nothing usable came out
57B tokens burned on an AI jq rewrite and nothing usable came out.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
A reviewer agent has checked 7,600 of his commits in four months and rejected half at least once
A reviewer agent has gated his commits for four months of daily use, about 3,877 commits and 7,600 reviews, rejecting about half at least once and catching real bugs before commit (his own measured use, RemainderBot class).
Build me a playlist of songs I have never heard from my liked tracks
Noah connected Spotify to his AI and asked for a playlist built from his already-liked songs but limited to tracks he has never actually listened to, as a way to surface new music from his own taste history. The AI can also just play his liked songs on his phone or computer on request.
The AI rebuilt his app as native phone apps overnight, smaller and instant to open
The AI worked about 6 hours overnight, inventoried a React Native app, and created working native Android and iOS versions, smaller and launching instantly.
Sent 25 brand outreach emails with metrics and set 3-day automated follow-ups
Bybatee's AI agent 'squishy' sent 25 outreach emails to brands in her niche — with her metrics, portfolio, and media kit attached — and set automated follow-ups after 3 days for non-responses.
Work my to-do list for two weeks — 7 items done in week one, 0 in week two
Sid Saladi documents a two-week experiment: after a 20-minute sort of his to-do list into DO, DRAFT, REMIND or GOAL, the AI ran it with a morning plan, an evening digest and a Friday sweep — including checking his inbox every morning for a refund email that had sat red for three weeks. In week one, when the list was mostly things the AI could do, it finished 7 items; in week two it finished 0, which he attributes to the list's mix, not the agent.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI’s halftone tool had him burning printing screens a day or two later
The AI built a halftone web tool, rewrote it in JavaScript, and he was burning screens with it a day or two later.
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
My agent moves my smart home devices between networks so I do not have to open every app
She gave her agent a rack mounted phone to control over ADB and its own Bitwarden account for passwords. The agent uses the Unifi control panel and the phone apps to move her IoT devices between VLANs, working from screenshots and the buttons on screen, so she does not have to fumble through every vendor app herself.
His business feeds receipts to the AI and gets back a file its expense app understands
His small business puts receipts into AI, which itemizes them into a CSV their existing expense SaaS understands, saving them from buying an upgraded receipt-scanning app.
The AI runs my quant research every hour, and one strategy already trades real money
His loop starts the AI once an hour with no human approval, a decision table in code picks one action, and each cycle ends in one pull request that a checking script may merge and deploy. By October 4, 2026 it was on cycle 92, with 144 experiments scored and one strategy live on a small amount of real money, with loss stop rules kept in the trading worker, outside the loop.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Find plumbing leads with no website and pitch angles
In a MindStudio demo, the AI was asked to scrape the web for Northwest London plumbing businesses without websites and return three qualified leads. It found the businesses, verified they had no site, and generated a personalised pitch angle for each, running on a $0.24/hour CPU instance.
An invoice agent read 688 documents in 30 days at about 11 cents each, with 3 errors
His invoice agent processed 688 documents in 30 days at about $0.11 per document and made 3 errors, with no retry storms. He is open that a document marked completed does not prove every field was read right, so the numbers count finished documents, not verified ones.
Proactively flagged a TripIt security email about a password change he had
The AI sent a notification that it had spotted an email from TripIt, the vacation-planning app Ulanoff uses, about a password change he had forgotten making. The agent wanted to make sure he'd seen the email verifying it was him.
A whiskey firm's Shopify reporting runs itself after four weeks of watched runs
Shopify hid the data his whiskey company needs for accounting and compliance, so reporting was a manual merge every week. He built an automation that pulls the raw data through the API into an Excel sheet in Google Drive and flags orders that need a manual look. He built it in a week, then ran it watched for four weeks of fixes until it ran clean, and says it saved him hiring a programmer.
A street sweeping alert service built with agents warns him the night before parking rules bite
Broomsday street sweeping alert service built with LLM harnesses is ready and testing with friends and family, sends email and SMS the night before block restrictions to avoid 50 dollar tickets.
$50
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI made my sheet in Google Drive and task cards in Trello
He picked the AI for a work task because the AI was busy with something else. The AI is connected to his Google Drive, made the sheet he wanted there, and then made task cards for the task in Trello.
Three days of the AI on a small home computer produced two working sites
He ran AI for three days on a headless ThinkCentre Tiny in the corner, driving it from a browser. Out came a learning page that walks through one job of an AI agent from order to approval to publishing, and a playable online photo darkroom where visitors expose their own photo and the file never leaves their browser.
Scan my inbox unprompted and rescue a message trapped in spam
Without being asked, the journalist's Dot (Sam) scanned her email and flagged two things she had missed: a message that had accidentally landed in spam, and a form she had forgotten to fill out.
Complain to the hotel until they refund me
A commenter says he feeds the AI his booking details and complaint and lets it negotiate petty corporate disputes. For a Milan hotel stay, the AI first won a free night he rejected, then a 25% reimbursement he accepted.
Agents read 206 of my AI sessions and found 223 failures
Haiku 5.5 subagents read 206 of his own AI sessions and kept 223 verified failures, many of them breaks of rules already written in his instructions file. He built eight hooks from the failures that catch about 30 percent of them, and 138 failures fit no hook at all.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
It helped me fight a PayPal tax claim and the whole bill went away
PayPal had told the IRS he had done tens of thousands of dollars of business through it, when the real figure was $150. With its help he disputed the claim and the entire tax bill was eliminated.
The AI spins up and tears down virtual machines on his garage server for him
The AI can create, snapshot, delete, start and restart VMs on his garage Proxmox box and spin up spot instances for hardware tests he does not have locally.
Created, optimized, and posted Meta ad campaigns from his existing Instagram videos
In comments on a testimonial post, someone elaborates that the AI autonomously created, optimized, and posted ad campaigns using his existing Instagram videos to drive traffic to Spotify and YouTube, rotating creatives automatically. Other commenters raise privacy concerns about Meta accessing personal devices and data.
The AI mapped the missing road to the takeoff spot
The road to a takeoff spot they fly from was not on OpenStreetMap, though satellite images showed the track. They built a tool called osmctl, and the AI drove it and mapped the road.
A desktop app became a web client in 2 prompts and 2 hours, at 95 percent
An LLM ported a Qt desktop app to a thin web client and server, reaching 95 percent of functionality in 2 prompts and 2 hours.
2 hourssaved
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI saved a streamer's whole video archive before Twitch deleted it
He had the AI download every video still left on a Twitch streamer’s channel, since Twitch only keeps archives about three months. The AI ran OpenAI speech-to-text twice for about $80, then made an HTML page summing up the public background the streamer had mentioned on stream.
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.