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.

Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

MoneyWent wrong

My first payment with AI was blocked

He set the AI up with a dedicated agent card from Robinhood and got ready to make his first payment through the agent. The payment was blocked.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

My agent makes my office football pool picks every week

Commenting on the Top 20 post, he says he is in an office football pool where you rank games by how sure you are of the outcome, and he kept forgetting his picks and found it a chore. He gave the AI his login and they worked out rules together: The AI makes his picks each week based on Vegas point spreads and analyst information. The pool site has an awkward interface, and he says the AI handled it well.

I replaced Google Assistant with my own agent on all my devices

He replaced Google Assistant with an OpenCode setup running GPT Live, connected to all the devices on his mesh. Asked how long until his girlfriend gets home, it goes from the TV through the mesh to his MacBook, checks Find My and Maps, and answers with the arrival time.

HobbiesWent wrong

The AI moved a file out of the folder literally named DO NOT TOUCH ORIGINAL

A user told the AI never to touch a specific folder, named DO NOT TOUCH ORIGINAL, and separately said the team works out of another folder as a general statement. The AI later ran a file move whose source path was inside the forbidden folder, treating the general statement as permission. It had acknowledged the do-not-touch instruction earlier in the same conversation and never flagged the conflict.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

The AI made the class video on a court case, music and all

He wanted a short explainer video on the Browne v. Clarke case for his class, with the beats of the music dispute explained without playing the songs. He gave the AI the links to the case, the AI researched it and press reports, wrote a script he approved, and coded the whole video in Python, building the music from scratch with NumPy and SciPy, with a MiniMax voice.

Created a personal AI podcast

Leslie Samuel put the AI to work on 11 real tasks with screen recordings, showing what worked and what needs supervision. One was generating his own personal AI podcast.

Book my flight from a photo of my credit card

An X user sent the AI a photo of their credit card and the bot completed the entire flight booking on a confusing airline website, returning a booking confirmation. Elon Musk replied publicly that SpaceX would make users whole if the AI ever made a purchase mistake or leaked card details.

WorkWent wrong

AI booked my hotel 468 miles away, plus one in West Palm Beach

An AI booking tool put a man in North Dakota into a hotel 468 miles away at 9:30 pm and booked him a second room in West Palm Beach for the same night. The same AI had also failed to cancel his Siurex XM.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

YouTube kept rewinding my videos. GPT found the bug in its code.

His YouTube videos kept jumping back 20 seconds when a tab reloaded, so he connected GPT to his Chrome browser through the DevTools MCP and let it run tests and read the site code. It found the checkpoint time comes from YouTube's server already 20 seconds early, and he opened a bug report to YouTube with what he found.

Build me a marathon training dashboard from my own running data

Simmons asked László to learn his Zone 2 method from his training community and analyse three months of pace and heart-rate data ahead of the New York City Marathon. Finding Garmin's API needed a developer account, the Dot signed up for Intervals.icu on its own, pulled his runs, built a dashboard called Steady and set up post-run messages.

Laid off two weeks ago, he spent the time finishing the poker site his friend group had wanted for years

His poker group has played together since high school. During Covid they played on a website that later shut down, and there was no good replacement for friends who just want a game of Texas hold'em online. He started building his own with AI while playing with the group, and after he was laid off from his database engineering job he spent two weeks going full time on it: front end, logins, authentication and stats. It is live in beta and free while he waits for his bank to approve that it is not a gambling website.

My agent watches my purchases for price drops and I am over $700 saved

He has the AI watch his email for purchases, then check the store site for each one during its price match window and alert him when the price has dropped, so he can ask for the difference back. He says he is over $700 saved so far. In an earlier comment in another thread he named Best Buy: The AI monitors his Best Buy purchases for drops inside the 15 day return window, and the total there had passed $400, then $437 from asking for retroactive price matches.

$700
HomePartly worked

My Dot is handling my house purchase in Kyoto, in a language I do not speak

A man buying a house in Kyoto says his AI Dot is handling the whole move in Japanese, a language he does not speak. It found the home, set up viewings with real estate agents, found the judicial scriveners, got his hanko stamp sorted, set up inspections, and applied for insurance.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

Vibe-code a physical live scoreboard for my son's 10th birthday

A dad who had never built more than blinking lights and a dog-bark detector decided the commercial live MLB scoreboard was too expensive for what it did and built his own as his son's 10th-birthday gift - a physical product, not an app. Over months of nights and weekends with AI/the AI and the AI he went from concept to web preview to a parts list and a 3D-printed case screwed into the back; the finished board shows live MLB and NFL scores, pulls his son's own baseball games and practice schedule from GameChanger, runs arcade games, and has a quiet mode that shuts it down after bedtime.

Turn my existing PCs into a subscription-free home camera network

He retired his Nest cameras and had the AI (alongside OpenCode) configure Home Assistant and the camera software on the PCs already in his rooms, Linux and Windows alike, so the household computers now double as his in-house camera system, checkable while traveling - no doorbell-cam subscription.

$10a month

He had LLMs rewrite his Python science code in Rust and it now answers instantly

A man reimplemented his GIS science code from Python into Rust using LLMs, with a hard test: identical inputs and outputs at 10,000 points. Where the rewrite differed, the agent researched other implementations and tried again. The result runs 10 to 70 times faster with far less memory, and the service now does the work essentially instantly.

Built a 7-stop Sardinia route map with hotels checked for live availability,

Facebook version of chelseakauai's Sardinia plan: The AI created a seven-stop Sardinia route map, produced a list of boutique hotels with live availability checks, and emailed hotels directly on her behalf — securing a €240 discount by booking direct instead of through a platform. The AI asked for approval before any payment.

Turn our messy family spreadsheet into a phone dashboard we both trust

Marco Madonna spent three days in October having the AI turn the Excel workbook he and his partner use to run their house into a phone dashboard backed by the same Google Sheet, which was never replaced. The AI first mapped the workbook and flagged a total that didn't add up, the app now writes expenses and budgets back into the sheet, monthly broker reports are imported only if every check passes, and a verification script matched 50 checks against the sources with zero unexplained differences — plus it spotted a kids' savings payment likely credited to the wrong contract.

WorkPartly worked

The AI planned the whole road trip. He just follows it.

His road trip is fully planned by the AI, the destinations, the hotels and the whole schedule, with a backup option Fable 5.1 found in case the Badlands roads are rough. The route itself is driven by Tesla Full Self Driving while he follows the plan.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

My agent sorted my 2,527 card collection into 61 deck roles for 22 cents

A Magic player built a collection manager with AI and needed every card sorted by what it does in a deck, not by the words on it. The AI ran his whole collection, 2,527 different cards, through a classifier that gave each card a fit score for 61 roles like ramp and card advantage. It took minutes and cost about 22 cents, and the AI wrote the method into a reusable skill for next time.

The AI bought me a VPS for $35.99 a year

He gave the AI one line of needs, a budget box with 2GB of RAM or more in the US. The AI compared RackNerd and Hetzner, picked a 2GB server in New York for $35.99 a year, filled in the checkout, and he approved the payment.

$35.99a year
MoneyWent wrong

The AI found me a $147.99 whey deal at GNC, but the link was dead

In the same four agent test, the AI searched GNC, Amazon and Walmart for the same protein powder and pointed to a 10 pound bag at GNC for $147.99, about $0.92 an ounce. The link it gave led to a page not found error. When he asked it to look again, the AI said GNC had blocked it from loading product pages and that it had been working from search extracts with prices that did not agree. It also said it could not check Costco, Target or Bodybuilding.com.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WorkPartly worked

An agent runs a social account end to end and the honest numbers are flat

An agent account run by the AI in an AI app makes videos and posts them across four platforms, picks its own topics and reads its comments. Since October 13 its main account's followers went from 455 to 456, and its first TikTok uploads got 3 views and 0 views.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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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.