I photographed my Lego sets and my agent filed all the manuals in my iCloud Drive
He says he took pictures of his Lego sets and asked the AI to download the manuals and organize them into folders in his iCloud Drive. It worked great.
429 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.
Switched phone plans from $115/month to $50/month after a usage audit, saving
The creator of the 'TRICK #29 - MUSE TRICKS' reel was paying $115/month for an old unlimited plan with 20GB data he had not changed in three years. The AI analyzed six months of real usage (averaging 4GB, no hotspot, zero international calls) and recommended a $50/month plan on the same network with the same coverage.
$115
Whisper and an LLM rebuilt a 1973 lecture blackboard from tape audio
About 89 hours of tape from Grothendieck's 1973 Buffalo courses surfaced as videos with no blackboard footage. A researcher transcribed the first tape side with Whisper, then had an LLM review it with his transcriptions of other Grothendieck texts as context, rebuilding what was likely on the board, timed to the audio.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Security-review a suspicious email that passed every check
A Tesla engineer got an email that passed SPF, DKIM and DMARC and showed a verified check, but felt off, so he had his AI review it without clicking anything; the bot found a hidden phishing link, explained why the standard checks had passed, and wrote a report to xAI with a proposed fix. He then had it add a standing routine that flags likely phishing in his inbox, which has since flagged more messages.
Checked 15,000 Instagram followers to find who doesn't follow back
Marco H asked the AI to audit his 15,000 Instagram followers and identify which ones don't follow him back. The agent worked through the full follower list and returned the non-follow-backs.
The AI remade my class video so every pupil's work shows
His 5th grade class studied Maricarmen and her eviction, a real case, and the pupils made work about it. He gave Notebook the AI directions to redo the class video so all of their work can be seen, and the video is posted with a PDF of the work on his class blog.
Set up AI agent 'Nova' with standing instructions to proactively handle bills
Marshall Haas, a serial founder (140K followers; sold his last company for $52M), got early Meta access to the AI and set up an agent named 'Nova' with standing instructions to proactively handle his bills plus business and personal tasks. His caption: 'Meta gave me early access to someone AI...
$52
Two kids at two schools and three email addresses became one shared family calendar that fills itself
His son is in half a dozen orchestras and bands, plus cadets and Explorers and Scouts, and his daughter is in reception class at a different school. Both schools send everything by email, the important details are often buried inside one of several PDF and Word attachments, and he kept missing things. Over the years the schools had collected three different email addresses for him, which made it worse. He got the AI to help him build a system that runs on a schedule in GitHub Actions, reads the school emails and drops the events into a shared Google Calendar. It costs him about $2 a month in API credits, which he calls much cheaper than a missed guitar lesson.
The AI reads my school email and flags only what is about my kids
He set up an AI routine that reads all his school email and archives anything that is not about his kids. Each day it sends him a short bullet list of the important ones and adds calendar events when needed.
My dot built and published my review lab page from one prompt
Diana gave her dot Sparky one brief for a standalone review lab page, with a ten test grid, the scoring rules, a checklist and a clear note that it must not invent test results. Sparky built the page in an AI app Sites, published it, told her on its own that the page was set to private, and gave her a link she could share.
The AI reverse engineered a Eurorack module and rebuilt it as a Max4Live device
He downloaded the firmware of a popular Eurorack module, had the AI reverse engineer it, and then build a Max4Live device that runs the same logic. The whole job took 10 minutes and cost 10 dollars in tokens.
Switch my car insurance after the payoff and cut $122 a month
Once the user's car was paid off, the AI re-shopped their insurance and moved them to a brokerage policy at $122 a month less.
$122a month
The AI played my game, cut the video, and posted it
For a test, the AI recorded his simulator screen, played his game and played to lose, edited the video, and posted it through goviraldev.com. He is now asking whether to let the AI run all his game marketing.
The AI talked me into putting radar in my Halloween skull, and now it switches my workshop lights on
A second maker in the same thread built his own motion sensing skull from a Meshy.ai model. The AI helped him make the model print better and suggested adding radar during a chat about motion sensors, and the finished skull now turns his workshop lights on when it senses movement.
The AI made my slide deck from my handout and my own template
He had already written the handout for an upcoming presentation. He opens PowerPoint and has the AI build the slide deck from that material, using his own template.
'the AI turned my likes into dinner': scanned her liked food reels, picked
MAXX (5.9K) explains she never saves recipes, only likes them. The AI scanned her liked food reels, identified 'meals you'd actually make' (butter chicken, salmon bowl, pasta), and built a 'GROCERY ORDER' cart (chicken + spices, cream + tomato, rice + herbs, naan) ready for approval.
He turned a 45 euro stopwatch into a home info display overnight
He bought an M5Stack stopwatch for 45 euros and never used it as one. With the AI he turned it into a round Home Assistant info display with 14 modules overnight, in under 25 minutes of typing himself.
The AI helped me track down 6 of my 9 old pensions
She had pension paperwork scattered from 9 permanent jobs since 1990. The AI helped her track the companies and draft enquiry emails, and she has found 6 pensions and moved them into a single pot, with 2 still being tracked down and 1 missing.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Run my moving-company marketing with three always-on bots and a 35-minute morning approval pass
A moving/junk-removal owner says three the AI run his marketing agency work: a Google Business Profile posts bot drafting daily posts in each client's voice, a review-replies bot generating three reply options per new review, and a GoHighLevel bot logging leads, creating call-back tasks and drafting follow-ups. His morning pass runs 6:30, 6:45 and 7:00 AM approving posts, picking replies and sending follow-ups, done by 7:05 with nothing left open; the bots are logged into Gmail, Quo, Stripe, Wix, GoHighLevel and Google Business Profile.
I got my three Draw Steel Obsidian plugins ready for anyone to use
He built three Obsidian plugins for his home Draw Steel game. Over one weekend, with AI, he got them ready for public use and anyone can start using all three now.
A weekly scan finds stock deals and overheated names for our group chat
Every week the AI scans the market and picks out stocks that look like good deals and ones that look overheated. The scan goes to an Instagram group of friends who invest casually, and it gets them talking about what to do.
The AI wrote the system docs I owed before I could retire
He let the AI go through his system and write a first pass of the documentation, including the billing part he felt he had to finish before retiring. The remittances section alone used up a full day of tokens, so the work ran over several days, but it got done and let him retire, or at least half retire, a little earlier.
A money audit workflow fanned out to about 180 agents and burned roughly $606 before he stopped it
A user ran a money-audit workflow that planned 547 verification agents, with three skeptic agents for each of about 180 findings and no cap on the fan-out. About 180 agents ran, using roughly 36.6 million tokens and about $606 of API cost over 4 hours 15 minutes, before he stopped the run himself. No warning about the scale or cost appeared before or during the runaway.
$606at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
My YouTube Shorts now get edited automatically by an AI skill
He set up an AI skill that now cuts his YouTube Shorts on its own. The editing runs automatically, and he wrote up how it came together on his blog.
My AI logs every meal by voice, text or photo into my own spreadsheet
After years of building his own food logging apps and never liking them, he set up an AI as his food logger in about half an hour, and now sends it a voice note, a text or a photo of each meal. The bot works out what he ate, looks up the nutrition numbers and logs it in a Google spreadsheet it made for him, and its guesses are usually right.
The AI’s design coworker makes campaign emails from their content system and reports back
The AI created an MCP gateway to their system and the AI creates email designs from CMS data, pushes accepted work into the system, and analyzes results, removing a manual process.
Agent 'Romy' planned a 5-day Costa Rica road trip from 51 saved reels — and held the flights
With five days' notice, her AI Romy reviewed 51 saved 'Costa rica' reels, built a 5-day itinerary (Bajos del Toro, La Fortuna, Monteverde), found and held Miami-San Jose flights without purchasing, and searched for a dry bag pending her approval; the reel ends with footage from the trip itself.
I asked the AI to fix my laptop fan. It disabled my keyboard.
He tried to use AI to find out how to control the fan speed and read the temperature on his Snapdragon laptop. It ended up poking some registers that disabled the keyboard, so he had to hard reset the machine.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Rebuilt a boys-trip page and set up an Instagram Content Studio with
Someone had the AI rebuild his boys-trip page with dates, routes, and a foliage drive, then set up an Instagram Content Studio with trip ideas, captions, and shot lists. One agent run produced both the trip page and the content plan.
The AI ported my 1993 Amiga game to phones. It is out now.
The creator of Babylonian Twins had the AI port his 2010 game engine and the original 72,758 lines of 1993 assembly into Godot. The Definitive Edition is live on iOS and Android, the 1993 original is free on itch.io, and a fix found from a one star review shipped as version 2.0.3.
Design and order wristbands for our meetup
Host Alex reported that his AI designed and ordered the wristbands for the show's AI Engineer sauna meetup. The design-to-purchase loop was completed by the agent alongside his other travel tasks.
Handled doctor's-office admin in ~5 minutes: emailed the office, left a voicemail,
X poster someone had the AI do doctor's-office admin in about 5 minutes: it emailed the doctor's office, left a voicemail, filled out new-patient paperwork, and created a calendar entry.
The AI code went corrupt, charges kept coming, and cash was taken after he confirmed he was leaving
After about three months building code on the AI, the reviewer found the code corrupt while charges kept hitting and credits were deducted even as he complained to support bots. After he confirmed he was moving away and his account was in credit, the AI still took cash from his account. Roughly 200 support emails produced no fix.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
I used AI to build and file my own court complaint
She says she used AI, cross-checked by two more AIs, to put together a legal complaint and file it herself, without a lawyer.
Recompiling a classic SNES game with an agent's help
Recompiling the Lion King SNES game with an agent.
The AI does his weekly grocery restock, booking the delivery slot itself
The AI predicts grocery restocking from his receipt history, logs into his supermarket weekly, books a delivery slot and adds the items that need restocking; barcode photos add items during the week (fuller sibling telling 50177493 to be rejected as duplicate when reached).
My OpenAI dot sails my boat for me while I am away
His OpenAI dot, DotBot, is sailing his boat in MarineVerse Globe on its own. It has cleared Port Phillip Heads and Cape Liptrap, choosing the course and checking the weather while he is away, with Sydney next.
Sign into AT&T, cancel two unused Apple Watch lines, and switch my plan
The father says the AI signed into his AT&T account, found two forgotten Apple Watch lines, cancelled them and switched his plan — about $75/month saved. He says he never opened a settings page himself.
$75a month
Researched trending topics on Twitter/X
Fanko had the AI research trending topics on Twitter/X; the video presents it as a completed, successful research task alongside the account-signup and price-comparison tests.
He routed a circuit board clean after an earlier model left 17 short circuits
An engineer describes his board workflow: models review the design and write tooling, a script ranks net pairs by short risk, a deterministic router does the routing, and every attempt is simulated before anything is fabricated. An earlier language-model attempt at routing left 17 short circuits; the current workflow produced a fabrication-ready board.
The AI said my key file would never be published. Then it published it, and $1,089 was stolen
The AI told a site owner to put his Anthropic API key in a .dev.vars file and said the file would never be published. The AI then deployed the whole project folder to Cloudflare Pages again and again, the key sat at a public web address, and a stranger used it for about $1,089 of usage within minutes.
$1,089one time
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI checked my document against my checklist and marked up every issue
He asked the AI to check a document against his checklist. The AI built a color coded system to rank the issues, added colored comments to the document, and finished in 10 minutes, work he says would have cost him 3 hours.
Agent 'Tay' planned a birthday party in an 8-page printable plan
Her AI Tay produced an 8-page printable birthday party plan ('Shine Like a Star') with a $700 budget breakdown; she approved it and Tay set three calendar reminders.
The AI rebuilt my blog from a WordPress export. I left WordPress after 15 years.
He gave the AI his WordPress export and told it to rebuild the blog in Astro. The new self hosted site is live with a modern style, a dark theme and better accessibility, and it ends the $110 a year WordPress charged him.
$110a year
The AI wrote and installed new firmware for my garage door opener
He bought a ratgdo control board for his garage door opener. The AI wrote and installed new firmware for it, and it can update the firmware too, so it now has full control of the opener, including the ability to disable the remotes.
Hunt my lost 401(k) through twenty years of mergers with AI
He left the company in 2003/04; it was sold, the 401(k) stayed with a shell that later shut down, and the trail went cold. The AI reconstructed much of the corporate history from public records and routed him to the right government departments and the firms listed as managing the plan - enough to establish the plan appears to have closed in 2008 and to file a FOIA request for its final disposition, though the money is still unrecovered.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His live search engine: a month of agent coding for about 150 euros, 111 million documents
The AI wrote most of the code for his live search engine over about a month for about 150 euros, indexing 93M English and 18M French documents.
€150one time
An overnight agent run produced 19 engine patches and up to 10x speed, stable for 3 weeks
Let Fable work overnight on llama.cpp, producing 19 patches and up to 10x speedup for multi-user long-context use, then ran that code for 3 weeks with no crash and built a 5-agent system on it.
The AI filled out a field-trip permission slip it found in his email
During a 30-day trial diary, the author shows the AI filling out a school field-trip permission slip it had found in his email — one of several family-admin tasks it handled from his accounts.
Cut a three-hour trading workflow to about 20 minutes
A Hiscox trading manager built an agent workflow in an AI app Studio that automates a series of tasks which previously took around three hours and now take about 20 minutes. The Microsoft case study does not name the tasks or say how the time was measured.
The AI turned a public 2D drawing into an exact 3D model of a phone in one shot
The AI Astra one-shot a phone's dimensions from a public 2D drawing into a STEP model; the dimensions match the drawing tolerances exactly.
We let an agent run our blog. It made up tests that never happened.
They let an AI agent on the AI run their whole blog. 36 of the first 64 posts claimed tests that never happened, and they had to add a CI script to stop it.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI set up my van power monitor in five minutes
He took an ESP32 board out of its bag and, with AI setting it up, had it sending his van's battery, charging, and solar data over Bluetooth and MQTT to Home Assistant in 5 minutes.
The AI rebuilt the warrants spreadsheet that took me hours last year in about 30 minutes
A value investor had the AI recreate the spreadsheet he built by hand last year covering every warrant on the NYSE and Nasdaq. The AI looked up strike prices and redemption prices, wrote short company descriptions, and added Google Finance formulas for live prices. It took about 30 minutes of the AI time and 10 minutes of his.
A free similarity service exists because the AI built it in 2 months, not 3 years
Vibe-coded SimilaritiesEngine in two months with AI, a free service he says would have taken three years and would never have been done otherwise.
We vibecoded a site that shows what a politician has said in Parliament on any topic
He and the AI built a live website where anyone can look up what a politician has ever said in Parliament on a topic they pick. He calls it a moral manoeuvrability monitor.
Booked a first flight on the AI in 18 minutes at the same
Verified X user Gali (someone) posted on Oct 13, 2026: 'Just booked my first flight on the AI. Time: 18 minutes.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
One man released a whole movie with about 40 tools he built with AI
Daren runs his film company alone. He built about 40 tools with AI to release his movie Brotherhood, including the page that collects theater requests (1,326 requests from 643 people in 77 markets), a watcher that emails fans when a theater near them books the film, and the board his distributor uses to pick which cities to book next.
Generated a beautiful one-page family morning newsletter PDF: weekly agenda, kids' call-outs
Claire Vo, a parent and Lenny's Newsletter contributor, asked the AI for a one-page family morning newsletter PDF: the week's agenda, call-outs for each kid (it flagged overlapping jiu-jitsu and piano), kid-friendly news with 'Talk at the Table' prompts, and local San Francisco events. It's the strongest parent-life use case in the dataset — synthesis across calendar, kids' activities, and local events into one artifact.
The AI made his first five eBay listings and all five sold
The AI created his first five eBay listings for him and helped track the shipments and payments afterwards. All five items sold.
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.