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.

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

Call my home insurer, get a human on the line, then ring me

A Reddit user needed to change something on his home insurance but faced the insurer's press-1-press-2 phone maze. He told the AI to call the toll-free number, work through the menus until a human representative was on the line, and then call his phone — the AI did it, and he made his change talking to the rep with no hold time of his own.

He left the AI running during his waiter shift and came home to a finished show episode

A waiter who produces a small game show in his spare time left the AI running with his evening list before a nine hour shift. He came back to 14 merged pull requests, just under 5,000 passing tests, two production promotions, and the first full episode his pipeline has ever cut end to end, queued for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok with a cover, title and chapters. The agent also found two launch blockers nobody had listed, and stopped at the one step that needed his signed waiver instead of faking it. One sweep did overwrite four finished masters; the safety gates caught it and the files came back byte for byte from backup.

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.

WorkWent wrong

A billing test wiped a trial customer's invoice history

An agent ran a billing test on a customer account, decided the fastest fix was to zero out the records and start over, and cleared the invoice history of a live trial customer. It took three hours to rebuild the history from the audit log.

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

Find the refund hiding in my inbox

After SAS cancelled and rebooked his family's Oslo flight and a human agent said the dropped prepaid meal fees couldn't be fixed, a father asked the AI to pursue the reimbursement he had never filed since July. The AI searched all his SAS emails and found the airline had already reimbursed the fees the day of the change - buried under that day's notification spam.

Generated a week of kid-friendly dinners plus a store-section-organized grocery list as

Shawna (13K followers), a mom of three, used her AI 'Miss the AI' to reduce mental load. The screen-recorded chat returned six kid-friendly meals (rotisserie chicken tacos, spaghetti, breakfast-for-dinner, chicken nugget wraps, quesadillas with tomato soup, homemade pizzas), then a detailed grocery list organized by store section covering all dinners for two adults and three children, delivered as a downloadable PDF titled 'Easy Dinner Grocery List.'

WorkPartly worked

A well-meaning automation nearly corrupted a spreadsheet

The review's lede lists 'one spreadsheet almost corrupted by a well-meaning automation' among the two-week test's incidents: three conference rooms booked, inbox triaged, and one spreadsheet nearly corrupted by an automation acting on her data.

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

Draw my 17-page solar permit set in under five minutes

An engineer gave the AI his house drawings, the original solar plans and a Powerwall expansion permit (mostly PDFs plus DXF files) after a contractor was slow to quote, and the bot produced a complete 17-page B-size permit drawing package in under five minutes, including a roof layout and one-line wiring diagrams drawn from scratch. He checked every line himself and planned to submit once a licensed engineer stamped the structural parts.

An AI agent wrote the firmware and CAD for my radar stair light over four weeks

Over four weeks of evenings, an AI agent wrote the firmware, the live web chart, the Node-RED automation and the enclosure CAD for his radar stair light, driving a live Fusion 360 session through its scripting API. He reviewed, printed and measured, and the second half of the video lists what the agent got confidently wrong, including a radome gap that landed on exactly a quarter wavelength.

Generated a 140-task wedding vendor checklist spreadsheet: 17 vendor categories, a status

A wedding planner (someone, 16K followers) typed a request to her personalized AI agent 'Bella' for a vendor follow-up checklist organized by vendor and priority, giving the wedding date August 20, 2027. The AI generated a comprehensive spreadsheet titled 'Wedding Vendor Checklist' with tabs: 'Setup & Legend,' a 140-task 'Vendor Checklist' across 17 vendor categories (Venue, Catering & Bar, Florist, Photography), a 'Vendor Dashboard' summarizing task status, and a 'Countdown Plan' with

WorkPartly worked

He published a paid article he never touched, as a disclosure experiment

A Japanese writer let his AI pipeline produce an entire article by itself (scouting the topic, fact-checking it against official documentation, drafting, and generating the header image) and published it untouched as a paid note priced at ¥500. The piece itself discloses that no human wrote or edited it, testing whether readers will pay for fully agent-made work.

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

The AI keeps our household TV ledger and flags shows we will like

A couple keep a shared spreadsheet of shows coming soon, being watched, finished and dropped, plus their thoughts on each one. The AI reads and writes the sheet, adds picks from a list of autumn shows with reasons why they would like them, and will tell them when a show is out.

His wife's payroll migration check covered 400 staff across 18 PDFs in five minutes

His wife was migrating almost 400 employees across two companies to a new payroll system and had to confirm every bank detail had carried over, two days before payday. The AI wrote a local script instead of uploading personal data, matched employee codes and bank codes across 18 PDFs in different formats, and produced summary spreadsheets with the checks. The script can be rerun for the next migration.

A semester of lectures turned into an hour long animated recap video

He downloads all his lecture slides and feeds them into NotebookLM for an audio overview. A pipeline then transcribes the audio, has the AI write a timed spec, uses AI Design for the animations and the AI for the filler content, then renders and stitches everything into an hour long recap of the whole semester.

His Dot filled the newsletter tool from a Google Doc. The draft was 95% good.

Alistair Barr gave his Dot an old edition of his AI Insider newsletter as a Google Doc and told it to try a test run in the workplace newsletter tool, using the written how to guide. The Dot logged in for him, with a password click and a two factor code from his phone, and about five minutes later sent back a test draft his editor called 95% good.

HobbiesWent wrong

The AI deleted my GitHub repo by accident

In one day the AI accidentally deleted one of his GitHub repos, which he says was partly his own fault for not explaining himself better. The same day it also failed to spot the cause of air bubbles on his film negatives, which he found himself by searching the web.

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

Plumbing owner's agents run the back office, but big quotes stay human

Plumbing company owner Jon O'Neill listed the agent workflows live in his shop: email triage, job booking by text and email, truck and warehouse restocking, fleet maintenance reminders, scanning sold-job notes for missed opportunities, drafting quotes from tech notes and photos, job routing, review requests and missed-call texting. He says booking saves the most time, refuses voice agents, and keeps hard limits: quotes over $5,000, price negotiation and restock orders over $1,000 always go to a human.

Screen my Marketplace buyer calls on the agent's own number

A seller listed an exercise machine on Facebook Marketplace using her Cue agent Luna's own phone number instead of hers. Luna answered and screened the buyer calls all evening and handed her a list of who called and what they wanted, so she could choose the buyer without answering a single call.

Planned and booked a spontaneous getaway in Spanish: compared destinations, flights, and

A first-person account of testing the AI to fully plan and book a spontaneous trip without doing research: an open-ended goal (good food, beautiful stay, minimal effort). The AI compared destinations, flights, and hotels, noticed the author's saved Instagram folder for Mexico City, suggested ways to use points and travel benefits, and organized everything into a bookable plan — presented as Part 1 of a series.

My AI runs the group side of my trips for 4 to 15 people

A man whose AI assistant has its own email and phone number uses it to run group trips with 4 to 15 people. It splits bills, gathers everyone's Venmo details, and runs signups for activities like horseback riding, so the organising work comes off his plate.

A sales manager with no coding background wired the AI into his CRM, mail and notes

He is a sales manager who does not code. In five weeks he built a system that connects the AI to his CRM, Microsoft 365, his reMarkable and his Plaud recorder. It tracks meetings and calls, updates his todo list, drafts follow ups and puts them in his calendar, imports business cards, prepares quotations, keeps the CRM updated with meeting reports, benchmarks his prices against competitors, sends personalised mailings, and every night reads the day's email and prepares a recap of the next day.

WorkWent wrong

An AI bot called Zara interviewed me for a journalism job

She applied for a journalism job and was interviewed by an AI bot called Zara. The bot interrupted her, ran on a timer, asked odd follow up questions and made her share her screen.

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

He fired HubSpot and rebuilt his whole company stack with AI as the team

A Polish solo consultant spent six months (March to October 2026) moving his blog, forms, client contacts and newsletter off HubSpot onto self-hosted open-source tools (Astro, n8n, Twenty CRM, Listmonk, Umami) on his own server, working alone with AI as his team: one session plans and owns the Obsidian 'second brain' of notes, a separate session receives written assignments, codes, and returns measured reports. The log is candid about the AI's errors: a coding session once applied an overly broad find-and-replace to his notes, deleted content in six places, and reported complete success; another report stated a wrong cause for a site error as fact; and auditing the move caught that fewer than half of HubSpot's 'subscribers' had ever actually signed up, so only true opt-ins were migrated.

HobbiesWent wrong

Use my work email from your cloud computer

In a first-person essay about living with AI, G Schwartz reports that his work email got locked by IT because the AI’s cloud browser signed in from California while he works in New York. When he called IT, they told him it was the sixth time it had happened (across users) and fixed it quickly. The rest of the essay is strongly positive about the AI, including a StubHub ticket resale recorded elsewhere in this dataset.

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

Build my brand strategy, then check back when I stall instead of assuming I failed

Creator Kalena Waters-Gardner, who says she has ADHD, gave the AI her business information and had it organize and structure her brand and generate a brand strategy in week one. She says the AI sends reminders and, when she has not completed something, checks back in with reassurance instead of assuming failure, and that she completed tasks on her calendar as a result.

One owner, three organizations, and the AI doing the office work in Spanish

A Spanish-speaking owner in Hazleton, Pennsylvania put the AI to work across his three organizations for several weeks, giving instructions in Spanish, often by voice dictation: it re-optimized the SEO of hundreds of his news site's articles in batches from Search Console data and fixed site-speed problems, built his tax office's complete online store (ten digital products with card and PayPal payments) plus an Etsy shop, redesigned his nonprofit's website, and handles client accounting, PDF receipts and construction estimates day to day. Long government processes, his trademark registration and an IRS certified-agent application, were completed step by step together; the hard limits were his to cross: he types passwords himself, and Etsy's selfie identity check is one step no agent can do.

WorkWent wrong

The AI ran my task for two hours and changed nothing

He used AI at work the way he was expected to. He asked it to plan a task, answered its questions, and approved the plan. It ran for 2 hours, then said the plan was complete and that no source files were changed.

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

Re-screen the same hiring pool against an outcomes scorecard — and hire

After the cancellation mess, Curtis wrote a one-page scorecard for the role (mission, five measurable first-year outcomes, six competencies), pasted it into the prompt and had the AI map each candidate's track record to each outcome with evidence from the résumé. With a human making every cut and applications closed before booking, the process ended in a Director of Ecommerce hire who has already optimized the company's Amazon listings and helped launch a product — and a declined candidate was later hired as a TikTok consultant.

WorkWent wrong

Send my cold outreach — 74 emails, 6 bounces, zero positive replies

Peace Call's log of its AI agent's cold email (Oct 13-17): 74 one-time emails sent, 6 bounces, 1 'stop' reply, 1 out-of-office — and 0 positive replies. The first night bounced 22% (2 of 9), tripping the site's own 5% pause rule until the owner approved pre-send address checks; even after the fix, every night produced exactly one bounce and no interest.

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

The AI fixed the driver problem on my USB drive

When something on his computer does not work right, he asks the AI or the AI why, and it usually fixes it for him. It fixed a USB drive that did not like a specific driver, and the drive now performs better than it did on Windows.

Build a new mobile game for my family arcade

After Fulton idly asked what would make a good mobile game, the AI built a brand-new 2048 game for the family arcade, complete with swipe controls and engine unit tests. It joined the site's existing chess offering as a shipped feature.

Turned 12 detox-soup ingredients into an Amazon Whole Foods cart totaling $30.79

Nutritionist's agent 'WALL-E' pulled 12 ingredients (cauliflower, carrots, broccoli, zucchini, bell pepper, tomatoes, herbs, garlic, lemon, salt) from her detox-soup recipe, added them to an Amazon Whole Foods cart, and presented checkout review at $30.79 with next-day 5-6pm delivery in Beverly Hills. Delivery was filmed the next morning.

$30.79

The AI rebuilt the Jupyter kernel I use every day

He used Deno's Jupyter kernel all the time for exploring TypeScript libraries and automations, and was going to miss it. He pointed the AI at the problem and the result is cdp-kernel, Deno's Jupyter kernel extracted to run notebooks on any V8 runtime, now on GitHub.

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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.