349 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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Plan my Montreal trip: Airbnb, direct flight and an itinerary that dodges construction

By voice, Simmons asked László for an October 15–18 Montreal trip: a central, inexpensive Airbnb, the cheapest direct flight with an aisle seat, and a plan of things to do. The Dot compared stays, caught repeated complaints about a squeaky Murphy bed at a 4.75-star listing, filled in his flight details from his travel records, rerouted the Mont Royal walk because the cross was under construction, and stopped at checkout for him to pay.

We audited Datasette with AI and shipped two security releases

He ran an extensive audit of his Datasette software using AI Fable 5.1, GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra, then fixed a range of bugs the audit found. The fixes went out as the Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases, and he told anyone running Datasette on a public website to upgrade.

The AI turned my 30 year old icon library into a paid Mac app in 11 days

He found a 30 year old Macromedia Director file holding the 2,338 icons from his old Icon Gallery product. The AI pulled them out as PNG files in about 4 minutes, then built a Mac app to browse and resize them, helped him through App Store submission, and the app passed Apple’s review as a purchasable product in under two weeks.

Audit two years of my grocery receipts and build me a Kroger-vs-Amazon lineup

A homeschooling mom posted on Facebook on Oct 20 that she handed the AI (her agent 'Mira') two years of grocery data — all 140 Kroger orders plus her Amazon history, line by line. Mira found her worst leak (cat treats bought 16 times in nine months, at full price 14 times; the subscription price would have saved about $96 a year) and built a categorized lineup assigning every staple to Kroger or Amazon with prices shown.

$96a year

Negotiate 25% off my Verizon plan in the loyalty chat

DaVe McComb's screenshot shows his AI 'Archer' reporting a loyalty-chat win: Verizon offered 25% off plan charges — about $33.75/month for 12 months, no plan change or contract — which, with a hotspot already cut, drops his bill from $194.74 to about $161/month, roughly $405 a year. Archer asked whether to accept; he replied 'Yes, take the discount', and Archer confirmed it had told Verizon to apply it and would verify.

$405a year

Negotiated a monthly internet bill from $100 down to $85

Facebook user Joshua Rieth says the first thing he tried with the AI assistant 'the AI' was negotiating his monthly internet bill, which dropped from $100 to $85. He presents the $15/month saving as the reason he stayed engaged with the tool and kept using it.

$100
HomePartly worked

The AI wrote the patch for my solar uploads. The fix idea was mine.

His Home Assistant setup polls every 5 minutes, and that polling was killing his Solis Cloud uploads. Hours of asking the AI to fix it got nowhere, then he spotted the clash himself and the AI wrote a patch that pauses polling around the uploads.

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

Asked how many days he trains, requested photos of his gear, and

Anthony (Neutron Toys, in his 40s) chatted with his agent 'Rodimus', which asked training frequency and injury history and requested photos of his home-gym gear. From four equipment photos it generated a detailed 5-day split with specific exercises, sets, and reps; Day 1 (Chest + Triceps) was logged on 09/19/2026.

The AI built my 15 second showreel with music

He had the AI build a 15 second showreel with music from a single prompt, using an animation skill and his own list of banned things. The AI checked its own images and fixed them before he saw anything, and he says After Effects is on his delete list.

Planned 4-day-a-week workouts synced to his calendar, ordered fragrance-free size-3 diapers, and found a date-night sushi restaurant

Crawford Collins (verified, 1.1M followers), a busy new dad, personalized the AI as 'Atlas' (fox avatar) and used voice commands while caring for his infant son. Atlas generated an efficient 4-day-a-week workout plan synced to his calendar, found and ordered fragrance-free size-3 diapers (approved on screen), and when grandma was watching the baby, found a date-night sushi restaurant (Yasu Beverly Hills, Sushi Note) which he booked.

HobbiesWent wrong

Failed to find or book parking in San Francisco in a head-to-head

Gail Moody (1.8K followers) ran a head-to-head trial of two AI assistants. For finding parking in San Francisco, she says the AI gave 'lame ass suggestions' and couldn't complete the transaction, while Instinct booked a SpotHero space at Plaza Parking with just her approval.

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

An agent gave up on the supported path and created the insight through the API instead

A Salesforce developer told his AI agent to unwrap Calculated Insights from a data kit into a sandbox. The agent worked out the config keys for most component types but failed twice on the insight template, then gave up on unwrapping and created the insight directly through the Data Cloud Connect API, copying the SQL from the kit metadata. The created insight showed as active and queryable, but a follow up answer shows API created insights sit in a broken state and cannot become trigger eligible, so it has to be deleted and unwrapped properly.

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

The AI pulled the exact boundary files for two local councils

He was helping gather maps of local political boundaries for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council near Half Moon Bay. The AI went through government data sources, extracted and combined the files, and built the exact boundary polygons, which he could then view on a map.

WorkPartly worked

DeepSeek model edited a real video inside an AI app for $0.33

The creator tested DeepSeek V4.1 Flash running inside an AI app on a real video edit, giving it raw video clips and working through the editing choices. The generated video came close to something the creator could actually publish, but changes were still needed before it could go live, and the run cost $0.33 in API credits and took longer than expected.

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

The AI pulled my session notes so I could rewrite a client report

A consultant had finished a monthly report for a client and realised the monthly frame made the work look weak. He used AI to pull his session notes since April out of his knowledge base in order, rewrote the report as a first ninety days review, and found two mistakes in his own numbers.

My agent watches my kids' classes in Canvas and built a dashboard of missing work

He has the AI logged into the Canvas parent app. It tracks each class and lists any missing assignments. He told it to ignore work missing for less than 3 days, so he does not get noise about things that are not due yet. The first version was all text, so he asked the AI to build a nicer dashboard, and it did. He says it is far better than using the Canvas app himself.

Audit 187 email flows in three minutes and tell me delete, fix or ignore

Toni describes the monthly Klaviyo audit she runs for a client with 187 flows: The AI reads the export, scores each flow on age, active subscribers and revenue, flags any flow with zero recipients in six months, and returns a color-coded delete/fix/ignore chart in about three minutes. The same approach on a 300,000-subscriber list found the right segments, though its condition wording didn't always match Klaviyo's interface terms.

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.

HobbiesWent wrong

The AI’s sellout-ticket watch stopped refreshing after 15 minutes and silently disabled itself

A Meta employee testing the AI asked it to monitor for tickets and other items that sell out quickly, and reported many failure modes that made it unreliable. The page stopped refreshing after about 15 minutes, other errors were silently ignored, and monitoring sometimes turned itself off for no apparent reason, per internal posts seen by Reuters.

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

One system runs his pallet resale business from lot check to garage shelf to sale

He resells Amazon liquidation pallets on Facebook Marketplace. With the AI he built one system for the whole flow: before buying, a browser extension pulls a lot’s manifest, retail prices and photos and says whether the lot is worth the asking price; after buying, it generates the Marketplace bulk upload files with pricing; in his garage he checks items in, photographs damage on his phone and prints QR labels; and dashboards track sales, tax, profit and sell through. It is about 10,000 lines of code across more than 35 versions, running on his home server.

Generated batches of video outlines and scripts from his saved IG content

Eric Siu (verified, 120K followers) demonstrated the AI’s Instagram integration reading his bookmarks and follow graph, then generating batches of tailored video outlines — '60-Second Playbook,' 'Story Cut,' 'Debate Cut' — each with hooks, TL;DR lines, talking points, editor notes, and links to past successful reels. He said it replaced a full-time person's scripting-research role.

My AI bots test my booking flow and prep my mornings

A small business owner runs a few AI bots that share one Google Drive knowledge base. One built and tested his client assessment flow end to end, from fit call to payment, booking and intake, another reads his calendar and preps his mornings, and the bots also fixed his task list and built a customer slide deck, saving him about two hours in one week.

2 hourssaved
WorkPartly worked

Created a branded caption and images for a real post: voice matched,

Caption+image creation scored 7.5/10: caption sounded like her from her past posts; first images missed her brand, but after she uploaded one of her designs the AI matched her blue-and-white branding closely (photo included), though some words inside images were wrong.

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

His agent keeps its own handover notebook; he just says 'remember that' after each mistake

The operator of a small Japanese company has used AI daily for three months across quote tooling, documents, internal pages and accounting help, and never edits a file himself: after every failure he tells the agent in chat to remember the lesson, and the agent writes it into its own handover note and memory (now 250+ memory entries and a note past 1,000 lines). The scars are specific: work built under the wrong account, duplicate tool instances breaking half the controls, and aggregated data lost to a 30-day chat retention setting.

MoneyWent wrong

My agent read a file from before the day started and told the public the trading account took no trades

An agent account (Acrid) reports on its own receipt video pipeline. One video said out loud, in public, that the paper trading account took no trades that day. The account file it read had been written eight hours before the trades happened. The file passed its 24 hour staleness check because it was fresh; it just had not been read again after the day it described. It ran on two separate days and sat there about a week before the agent traced it. No alert fired, because nothing was malformed.

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

Buy on Amazon inside my own logged-in account

The AI’s Comet browser shopped Amazon inside users' own signed-in Prime accounts — loading pages, comparing products, filling carts and completing purchases at the user's direction — until Amazon sued, arguing the access was the user's permission but not Amazon's authorization. A district court enjoined Comet in March 2026; on August 4, 2026 the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction, holding the agent is a tool and the user is the one buying, while leaving terms-of-service claims live.

I let the AI design a circuit board. It works.

The AI wrote routing algorithms in Python that ran for almost two days, then told him it was 90 percent sure the board would work and to just order it. He paid 200 euros, and the finished board arrived two weeks later.

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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.