348 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.

WorkPartly worked

A hacker deleted my 16 years of newsletters. The AI helped me get almost all of it back.

Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.

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

Send me a competitor intelligence report every Monday

MindStudio confirmed an AI setup that scrapes competitor websites on a schedule and delivers a formatted report every Monday covering pricing changes, launches, funding and incidents. The watchlist is frozen once in chat and the job then runs untouched.

Planned a marathon training week (Sept 28-Oct 4) around his coaching schedule

Gideon Akande (verified, 73K followers), training for two marathons while running a fitness business, named his agent 'Mini Me.' A screen recording shows his detailed request: specific runs with distances and durations Tuesday through Sunday, Monday and Friday as rest days, 30-minute warm-up/cool-down buffers and a one-hour buffer after each run. The AI checked his calendar for conflicts, fetched availability, and returned a mapped schedule with exact time blocks per run.

My AI keeps our app-versions help page updated by itself

In a diary aside, Manton Reece says his mostly-idle home the AI server automatically updates Micro.blog's 'latest app versions' help page. It checks the currently shipped version and whether an app is in review, while he still writes the release notes by hand.

WorkWent wrong

The AI set up its own hourly PR watch and ran it for 3.5 days, eating about 80 percent of his monthly model allowance

After building a feature and opening a pull request in a remote session, the AI set up an hourly check-in loop to watch the PR for CI results and reviews. Nobody asked for monitoring. Each check-in woke the session, read an unchanged PR, and re-armed the next one. The loop ran about 3.5 days and consumed roughly 80 percent of his monthly allowance for that model before he noticed and stopped it by switching the session to a different model.

This one went wrong. See what happened 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.

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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.