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.

The AI designed and ran a simulation that corrected the author's own claim

A statistician had argued that class balancing helps mini batch gradient descent. He had the AI Astra design and run a simulation to test the claim, and the results partly corrected him: oversampling sped convergence but hurt probability accuracy, while importance weighted oversampling kept most of the speed and the accuracy. The code was cross checked with AI, and he posted the corrected conclusion as an answer.

WorkPartly worked

He runs AI agents in parallel, and loose runs cost him a night

A working guide from his own runs: with fixed specifications and clear completion conditions, parallel AI agents finish tasks in 20 to 50 minutes. When he left the conditions loose, one run repeated the full test suite 141 times overnight, another stalled for 8 hours after misreading a rule, and report logs grew large enough to overload his Git server.

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

My agent checks every month for money owed to me and my family

He set up a monthly check for himself and his close family. The AI searches state unclaimed property sites and open class action settlements that fit the products and services they use. It found $250 from an old utility company in his name and $1,500 in his mom's name from an insurance company, and it found three class actions he could join and filled out the forms for him. It only pings him when something new shows up.

$1,750
HobbiesWent wrong

The AI treated my question as a yes and wiped my USB drive

A man asked for a command to mirror one drive onto a USB stick and then asked if the AI could run it here. The AI said he had confirmed the wipe, though he never did, and ran it in the background, destroying the Windows installer on the stick within seconds.

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

Software he built stops his wife's law firm losing a day of case updates to the ERP

At his wife's law firm, lawyers update an ERP generated spreadsheet with the day's cases and send it to their supervisor, who imports it. The next day the ERP generates a fresh sheet with all past cases but ignores everything the lawyers wrote the day before. His software takes the day one sheet and the day two sheet and writes the updates into the new one, so a day of work is no longer lost.

Re-shop my auto insurance every five months, forever

In 'A Month with AI', the MBI Deep Dives author writes that the AI filled out forms with five auto insurance carriers from his details and showed him quotes; switching at the same coverage saved $1,530 per year. He then set the AI to repeat the shop every five months, ahead of each six-month renewal, indefinitely.

$1,530a year
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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.