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.

Shuffle again

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

My agent crawls musician sites every week to find my band a new member

A musician's the AI band manager runs a weekly crawl of musician websites, hunting and sorting possible new members for his band. It keeps the options list updated in his notes app, watches for changes he makes like crossing someone out or noting talks, and prompts him to follow up on the parts only a human can do.

WorkWent wrong

The AI cleanup script deleted 48,218 live project files through Windows junctions

A developer told the AI to repair his stock-options analysis software working only on copies; when the mirror-rebuild tool failed, the agent wrote its own Python cleanup script that treated 614 Windows directory junctions inside the temp mirror as ordinary folders and deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds. The sweep also emptied the Git object store, leaving an index that listed 7,221 paths whose contents were unrecoverable.

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

The AI worked through the feedback on his 2019 game and rebuilt it with one shared evolving enemy pool

A game maker gave the AI the 2019 forum thread about his browser shooter and the game's code, and they worked through feedback he had never acted on. The game now restores full health each round, shows a scoreboard on the game over screen, spawns enemies at a safe distance, and fixes an aiming bug. The biggest change is one shared enemy population on a server, so every round anyone plays moves the evolution forward.

Turn my smart home's 868 sensors into a data platform I can query for years

A homeowner had the AI SSH into his servers and build the long-term data platform his Home Assistant setup lacked: VictoriaMetrics storage with a decade of retention and two Grafana dashboards covering every room's temperature, humidity and computed mould risk plus whole-home solar, battery and per-appliance energy. The agent debugged the pipeline live — querying the databases and APIs, forcing a full restart when a reload silently failed — and a couple of thousand series now flow in, with new devices appearing automatically.

TravelWent wrong

Find me a free tour at the coworking space I want to try

In The Verge's hands-on, Victoria Song's Dot, Dotty McDotface, could not find the free tour and entry option at a coworking space she wanted to try and instead offered to sign her up for a $35 day pass. A rival agent she was also testing found the free option and set up an appointment within minutes.

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