Ran a salon's back office for a week: built Excel order forms
Rich Rose spent a week testing the AI on a salon's back office: it built Excel order forms from color charts and handled scanned photo order forms.
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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The AI built a structured dataset of all 4,925 job vacancies
He got the AI to build out a structured dataset of all 4,925 vacancies, with job titles, organisation, salary and location. He shared it in a spreadsheet for other people to play with.
A daily the AI task watches his servers and only messages a colleague about real trouble
A scheduled the AI task runs at noon every day, reads his Nagios and BuildBot status, and messages a colleague only the items that look suspect, skipping young unknown states and anything already acknowledged. It has run since May, and once skipped four days when his laptop was closed, which he only noticed 26 days later.
An agent reads his email and PDF attachments and puts his kids' school dates on his calendar
His agent reads his email, including PDF attachments, finds the dates and appointments inside, and adds them to his calendar with a check for duplicates. With two kids at different schools sending home a stream of letters, he calls it a big time saver.
His agent transcribes his voice messages on his home server
He sends audio messages to his AI. It transcribes them locally on the graphics card in his home server, so his voice notes become text without leaving the house.
An agent migrated his whole setup to a declarative system, backups included
Migrated a fairly complex setup to NixOS 1 to 1 with an LLM agent and gained declarative services, backups and redeploy tooling.
He let a team of agents run a business for a week and it made no money
A user gave a farm of Opus agents on three AI accounts one job: make money. In week one they worked through 245 ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker, which they built, shipped and advertised. It drew 68 visitors and 6 real invoice checks and earned nothing. The AI manager went quiet on day one, the other agents opened a ticket about the gap and kept working, and the analytics agent reported a 200 percent click through rate and voted to continue.
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Agents pull his banking data, label every transaction and run his budgeting dashboards
Personal finance advisor system: agents with computer use extracted data from legacy banking portals, labelled transactions, set up rules and configured dashboards on his budgeting app built to replace Monarch, with tax-loss harvesting and wash-sale prevention.
Our costing sheets price a job in 8 seconds and caught a margin squeeze
In his new job organising a small business he built spreadsheets that work out full product costs from current material prices and product dimensions, including all costs of goods sold, so pricing a product or bidding a custom job takes about 8 seconds. Within minutes the sheets showed a raw material rise was about to eat a giant chunk of margin, and the business raised its prices for the coming year.
The AI reads my email and keeps my United status chart updated
A United flyer in a status match challenge had the AI set up an agent that checks his Gmail for upcoming flights and adds the bookings he expects to take. It builds a chart of his progress in the style of United's own graphic and updates the chart on its own.
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.