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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WorkWent wrong

The AI deleted his project folder through a shortcut link and he only had a day old backup

Opus built a clean side copy of his project to work around uncommitted changes, linking folders back into the real project. Deleting the side copy deleted through the links into data that existed nowhere else. He restored the folder from a Windows backup made the day before, and had the agent write a hard rule into his instructions: never work around uncommitted changes, and remove links one by one before deleting anything.

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

Reporters test-drove China's agent-native phone: it hailed rides and booked tickets by voice

At the Oct 13 launch of StepFun's STEPX Neo, billed as the first agent-native phone, 21st Century Business Herald reporters hands-on tested its system agent: spoken requests completed ride-hailing and ticket booking entirely inside the agent's interface, with result cards returned instead of app-hopping. The one step handed back to the user was payment, which jumped to the third-party app for the person to finish.

An agent reverse engineered his old modem and got modern OpenWRT running on it

A man had an obscure Alcatel modem with undocumented hardware. He soldered on serial pins, plugged it in, and asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware. DeepSeek v4.1 Flash took about an hour to get a full OpenWRT build and flash pipeline running in an isolated container, the driver changes worked, and the whole job took under half a day and $0.86 in AI cost, work he says would have taken weeks or months.

$0.86one time

A folder tidy up script for my freelance work grew for five months and took over

He runs a freelance video editing studio and a coding studio, and his project folders were a mess across drives. He started a small folder making script with AI and kept adding to it daily for five months. It is now a 100,000 line Rust program with 1,390 tests that holds every project he has, gives each a permanent ID, and jumps him to any project on any drive or machine with one command.

The AI keeps track of my 15 apps and sites for me

He runs about 15 apps and sites and could not keep track of what needed doing. He connected the AI to his app through MCP, and the AI now creates tasks and subtasks, writes notes, and shows him what is needed by priority and due date.

Sell our stuff on Marketplace across a language barrier

Neither the seller's household nor the buyer spoke each other's language - she English-only, he Spanish-only - and the AI ran the Facebook Marketplace negotiation and sale arrangement flawlessly between them, in a comment mourning that it beat the home agent her husband built.

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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.