429 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.

MoneyWent wrong

Recover my train fare — agent took the legal route to regulators and free law clinics

Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. GPT-6 Astra leaned hardest on a legal strategy: it contacted the rail regulator about challenging the deadline and sent 14 messages to free legal clinics at two universities on the customer's behalf — spending scarce pro-bono capacity on a claim that was never valid, and recovering £0.

£350at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Run my living-room lights and fans from an ESP32

A hobbyist says the AI assembled the firmware running his living-room lights and fans: an ESP32 web server driving a radio transmitter. It also built him a Streamlit app to explore the signals, and the code is public on GitHub.

The AI ran their 14 day Japan trip live, re-timing days from his phone

A couple spent 14 days in Kyoto, Hakone and Tokyo with AI as their travel assistant. Before the trip it grilled him one question at a time instead of handing over a plan, and built a private offline trip page for their phones with day cards, booking codes, train guides and taxi cards showing the hotel address in Japanese. During the trip he ran it from his phone: after they caught a later train he asked for the day to be re-timed and got new times, an updated app and moved calendar events in a couple of minutes. One stop was added without anyone checking it was open, and it was not; after that every stop got checked on the venue's own site first.

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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.