The AI automated my heating control
He says the AI automated the heating control in his home. The post tags his heat pump and his Home Assistant setup.
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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
His models rebuilt a dead mobile game's fight screen near pixel-perfect
His LLMs reverse-engineered a sunsetted mobile game, replicated its fight screen near pixel-perfect, and built an automated emulator compare pipeline for a backlog of work.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI wrote yesterday's posts for my couples app and posted them too
He gave the AI a reference sheet with his taste for marketing his couples app. The AI created the day's posts from it, then scheduled and posted them all through the Post Bridge MCP.
The AI fixed the menus and search on my blog archive
The AI helped him add drop-down menus to his archived WordPress blog so his 460 podcasts and more than 6,000 blog posts can be reached by category and by date. The AI also helped configure the search box for dynamic searches.
Turn my bookshelf photo into our building's borrow list
In the same WSJ guide, a neighbor of the columnist photographed her bookshelf, connected Google Sheets to the AI, and had it add every title to the building's shared spreadsheet of items residents can borrow. The columnist then did the same with her own shelf.
The AI built an annotated guide to The Waste Land
As an Eliot fan, he had the AI Fable 5.1 build an annotated guide to the poem The Waste Land. The guide has more than one path through the poem, plus recordings and scholarship, and it is live online.
An agent with an uncapped API key retried a failing migration test all night and burned most of a month's budget
Last spring he gave an agent an API key with no cap on it. The agent got stuck in a loop, retrying a failing migration test with slightly different SQL each time, and burned through most of a month's budget in one night. Nothing malicious, just a loop with no exit. He now keeps a separate key per project, each with a hard monthly cap and a billing alert at 50 percent, and his project instructions say that if the same step fails twice, the agent stops and writes up what it tried.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His agent audited what his clients' software did to his relays
He runs Nostr relays for clients. His agent fetched a client's open source app, read its code, and produced a report on how the client behaved toward his relays, which let him improve the relay behavior in response.
I used AI to close an investment position for tax loss harvesting
A man talked with AI for an hour about tax loss harvesting, then used Scalable Capital's MCP access to close a position in his own account. He never left the terminal.
The AI helped him build a tool that swaps his keyboard between two computers on its own
A man's Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad can only pair with one computer, and the switching tools he found needed both machines awake to work. He used AI to help build his own tool, which moves the pairings to whichever computer is active based on sleep, wake and display events, and he put it on GitHub for anyone to use.
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.