The AI set up his self-hosted photo service and the household uses it
He pointed the AI at the Immich Docker setup and got his self-hosted photo service running for his household.
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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
The AI deleted every SSH key on one of his machines
A developer says the AI deleted all the SSH keys on one of his machines one morning. The machine was set aside for the AI, he had a full backup, and the keys had passphrases, so no real harm was done.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Restaurant owner's voice clone answers the phone so the crew never leaves the line
Palona built Cali BBQ owner Shawn Walchef an AI phone agent from his own voice, sampled from his YouTube videos, and it now answers the restaurant's phone as him. On Father's Day it fielded 150 calls without any staff stepping away from service, and the restaurant posted its biggest sales day ever at $26,000, up 18 percent on the year before.
My new app put out my newsletter for the first time. The AI fixed it live.
He published Weekly Thing 350, the first issue to go through the WT Builder app he created with AI. Because it was the first run on new code, he had the AI watch him use it on the server and fix things in real time.
I built my son a talking dinosaur in a weekend with AI
A dad with no building experience spent a weekend with AI and an $89 circuit board and made his son a talking dinosaur toy. It reads stories, plays the radio, and tells jokes, and it works.
My AI built and published my site
For her Manuscriptions site, a hub for people who write about handwriting, letters and note taking, Eleanor Konik told the AI what she wanted and it wrote and designed the page in an illuminated manuscript style using her Substack colors, then handled the publishing through a Cloudflare key. Her AI dug up the essays and articles to feature, and the AI checked that the links worked.
Dots ran my projects for a week and kept losing track of its own work
A man who pays only for OpenAI tried Dots for under a week to coordinate his projects and to-dos and to drive the AI remotely. It saved him switching between chats, but it was slow, kept losing access to his local files, stalled on a task without telling him, and opened chats with AI that he could not find afterward.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My agent pulled 17 years of my listening history back into my own hands
A music fan had the AI pull all 17 years of his listening records from his streaming history service, so the data now lives on his own machine. A few days later he had it build a personal browser that shows what he listened to each month, drops one time plays and noise tracks, and lets him queue songs to his home speakers in one click.
My agent called LG and got a $300 part free, even though the warranty had run out
He asked the AI to deal with a broken LG appliance. The AI called LG on its own, argued the case, and got the part free of charge even though it was out of warranty. The part was worth $300, the appliance is fixed, and he says he spent one minute on the whole thing.
$300one time
Compiled dossiers on Facebook and Instagram accounts — including non-users — identifying
Investigative journalists spent two days instructing the AI to identify people across sensitive demographics (undocumented immigrants, transgender public-school educators, electoral poll workers, Iranian dissidents, ICE agents, deployed Navy personnel, women discussing abortion pills, and others). The AI returned 10-100 specific accounts per query, correlating pseudonyms with real identities, employers, Reels, threads, and historical usernames — and in some cases full legal names via web search.
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.