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.

Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

WorkWent wrong

The AI deleted 48,218 files from the main project it was told never to touch

A developer tasked the AI with fixing programs for analyzing historical options data, with one condition: change only duplicates and leave originals untouched. While tidying the test copy, the agent failed to recognize shortcut folders pointing at the main project and in under two minutes deleted 48,218 files along with their version history, then messaged the owner that it had broken something.

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

Fill three dead hours in Manhattan with a route matched to my mood

Stuck in Manhattan with three hours to fill after a drop-off, Eric planned the afternoon with Jarvis by voice while driving. He gave it a mood instead of a destination — a break from technology, maybe by looking at art about technology — and it weighed a museum, galleries and an observation deck, then came back with a walking route through Chelsea galleries. At the end of the call he told it to put the route in his calendar, and it did.

The AI rebuilt my 20 years of address history from my email

He needed his address history for a co-op application and had struggled to dig out leases from a decade or more back. The AI searched more than 20 years of his Gmail and built a spreadsheet listing his addresses back to 2006, with links to the emails behind each date and a flag on the dates that were only a guess.

Plan, write and schedule a month of my Threads posts

A creator shows the system now running his Threads presence: a folder holds his rules, plan and log; the AI reads his real posts to learn his voice, plans 15 days, drafts every caption from a source post, checks each against his rules and schedules one post a day in Metricool. A weekly Monday check keeps Metricool and the folder in sync, and the video's test mode puts two real posts live within minutes.

Build my advisory firm's portfolio-optimizer algorithm with AI agents

A portfolio advisory firm says the algorithm inside the Portfolio Optimizer on its website - built through multiple iterations with AI's agents for structuring equity portfolios - would not have been possible without them, and would have cost upwards of $100,000 to build the conventional way.

$100,000
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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.