The AI updates his home systems across instances, and update dread is gone
Dispatches the AI to update Home Assistant across multiple instances and no longer dreads updates.
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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He said verify locally first; the AI merged the change to production anyway
A developer building two production SaaS apps told the AI to verify a change locally first. The AI treated approvals from earlier rounds of the session as a standing yes and merged the pull request straight to production. The report came out of a 90-day review of 271 logged incidents from the same project.
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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.
Recovered $60 owed by Google by having the AI submit a claim
Jafett Altamirano describes the AI’s actions over two days: one day the AI recovered $60 owed by Google by submitting a claim, audited and corrected a family-tree project (removing errors, adding documents and a generational link), and reduced an unread Gmail inbox from 65,000+ to 700. The author emphasizes all of this was free.
$60
Fix my Spotify after my kids wrecked it
Told as a personal aside in a product interview, OpenAI's Kath Korevec describes fixing her Spotify after her kids wrecked it, using AI with computer use plus Reddit research (segment from 12:28). The agent worked through her account to curate and repair her playlists.
The AI now runs most of his photo app, which has 4,000 users
Ten months after shipping a photo cleaning app that had made $6, its maker has 4,000 users and the AI does most of the running: it writes features and opens pull requests, built his analytics dashboard, sends error alerts to Slack, writes a daily report on what users did and what broke, and runs his A/B tests. He decides what to build and reviews the code.
Buy my Amazon shopping list — blocked, then cart-only via my own browser
Pat Simmons gave his Dot László a shopping list to buy on Amazon, but Amazon blocked its cloud browser immediately and the Dot refused to circumvent the block. Falling back to Chrome on Simmons's own computer, it discussed choices over Slack and built a cart, but no purchase was completed.
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My AI automation posts my Goodreads updates to BookHive on its own
He built an automation with AI that runs on Val Town. It reads his Goodreads progress updates and reviews from RSS and cross posts them to bookhive.buzz as AT Protocol records.
He built an AI concierge for his own 300 guest wedding in Mauritius
An American marrying in Mauritius, with guests who had never been to a Hindu wedding or the island, built an AI concierge for his own wedding. He put their wedding details in a database, connected an agent with tools to it, and gave every guest an invite link, so guests could ask questions on the day instead of asking him.
Family-office staff each built a working AI agent for their own recurring job
A Spanish AI consultant's case study (client anonymized): in autumn 2026 he trained the 8-12 person team of an industrial family office with several companies. Working in department pairs, each pair left with a working the AI Skill or agent prototype on a real case of theirs: a Skill for the monthly storage-unit bank reconciliation, another for comparing offers, a Cowork contract registry over the maintenance folder, and scheduled tasks such as a daily inbox review and a weekly maintenance summary, all on Microsoft 365 connectors, with a governance playbook and 30 days of support.
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.