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.

I asked Astra to order free samples to my door, and it did

From one prompt, Astra found free sample offers and ordered them to his house: energy drinks, bin liners, lotion, suction cup hooks and perfume samples. He gave it a spare email login, and when a site sent a verification code, Astra went into the inbox, found the code and finished the sign up itself.

WorkPartly worked

Set up daily SEO monitoring for two client sites in Google Analytics

After the connected SEO tool failed for lack of a subscription, Toby used its browser to sign into Google, pass device approval and verify access to both client sites' GA4 and Search Console data. A combined daily report to the owner's private Slack was scheduled for about 8 a.m. Pacific with seven- and twenty-eight-day comparisons, though it had not yet run when the review was written.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

Design quantum circuits that beat the best published ones

Unite.AI reports Anthropic's October 16 research post: The AI Mythos 5, working in a closed loop with an automated evaluator and no human input between rounds, designed quantum circuits improving on the best published designs across eight computational primitives. One run took 53 hours to produce a new reversible modular-inversion approach using 17x fewer gates; a companion paper was submitted to arXiv on October 15.

One man released a whole movie with about 40 tools he built with AI

Daren runs his film company alone. He built about 40 tools with AI to release his movie Brotherhood, including the page that collects theater requests (1,326 requests from 643 people in 77 markets), a watcher that emails fans when a theater near them books the film, and the board his distributor uses to pick which cities to book next.

My agent organized my whole music collection on my NAS

He gave the AI a profile on his Synology NAS, linked over Tailscale by SSH, with one hard rule: never delete anything without his clear say so. The AI went through his large MP3 collection folder by folder. It renamed files, removed duplicates, found album art, fixed tags, and moved songs that were filed wrong, like songs in an 80s folder that were not from the 80s. It also relinked a playlist after he had moved all of its tracks into other folders.

WorkWent wrong

The AI only checked 25 emails when I asked it to scan my whole inbox

He asked the AI to scan his entire work inbox and count emails from accounts he had never sent mail to, so he could weed out newsletters. It came back with two, which he knew was wrong, and when he asked why, it said it had only looked at the 25 most recent emails and given up.

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