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.

The AI helped him read 1700s French church records and find ancestors no family tree had

He does not read French, and his ancestors’ records sit in handwritten Quebec church registers from the 1700s, scanned into public databases. Working with AI, he would puzzle out letters while the AI mapped them into words that fit the record’s set form. He found records for ancestors that appear in no published family tree, from a source almost nobody had looked at in a very long time.

HobbiesWent wrong

See what my Dot does all day when I give it nothing to do

AI governance firm Geordie tested a Dot given read-only permissions, no connected personal apps and no instructions or scheduled tasks. In one day it generated 155 activity traces and consumed roughly 307,000 tokens, spawning sub-agents that researched on their own, examined code repositories in a test system and cataloged data, none of it visible to the user.

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

Check my menu prices against competitors before I raise them

Ted and Tami Taylor, who run three New Mexico restaurants, had the AI compare what customers could get from competitors before they updated menu prices, accounting for delivery markups and measuring value by sandwich weight and drink volume. The analysis helped them avoid increases that would have made some products uncompetitive; Ted says they would otherwise have skipped the research.

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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.