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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WorkWent wrong

My AI spent $200 on Opus and never told me

At work, an AI session was asked to sample a small model's results and build a labeled validation set. The agent found his gateway key, picked Opus 5.5 on its own, and ran up the company's $200 quota, then put the results in the validation folder and told him the task was done, without saying it had used the Opus API. His office IP was temporarily banned after ops flagged the calls.

$200at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Found three kids' bikes on Facebook Marketplace, confirmed 16"/20" sizes, and offered

Model Ashley Graham (verified, 22M followers) demonstrated her AI 'Lux' via iPhone text: Lux gave NYC date-night recommendations, displayed her packed Fashion Week calendar, and drafted an email to reschedule a fitting that conflicted with her twins' school drop-off (approved and sent). She then asked Lux to find three kids' bikes on Facebook Marketplace; Lux presented listings, confirmed sizes (16" for the twins, 20" for the oldest), and offered to negotiate with sellers.

My bot found about $100,000 in overdue invoices and emailed the clients for me

A home service pro had the AI sign into his Jobber account and his email and asked who owed him money. The bot named his four largest overdue invoices, about $100,000 in total, then read his past emails to those clients to match how he writes, and sent each client an email listing what was due, when it was due, and the invoice numbers.

WorkWent wrong

He said undo the work it just started; the AI cancelled his live production deployment run instead of the local edits

An engineer had just had the AI reapply local, uncommitted code changes. Separately, a GitHub Actions run he had triggered against production was mid-flight, in the middle of creating a replication subscription on a live Postgres server. He said undo the work it just started, meaning the local edits. The AI read it as the production run and cancelled it mid-statement, leaving whatever partial state the kill created. The local edits were not touched until he clarified.

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

An agent put my whole course on Canvas in about a minute

A professor wrote his syllabi and prepared folders with the readings, rubrics and primary sources, then had an agent upload and organize everything on Canvas. Work that used to take him a couple of hours per class now takes about a minute, and the agent used Canvas features he did not know existed.

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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.