424 new ideas this week

Level up how you use AI

Real things everyday people got it to do, and how to try them yourself.

New ideas that are working for people, picked fresh every day.

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.

The AI runs the school admin for my four kids

A mom of four school age kids started using AI last week and it already watches her school email, the grades site, Google Classroom and the ClassDojo app. It adds events and tests to the family calendar, sends a weekly report on missing assignments, reminded her about a field trip permission slip today, and drafts the email when a kid is out sick.

The AI watches my kids' six school Facebook groups and flags the clashes

School news for his two kids comes through six Facebook groups as well as email. The AI watches all of them, asks him which events he wants to track, spots clashes like a field trip on the same day as a dentist appointment, and keeps his calendar updated, and it also pulls the Scouts dates together and, before a camping weekend at two different spots, told him the weather at each one and what the boys should pack to stay warm.

WorkPartly worked

He put his $200 a month AI in charge of a shop to earn its keep

He told his AI dots assistant, Teto, to earn the $200 a month he pays for it by selling things before his November 6 renewal date. Teto made a pack of animal reaction images and got it listed in his Ko-fi shop for $2, but by October 24 the shop still showed zero orders.

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

Audit two years of my grocery receipts and build me a Kroger-vs-Amazon lineup

A homeschooling mom posted on Facebook on Oct 20 that she handed the AI (her agent 'Mira') two years of grocery data — all 140 Kroger orders plus her Amazon history, line by line. Mira found her worst leak (cat treats bought 16 times in nine months, at full price 14 times; the subscription price would have saved about $96 a year) and built a categorized lineup assigning every staple to Kroger or Amazon with prices shown.

$96a year

The AI wrote every line of my game. Version 173 is playable now.

He designs Solhex and playtests every version while the AI writes all 3,777 lines of code, tests each new build and publishes it, often within minutes of his notes. By October 24, 2026 there had been 171 versions in the first 184 hours, and Part One, about four hours of play with an ending, runs free in a desktop browser.

Our agent bought its owner an eSIM for Turkey, then got the money back

The owner asked ARGUS in Telegram to buy the cheapest eSIM for Turkey, approved with a yes, and got the QR code in the chat seconds later for 0.31 USDC. Thirty-four minutes later he asked for a refund because he had not installed it, approved again, and the 0.31 USDC came back after the seller checked the eSIM was unused.

$0.31

I asked the AI for a reminder. It cancelled the appointment itself.

In its morning briefing the AI flagged a doctor appointment he had booked weeks ago, and he told it to remind him to cancel it later that day because a work briefing now clashed. The AI went into his email, found the confirmation, saw there was a $150 fee for cancelling within 24 hours and a cancel link, and cancelled it before he had seen any of that.

WorkNew

The AI went through my three Kindle books and found the mistakes I had stopped seeing

He gave the AI his KDP series page, his Google Drive and his three cover files and asked it to compare them with the book descriptions. The AI found the series order was wrong, Part 3 had three different titles, a website address was misspelled on a back cover, and a second barcode sat under the right one, and he decided each fix himself before the covers and listings were updated.

HobbiesPartly worked

I connected the AI to DevonThink to sort and tag my old documents

He connected the AI to DevonThink, the app where he keeps his documents. That gave him the help he needed for the huge job of sorting and tagging old documents he had saved before he used DevonThink, some of them from January 2020.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing 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.