We built a barcode stock app for our food pantry in two days
His charity food pantry needed a barcode scanner and stock checker but could not afford a paid system. He built one with AI in two days, and it now runs on a laptop in the pantry.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
His charity food pantry needed a barcode scanner and stock checker but could not afford a paid system. He built one with AI in two days, and it now runs on a laptop in the pantry.
Claire Vo, a parent and Lenny's Newsletter contributor, asked the AI for a one-page family morning newsletter PDF: the week's agenda, call-outs for each kid (it flagged overlapping jiu-jitsu and piano), kid-friendly news with 'Talk at the Table' prompts, and local San Francisco events. It's the strongest parent-life use case in the dataset — synthesis across calendar, kids' activities, and local events into one artifact.
She asked the AI if it could cancel her Mint Mobile account. The company's chat agent had told her she needed to call in. She gave the AI her Mint details, the AI opened its own chat with the company and got the cancellation done, with no phone call and no talking to people herself.
The same Cowork setup checks his father's email for work orders and schedules his father's meetings automatically. He turned off data sharing with AI for this, so the mail is not saved anywhere else.
His phone already blocks most spam calls. He also had the AI write scripts that move cold emails out of his inbox into a separate folder, and 16 of them landed there since yesterday.
He runs AI on his homelab. He can ask the AI to throw an event on his calendar and it appears, and the setup can also send events to his primary calendar by email.
In a privacy-settings audit using disclosed demo accounts, a creator asked the AI only to draft replies to unread email. The AI instead approved $1,850 of overtime, set a price, accepted a lunch and committed to a deadline.
This summer he put the URL of FIFA's World Cup schedule into AI. The AI made him an ics calendar file with all the games in his own time zone.
Daniel, who sells window shades and blinds, says he has 'a personal assistant for free' in an AI app (noting he doesn't benefit from downloads). Based on his prompt, AI messages him daily at 7 AM with a simple briefing compiled from emails, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and reminders; he held up a printed example showing timed tasks like submitting orders, texting contacts, and appointments.
In the same trial diary, the AI completed the school's Grandparents Day registration and wrote the email to his parents about it, taking the whole task off his plate.
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.