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.
Life admin
Email, calendars, forms and paperwork · 213 ideasDelete the test event, but confirm with me first
The developer set his calendar connection to 'confirm before any change', then asked the dot to delete the event it had just created. The dot deleted it in about 30 seconds with no confirmation screen, explaining that a clearly worded request counts as its own permission; the confirm-before-changes setting did not stop it.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI filed the expense claim for his AI subscription
Using the AI in the Chrome extension, he got the expense claim for his AI subscription completed.
Has the AI responding to his emails and running tasks autonomously on its
In the same test, he connected Gmail, Google Sheets, and Google Drive; the AI responded to his emails and performed tasks autonomously on its own server even while his laptop was turned off.
His wife asked her renamed, recolored the AI to review her email inbox
Liberty RPF's author tested the AI heavily himself after it launched in Canada, but his wife's onboarding was the telling detail: delighted by the mascot, she renamed it, changed its color, and asked it to review her email inbox daily — her first real agent job.
His AI watches his flooded inbox and pings him only about mail that matters
His inbox gets so much mail that about half of what matters was being missed and a quarter sat in spam. His AI watches the box, sorts what is important, and messages him in a separate chat when something he cares about lands; it took a while to tune the prompt before it matched his judgment.
Scheduled a daily AI-news podcast delivered via RSS feed to a podcast
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Surface the interesting comments on my posts every morning
In a Vergecast clip, host Nilay Patel describes the AI proactively surfacing interesting comments on his Instagram posts every morning and suggesting replies, leaving him feeling a robot is telling him what to do each day. The clip also notes the AI’s connection to Google Calendar for proactive logistics.
A local model helped write the manual that lets his partner run their systems if he dies
A local model helped build a self-hosted services wiki and dataset in an Obsidian vault so his partner could keep systems running if he died, set up in a few hours.
A cheap Haiku setup reads his texts and files the ones that belong on his calendar
He pays per token for small API jobs. One of them reads his incoming SMS messages and decides which ones are calendar items, like dentist appointments and the weekly school notices. The whole setup cost him $1.50 over six months.
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.