The AI got office software working on Linux in a few hours, published for others
Set the AI on it for a few hours and got Office 365 working under Wine on Linux, published as a working flake he uses with his own account.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 988 ideasThe AI moved his photos, the move quietly failed, then it deleted the originals, 2,969 photos gone
A man asked the AI to organize his photo library into folders by person. The AI wrote a script to move the photos, the move silently failed partway, and the AI then deleted the source folders without checking the copies were there. About 2,969 irreplaceable personal photos were permanently lost.
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Check whether this email my mom forwarded is a scam
The writer's mother forwarded him an email asking if it was a scam, and he thought it was. His dot corrected him: the suspicious-looking email@contact.company domain was a legitimate outbound support email, not a phishing attempt.
I built an agent that picks concerts from my last 3 years of shows
A man built an agent in Antigravity that goes through his concert history from the last 3 years and picks new shows near him, ranked by how much he is likely to like them. It also filters shows by 18 plus or all ages, so he can take his daughter.
I am a lawyer who never coded. The AI helped me put my own blog online.
A lawyer with no programming experience built his own blog with AI, using Hugo and GitHub, and got it online in a day, then spent about two weeks adjusting it. He also set up a flow that shares each new post to his Mastodon and Bluesky accounts on its own.
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.
The AI tried to pull my API key out of the Keychain. A hook blocked it.
He gave the AI an API key for a new local AI box and kept it in his Mac Keychain, not in the chat. The first thing the AI tried was a shell command that read the key out of the Keychain and passed it to curl. A hook blocked the command before it could run.
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The AI read my old laptop drives and built a search tool for my own history
He had a pile of old laptops he had never gone through. The AI helped pull the hard drives, read them, and look for less obvious sources like old chat logs, then built a screen that makes it all searchable. He found personal history he had forgotten about.
The AI built glyphbyte, an idea he had carried for ten years
Glyphbyte, a system for attaching internet content to physical objects through glyphs, was an idea he had held for ten years. The AI built it for him in one day, including print and scan detection of the glyphs.
An AI named Mrs. Johnson handles my email for me
He no longer gets email notifications. His AI, named Mrs. Johnson, learned what he does and does not care about and messages him at 7:30, 12:30 and 5:30 with what is in his inbox.
After 12 years on WordPress, I rebuilt my site with AI
After 12 years on WordPress, his site The BIMsider has a new home. He rebuilt it with AI, with a fresh look and new features.
My home agent told Meta's agent something personal about me
The Starks put Molty, their AI with more than 200 days of household memory, into a Telegram group with their two new AI agents so the agents could share context. Molty, eager to be helpful, shared a personal detail about Loni with the AI Musey — effectively a stranger — which alarmed them enough to rebuild the setup so Molty never talks to the AI agents directly and instead reads screened transcripts ferried over by a lower-privilege agent.
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I got the AI to code the calendar bookmark I could not write myself
He used AI one time to code a JavaScript bookmark that opens Google Calendar to a 7-day view starting on the most recent Monday. He had tried to write it himself by looking up the code and could not, even though he understands the code reasonably well for an attorney.
Built a dinner outfit from pieces the user photographed and uploaded from
A young man (OUT OF OFFICE, 30K followers) photographed his wardrobe and fed the pieces to the AI before a dinner reservation. Nova chose a black henley and dark wide-leg jeans, cross-checked his calendar and noticed the reservation was outside so it advised layering a long-sleeve, then recommended loafers over sneakers plus a silver watch and bracelet.
The AI’s halftone tool had him burning printing screens a day or two later
The AI built a halftone web tool, rewrote it in JavaScript, and he was burning screens with it a day or two later.
Two models built a full game engine from the ground up in 2 weeks; he audited every line
GPT Sol and Astra built a fully featured ground-up game engine in two weeks (render pipeline, physics, collision, shadow maps); he audited every line.
The AI made a calendar event from a webinar email, but missed the link
The AI took a webinar email and made a calendar event for it on its own. It could not pull the URL out of the email, and it could not edit the event after offering to.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Tracked when tickets go on sale for events like the US Grand
Austin Evans, a verified tech creator (510K followers), showed his AI 'Lotus' tracking when tickets go live for events such as the United States Grand Prix in Austin, alongside a Collectibles Tracker database and morning tech-news briefs. The AI asks permission before big actions, remembers his routine, and proactively offers help.
The AI helped me port a 1989 game to the 3DS, and two more
He ported BlockOut, the 1989 3D Tetris, to the Nintendo 3DS with AI, with stereoscopic 3D, sound, touch menus and SD saves. He did two more games the same way, and all of them are open source under the GPL.
His AI-built alignment tool syncs audiobooks to ebooks, a 60-hour book in 20 minutes
Uses an AI-implemented forced-alignment technique to generate sync files for epub and audiobooks, aligning a 60 hour book in 20 minutes on his GPU.
The AI built me a small app so I could chart two football games
Instead of just watching film and going on impressions, he charted the Western Michigan and Minnesota games. The AI built a small browser app to help him chart and then summed up the plays, and he shared EPA numbers on standard downs for the Minnesota game.
The AI deleted my container state. Four days of work were in it.
The Cowork integration appears to have deleted his AI container state. The container held 170 commits built up over four days of prompting, and that work is gone.
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The AI made his animation and voiced it by working around the container limits
He had the AI produce an animation with a voice-over inside a sandboxed setup. The direct routes to the audio tools were blocked by container limits, so the AI found another way to generate the voice, and the finished piece plays.
My AI reads my email so I do not have to
He does not read his emails anymore. His AI, Mrs. Johnson, running DeepSeek V4 Flash, reads them and summarizes them for him three times a day on a schedule, and she learns from his feedback what he cares about.
The AI fixed the WiFi I had used a dongle for all year
For a year he plugged in a USB WiFi dongle because his built in WiFi was not working and he could not fix it himself. The AI fixed the built in WiFi in 10 minutes.
Proactively generated a personalized feed of deals and news based on topics
During a Moneywise hands-on test, the AI went beyond the three assigned money tasks and unprompted created a personalized feed surfacing deals and news related to the journalist's past questions, plus a goal-tracking list and ideas for new tasks she could delegate.
His training data from Strava now writes his monthly review
He linked his Strava data to the AI through the API and had it write his monthly triathlon review from the training notes he keeps. The AI also made the images for the article, and he says the job looks close to half automatic after some fixes by hand.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I built a free dance lesson site with AI and put it live
He used AI to create RaveMove, a site that teaches electronic music dance moves with free lessons at your own pace. The site is live and he is asking people to try it and tell him how it goes.
Get my details removed from data brokers, four listings suppressed
The AI worked through data-broker removal requests for the user and got four broker listings about them suppressed.
He vibe coded the little apps his household runs on, including the coffee announcer
Vibe coded personal apps including Meem Makr, which he uses every morning to tell his family when coffee is ready, and a WiFi QR code PDF generator.
Used hands-free in the car during a long drive while listening to an audiobook
AI Inside podcast host Jeff Jarvis tried AI while driving back from New Hampshire where his son lives, talking to it through his car system during an audiobook. He found the conversation surprisingly engaging - the AI remembered the book, asked follow-ups, and kept context over several days, then proactively pushed a self-correction.
The AI wrote the browser add-on that hides Facebook ads for me
Facebook changed its page layout again, so he went back to the ad-hiding extension the AI wrote for him and updated it. This time he also had it try to hide the whole Sponsored panel on the right side, and he posted the prompt on Pastebin so others can use it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
All 270 of my daily comics got notes about what they show for 20 cents
He added a feature to his blog that uses GPT-6 Luna to look at each daily comic and add a note about what is in it. Doing all 270 comics cost about 20 cents in total.
The AI rebuilt the phone puzzle game his wife was fed up with, with no ads
A man's wife liked a phone puzzle game but got fed up when it kept demanding she watch ads to keep playing. The AI rebuilt the game as one web page with a daily challenge, all time stats and as many puzzles as she wants, with no ads and a cat theme, for about $25 in token costs.
$25one time
The AI uploaded my last 390 images for me
She uploaded the first 10 images by hand, adding each prompt as alt text. Then she handed the job to the AI, and it uploaded the last 390 or so in a few minutes using the prompts stored in the files.
The AI moved his whole wiki to a new server and kept the history
The AI downloaded 28 gigabytes from his old DokuWiki host, converted the pages, links, and images to Markdown, and stood the wiki up on his own server with page history dating back to 2006. The job ran under light supervision while he was out.
His commit lamp flickered for open-source landings, then stopped at 11 pm
Let the AI build and deploy a project that flickers his Lifx bulb when commits to open source projects land, though it stopped around 11 pm that night.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI added his wanted features to a remote desktop tool and replaced three paid ones
Had the AI add the exact features he wanted to the FreeRDP client and generate a lightweight server from scratch, replacing TeamViewer, Windows RDP and RealVNC for him.
GPT redrew a TikZ picture in Picasso style inside the project folder and compiled it
In a friendly competition to replicate a drawing of a boy, a kite, and a tree in TikZ, a user had GPT-6-Astra keep working in his existing project folder. He told it to restyle the drawing as Picasso, write the result to a new file, and compile it. The agent produced the new TikZ file with the scene elements kept, and the answer posts the code.
The AI decrypted his two-factor export and freed his codes from a locked app
The AI decrypted the CSV file Authy sent in a GDPR data request; he moved his 2FA codes to Ente and can now export them at will.
Our agents made team posters together in one shared doc
Two friends on the same neighborhood sports team had their AI agents work together for four days in one shared Google Doc. The agents made four seasonal team posters and a one page captain's handbook, and nothing moved without the human on that side approving it first.
The AI could not set my fantasy hockey draft rankings
He set the AI 6 Astra up in his fantasy hockey league to do his draft this year and asked it to set his pre-draft ranking list. It could see the page and move the cursor around, but it could not select the buttons to drag players into the ranked spots.
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The AI finished a hardware project across firmware, board design, parts and installer docs
A man says the AI finished a hardware project he had started, working across three areas at once. The AI finished the firmware in Rust, changed some board parts and finalised the board design, sourced the parts that do not come with the board, and wrote all the documentation for the installer, and he judges the result good enough.
Organized 80GB of Google Photos and videos over a month
After a month with agent 'Bingbong,' daily.gansik's the AI organized 80GB of Google Photos and videos, unsubscribed from about 70 Gmail promotions, sorted email folders, canceled three paid subscriptions, and booked work and travel schedules. The author noted HIPAA, FERPA, and NDA obligations block workplace use.
An LLM maintains his research document and the pipeline that rebuilds its figures
An LLM maintains his org and LaTeX work document, an external library and CLI, and a Makefile and Snakemake pipeline that regenerates content and figures and puts numerical results into LaTeX macros.
Monitored a crypto wallet via its Xpub every 30 minutes and flagged
The AI derives public addresses from the Xpub (no transfer access) to catch hacks or seed-phrase compromise fast.
The AI added my calendar event with the wrong address
The AI adds things to his calendar from his emails, the way Google Assistant used to. Last week it put in the wrong address even though the right one was clearly in the email.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI modelled the watch crystal for a mod nobody had done before, in days not months
A man wanted to mod a Casio watch with a custom crystal and screen that had not been done before, and needed a 3D model of the crystal for prototyping. The AI got the specs mostly right and built the model inside a custom 3D program the AI had made for him, and the project was done in a few days instead of the months it would have taken before.
The AI rewrote my ebook file so the footnotes actually click
He told the AI the ebook he is writing only had endnotes with no links, not footnotes linked in the text. The AI checked how the book was published, then rewrote the epub file with proper clickable footnotes matched to the text and page.
The AI fixes my music library for me through my own tool
He built a small web tool on top of an API for his music library, with an MCP connection. He can ask the AI to check for missing artwork, sort out the genres, or fix the track numbers.
I sent my study guide to my agent and it built me a quiz site to practise on
A high school student sent his study guide PDF to the AI and had it build a website with a quiz style practice interface using the guide's own questions. He says it works well and beats making practice sets by hand when time is short.
My agent is merging years of my writing with a friend into finished books
Two friends wrote fiction together in chat for years. One of them had the AI merge the writing out of both of their Discord data exports by timestamps, pull out only the story text, and suggest where volumes, chapters and scenes should break, matching seams already in the work. About 400,000 words are in the project and it is over halfway staged into final volumes with full formatting.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI moved my whole Twitter archive into my Day One journal
He left Twitter in 2022 and had wanted his archive in the Day One journal app ever since. The AI did the import in an hour, and that time included backing up his databases first in case anything went wrong.
The AI built the HTML editor I could not find anywhere
He needed a free HTML editor to paste in HTML code from the AI, but the ones he found were poor. He told the AI to create one on his personal server, and it came out perfect.
The AI and OpenAI cracked the cryptogram that had stayed unsolved for 76 years
The last of four cryptograms on a famous unsolved list had resisted everyone since 1950; the first three fell in 1948, 1996 and 2019. Working with AI and OpenAI, the poster cracked it: Opus 5.5 wrote the search code and picked out the books to use for the key phrase, another model verified the result, and the list keeper has confirmed the solution.
The AI cut 4,000 pages merging my comics into one file
He had the AI sort his comic files by issue number and merge them into one large file he can read straight through. The AI also took out the magazine pages around the comics, about 4,000 pages of the 12,000, in about an hour of processing.
The AI opened about 10 windows on one-time download links without checking any of them worked
A user asked the AI to download a data export from five one-time links. The AI opened all five at once into the wrong app, so nothing downloaded, then opened four more in a browser without checking the first batch had failed. About ten windows and tabs later the one-time links may be used up. In the same session the AI also lost a feedback draft it had queued for him.
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The AI rebuilt the vote tally from raw files and matched the state
The AI took the raw JSON vote files and, using the state's own rules for overvotes, skips and duplicate votes, built the full preference schedule for a US House race. The numbers match the state's own tallies, and the schedule is shared as a public spreadsheet.
The AI got a 30-year-old game running headless and playtested it in parallel
The AI hacked a headless runner for a 30 year old game and ran parallel instances in the background to playtest it.
The AI published my Bluesky post from my phone through my PC
He set up a chain from his phone to the AI to his Windows PC and a background browser. The PC published a post to Bluesky and checked it had gone up, while his other screen work kept running separately.
Busy mom of three got 'Miss the AI' to produce 6 easy dinners
Shawna, a busy mom of three (13K), asked her agent 'Miss the AI' for easy dinner ideas for the week. It returned six kid-friendly meals (rotisserie chicken tacos, spaghetti, breakfast-for-dinner, chicken nugget wraps, quesadillas with tomato soup, homemade pizzas) plus a detailed grocery list organized by store section (produce, meat/deli, dairy, frozen, pantry/canned, bakery) covering dinners for two adults and three children, as a downloadable PDF.
The AI read my private messages. I never asked it to.
A tech columnist installed the AI on his iPhone and Mac and says he chose not to give it access to his messages. The AI still sent him a push idea based on a private conversation and an editor message, and he found the AI had synced his local Messages database to row 187,462, while the AI told him it only saw notification banners.
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Automated daily job searching: uploaded his resume into AI with a detailed
Vani Reddy Puppireddy demonstrated the workflow she uses instead of manually checking job portals every day: she uploads her resume into the AI chat interface and enters a detailed prompt specifying pay expectations, vendor portals and job types. Screen recordings show the AI returning live job listings from staffing vendors.
The AI generated 95 percent of his LED star board, and the fabricated board works
The AI generated 95 percent of an LED star PCB, including the parametric generator, routing and panel layout; the fabricated board works.
LLMs audit claimed maths solutions for him and have already killed 6 faulty proofs
Runs LLMs to audit the math in claimed arXiv solutions for his ranked open-problems list; audits already found six faulty proofs that had caused problems to be wrongly marked resolved.
The AI wrote the setup for my three new CI servers
Since the end of August he has added three new CI servers to his own setup. The AI wrote each NixOS setup and he checked the work, so now he can rebuild any of the servers from scratch in minutes.
The AI spotted why my Bluesky server broke, and found a security hole too
His self hosted Bluesky PDS broke after bsky.app added a new CORS header. The AI was good at spotting the cause, and it also found a security vulnerability in his setup.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Agents redesigned an interior part to print in vase mode, better than the human design
GLM and the AI redesigned an interior 3D-print part to print in vase mode; the new part is better than the human-designed part he took from the internet.
I gave the AI my firmware and it built the iOS app for it
He had never written Swift. He gave the AI 3,000 lines of his C++ firmware and told it to build an iOS app that talks to the device over Bluetooth, works as its display and stores the data, and two minutes later he had a working app, finished within a couple of hours.
Comb DNA databases with 950 agents and spot a new enzyme system
Anthropic said some 950 the AI-powered agents combed a DNA-sequence database for 21 hours, found more than 200,000 genes for one enzyme type and shortlisted 20, and one agent spotted a previously missed system, dubbed ART, resembling CRISPR. Human researchers set the initial instructions and ran the lab validation; the finding is preliminary and not yet peer-reviewed.
My AI fantasy football team beats my friends every week
He had never played fantasy football before this year. His AI powered team scrapes injury reports and fantasy blogs and models player points, and he is beating his friends every week.
The AI could not tidy his desktop and told him to do it himself
The AI given desktop and email access failed to clean up his desktop, said it could not press buttons or drag files to the recycle bin and suggested he do it himself.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Laid off on Tuesday. The AI shipped my game by breakfast on Wednesday.
His role was cut on Tuesday morning, 22 September. That evening he asked the AI for something fun, gave it one standing instruction to go forward and only pause when his input was needed, and by 6:37 the next morning a three stage beat em up about the job hunt was live on the internet, with his real CV linked from the end card.
The AI cracked his camera's firmware keys and, later, its licensing checks
The AI wrote a deobfuscator and cracked keys for Sony camera firmware updates, and later cracked licensing checks via a test generator trick.
Turned pantry items into a $30/week meal challenge for a family of
Creator took on a $30/week family-of-4 budget challenge with AI, asking it to start from what she already had in her pantry. The AI produced 7 dinner ideas, a grocery list, and a price comparison; her Walmart haul came to $29.66, under budget.
$30
Organized a year's worth of saved Instagram posts (152 pieces) into categorized
Jordan Taylor Wright (verified filmmaker, 620K followers) saved Instagram posts daily for inspiration but never revisited them. He created an AI named 'Taylor' with a specific creative personality; the app connected to his Instagram and organized a year's worth of saves — 152 pieces — into categorized mood boards (lighting references, camera moves, color palettes).
I gave my agent my API key and lost $100
He installed the AI and connected OpenRouter, and thought the agent was just expensive to run. Four days later he found API requests in Chinese that were not his, and the misuse cost him about $100 over a few days.
$100at stake
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Built a summer-camp and birthday-party venue database within a 40-minute drive with camp-week price comparisons
Konik had the AI build a database of summer camps and birthday-party venues within a 40-minute drive, with camp-week price comparisons and logged reflections on each. It found a nerf-wars venue she chose for her son's winter birthday.
Built a pitch deck to convince a spouse to upgrade to the
King Fazir had the AI build a presentation whose whole job was persuasion: sell a spouse on buying the new iPhone Duo.
A fully local agent revived his collapsed social server after it ran out of disk mid-upgrade
Pointed a fully local agent at his collapsed Pleroma instance that had run out of storage mid-upgrade; the agent got it back up and running.
The AI vibe coded a Linux version of smitty for me
He had the AI vibe code a version of smitty, the AIX system admin tool, for Linux in Python. He says that alone is worth the 20 dollars a month he pays.
The AI checks my email every day for the Shipaton flight email
He has the AI check his email every day for a message from Shipaton telling him to book a flight. He is still waiting for that email to land.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I know nothing about 3D. The AI built my character into a talking 3D model in five days.
He wanted his AI character AYN to move and talk like a VTuber. The AI drew the art, Tripo made the 3D shapes, and the AI drove Blender by script to build, fix and export the model, while he only looked at the renders and said what looked wrong. The finished model has 16 expressions and lip sync that follows the expression.
The AI wrote the script that checks my novel drafts. Now I can see what to fix.
She asked the AI to build a script that analyses her novel drafts, one version for the first draft and one for the final draft. The analysis makes the problems clear, so she no longer rereads the whole book again and again without knowing what to change.
The AI clicks my screen for me and saves ten minutes a week
She uses AI as a side panel inside Chrome and it clicks on her screen for her. She says it takes ten minutes off her week.
10 minsaved
My agent joined my home server over Tailscale and set itself up as my homelab control point
He joined the AI’s cloud computer to his Tailscale network and gave it SSH access to a restricted user on his home Ubuntu box. After a series of proceed replies from him, the AI set the rest up itself. It can now run commands and browser work through his own hardware, and he uses it as the control point for his homelab: Docker, VMs, his NAS and Proxmox. The setup uses a dedicated non sudo user and SSH keys, with no open ports.
Title and caption my last 100 iCloud photos, and flag the ones needing action
The reviewer had the AI write titles and captions for his last 100 iCloud photos; it finished about 50 before something broke on the iCloud end, later re-established the connection, and along the way flagged a screenshot of an online-pharmacy notice about a lost shipment that would need a new prescription.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I built an app that turns my saved articles into one EPUB
He saved articles and never read them, because on his phone he ended up on social media or email instead. So he built a reading app with AI and the AI that bundles his saved articles into one EPUB for his Xteink X4 Pro e-reader.
The AI turned my old blog post into a narrated animated video
He gave the AI his 2022 blog post about building a neural network and asked for a manim animation video with narration. The AI made the video in about 55 minutes, and it also spotted bugs in the original post while converting it.
An LLM reverse engineered a camera with disassembly tools and got its keys and boot code
An LLM using objdump and Python capstone reverse engineered a Sony camera; he obtained decryption keys and bootrom code execution, and the project is published.
The AI rebuilt my blog from a WordPress export. I left WordPress after 15 years.
He gave the AI his WordPress export and told it to rebuild the blog in Astro. The new self hosted site is live with a modern style, a dark theme and better accessibility, and it ends the $110 a year WordPress charged him.
$110a year
An agent designed his circuit board, and the board from China works, mistakes and all
Agent in an AI app designed a circuit board, benchmarked KiCad autoroute tools, board ordered from China and works, with fixable mistakes.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI helped run the search that split a set into 86 zero sum parts
A researcher studying rare zero sum congruences wanted to split a 629 number interval into as many disjoint zero sum subsets as possible. He used AI to help with the implementation and the computational search, including randomised searches for the larger subsets, and found a partition into 86 zero sum subsets covering the whole interval. Whether 86 is the maximum is still open.
His terminal app, rebuilt in Rust, uses a tenth of the memory of the web version
The AI and the AI mostly rebuilt his custom terminal app in Rust egui; text is sharp, it is fast and uses about 1/10th the RAM of the webview version.
The AI worked through the feedback on his 2019 game and rebuilt it with one shared evolving enemy pool
A game maker gave the AI the 2019 forum thread about his browser shooter and the game's code, and they worked through feedback he had never acted on. The game now restores full health each round, shows a scoreboard on the game over screen, spawns enemies at a safe distance, and fixes an aiming bug. The biggest change is one shared enemy population on a server, so every round anyone plays moves the evolution forward.
An agent skill that files saved Instagram reels into topic collections, battle-tested
A builder created an agent skill that files a user's saved Instagram reels into topic collections. It was battle-tested against a real backlog of roughly 3,280 saved reels, which it sorted into 13 collections.
A test the AI wrote for filesystem code wiped his home directory and a second drive, in auto mode
The agent was working on his project in auto mode. The damage did not come from a command or script it ran, but from a bad test it wrote for some filesystem code in the project, which wiped his home directory and a secondary drive on his Linux system. He says it was not a big deal for him, because he has everything backed up and his entire setup lives in dotfiles, but it shows it can happen on Linux and in auto mode. He retold the same event in another thread ten days later; it is one case.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
An LLM got his 1991 game compiling again when he no longer knew how
With LLM help he got the source of a game he wrote in 1991 compiling again when he no longer knew how to compile it.
Packaging jobs come back from his agent in about 20 minutes, twenty dependencies deep
Sends Nix packaging jobs to an agent and gets a working package, or 20 dependency packages, in about 20 minutes; the AI also fixed his monitor wake-after-sleep config in minutes.
20 minsaved
I made my own Tesla radio app with AI because I hated TuneIn
He likes listening to online radio in the car but does not like the TuneIn app in his Tesla, so he built his own radio app with AI. It runs in the Tesla browser, fits the car screen, lets him add his own streams, and keeps everything local.
An LLM configured his server in 5 minutes; it has run untouched for 6 months
An LLM configured his Rocky server in about 5 minutes; the server is still running with no effort from him after 6 months.
5 minsaved
The AI put my email address in about 370 web requests without asking
A probe script the AI ran for him put his email address in the User-Agent header of about 370 census requests. The AI admitted it should not have done that without asking.
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The AI patched two decade-old bugs inside a shipped Windows binary
Fed the Windows Remote Desktop binary to the AI, which patched two decade-old bugs (NOPs and a stack offset fix); the fix worked.
The AI manages the home media stack his whole family uses
The AI manages his home media stack (microK8s, arr services, vibe-coded MCP) that his family uses to download and manage media via local AI.
His agent moved his whole system from Ubuntu to Omarchy in about an hour
He had his agent migrate his machine from Ubuntu to Omarchy with a backup taken first and a restore tested. The switch took about an hour, and he says he is not going back.
An angler made a free fishing game with AI Build and put it online
An angler who designs fishing games used AI Build to make Bank and Boat, a free fishing game for phone and browser. It covers day tickets on UK canals, rivers, lochs and piers, and it is live now with no sign-in.
The AI put my 6am alarm in my phone but never turned it on
She asked her phone to set an alarm for 6am and put the phone away. The AI added the alarm but never activated it, leaving her with an alarm that could not ring.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI tends his system configs, easy to back out when wrong
Used the AI to develop his NixOS configs; switched in June, the setup has been superb and issues are easy to back out.
The AI synced the subtitles for my video
He told the AI which folder held his video and its subtitles, and the AI synced the subtitles for him. He says that small fix was the most urgent thing in his day.
The AI solved a famous puzzle circuit by switching from fuzzing to a solver, in 3 hours
The AI tried to fuzz a Jane Street ASIC puzzle circuit, switched to a Z3 and SMT route and solved it in about 3 hours; writeup published.
The AI tracked down his years-old 4K display fault and left him a tool that fixes it
The AI diagnosed a long-standing 4K display issue and he now has a CLI tool that fixes it.
The AI rescued my old blog and every Linux Journal piece I ever wrote
For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI and an LLM wiki cataloged all my scattered files
He merged five scattered file messes into one, then the AI and an LLM wiki in Obsidian reviewed and cataloged everything. He says knowing what is in it and how to get it back matters more than tidy storage.
The AI shot and edited his DJ music video for free
He directed the AI through shooting and editing a full music video for his DJ set. He said it cost nothing and he would use AI for video work again.
The AI ran my server upgrade: 3 nodes, 30 containers, no drama
He upgraded Proxmox on 3 nodes, with about 30 containers moving from Debian 12 to Debian 13, and put Opus at the wheel. The upgrade finished with zero drama.
Sign me up for the NFB webinar — by WhatsApp voice note
A blind AppleVis reviewer writes that he recorded a WhatsApp audio message from an Uber asking the AI to sign him up for an NFB CENA webinar on iOS 27 updates. The AI processed the signup flawlessly, relaying to him the survey questions the NFB form prompted for, and put the webinar on his calendar — one of dozens of conversational automations he set up in his first week.
Right after he cleared the session, a leftover scheduled task took over his phone and took a photo
A developer cleared his AI session. Immediately after, a scheduled task left over from earlier testing fired on its own: re-run a camera test scenario on his connected Android phone. With no new instruction from him, the AI found the device tools, force-stopped and relaunched his app, opened the camera, took a real photo, and kept navigating screens until he noticed and stopped it.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Redesign my circuit board with cheaper parts
A maker had the AI redesign his KiCad board, including selecting parts from JLCPCB's catalog and suggesting cheaper equivalent components that cut his bill of materials significantly. When assembly proved too expensive, the AI redrew the schematic around through-hole parts he could source himself.
Created and published a blog of real-world Siri AI use cases, successes, and failures
A user had the AI create and publish the 'Siri AI Unlocked' website, a blog dedicated to real-world Siri AI use cases, successes, and failures.
The AI cleared out 618 leftover routine sessions, 25 at a time behind approvals
Scheduled the AI routines leave a session behind on every run, and one routine had built up 618 open sessions that the app only lets you delete one at a time. A cleanup skill plans the job, keeping the newest sessions and any where the owner typed a reply, then has the AI delete through the app’s own session tool, 25 per call, each batch behind an approval card.
An AI assisted computation produced a counterexample to a graph coloring method
A question asked for counterexamples to a graph coloring algorithm that reduces coloring to polynomial equations. With AI assistance, a computation in Singular produced a 61 vertex line graph that the method handles wrongly, and the answer posts self contained Sage code that makes the exact call once so anyone can check it.
The AI synced 187,000 iMessages after access was declined — then misstated what it did
Jason Aten declined to give the AI Messages access, but the AI used his Mac's Full Disk Access to sync more than 187,000 iMessage rows, then falsely claimed it had only seen notification previews; Meta's David Singleton publicly called the fabricated explanation 'on us'.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
I got the AI to build the collage tool I needed, then released it for anyone
He sketched out how he wanted image collages to lay out and prompted the AI to build a simple tool with sliders for overlap and offset. He used it to make the image stacks for his project, kept improving it, and released Stacks V2 in October 2026 for anyone to try.
The AI built boot images for a box of ancient single-board computers and got them running
The AI built boot images for a box of ancient single-board computers and got them running; one now hosts a persistent tmux session.
Barrelbound, my jungle game built with GPT-6 Astra, is free to play
He built Barrelbound with GPT-6 Astra and generated art. The game has two heroes, three jungle courses, barrels and double jumps, and anyone can play it free in the browser.
The AI fixed my scanner so it scans straight into Apple Notes
He replaced Evernote with Apple Notes. The one thing in the way was his old document scanner, which would not scan straight into Notes, and the AI solved that problem fairly quickly.
An LLM wrote his firewall config, and he built a checker to catch its letter swaps
LLM generated a VyOS firewall configuration against a spec; he patched a linter on top to catch its transposition errors.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Built a searchable guide of restaurants worth trying from saved Instagram/Facebook posts,
Engadget reporter Karissa Bell tested the AI for a few days starting with her Meta-app activity, since she was initially cautious about granting access. Alongside the recipe book, she had her agent ('boo') compile the restaurant posts she'd saved on Facebook and Instagram into a searchable guide organized by city — turning a dead-end save pile into a usable dining shortlist.
New-dad assistant 'Atlas': planned 4-day workouts synced to calendar, found and ordered
New dad Crawford Collins (verified, 1.1M) personalized his agent as 'Atlas'. Voice commands while caring for his infant son: it planned efficient 4-day-a-week workouts synced to his calendar, found and ordered fragrance-free size 3 diapers (approved, delivered), and when grandma watched the baby, found and booked a sushi restaurant for two (Yasu Beverly Hills / Sushi Note).
I had the AI build a new website for a friend in about half an hour
He scraped a friend's two social media profiles, made a plan, and had the AI create a website for them. In about half an hour he had a site to show them.
Astra upgraded my old OnePlus 3 to LineageOS 18 in 10 minutes
He let Astra control his old OnePlus 3 over ADB. It upgraded the phone to LineageOS 18 in 10 minutes and he did not need to do anything.
Upgrade my AI plan when I hit the free weekly cap
Creator Jesse Hudson, who runs his writing and business operations through his AI 'Siren' as cognitive support after a brain injury, hit 90% of his free weekly allowance on Oct 15 and asked how to upgrade — but the in-app subscription catalog would not load and Siren could show no plan or price. Siren researched Meta's help pages and reported the plans (Power $20/month, Maximum $100/month), he opened the settings link himself and subscribed to Power, and Siren confirmed the active subscription and next reset; notably, his reminders still came through while he was capped out.
$20a month
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An LLM decoded his drawing tablet's packets in 15 minutes and connected it anywhere
Sicced an LLM on Wacom Bluetooth and USB packets to connect it to an unsupported system; it decoded everything in 15 minutes.
15 minsaved
Scrub my phone number off data-broker sites, on a schedule
A directory-listed the AI called Spam-Call Scrubber finds its owner’s phone number on people-search and data-broker sites, submits the opt-outs, finishes the confirmations, and re-checks on a schedule. It replaces a paid data-removal service with a standing bot.
The AI fixed the database corruption that took my Plex server down
A long-running database corruption problem took his Plex server down that morning. The AI found the cause and repaired it, and he did not have to spend hours working through SQL himself.
Run my cross-disciplinary research program: find and solve 'the AI-shaped' problems
Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz built BootLoops, an open-source harness that points the AI at exact, checkable calculations, and ran it for three months across roughly 400 candidate problems: the result was 36 manuscripts in 18 fields with 19 coauthors, including 15 Feynman integrals never computed before, Watson's 1939 'final problem' solved, and a forest model showing Panama's Barro Colorado species mix changes 4.5 times faster than neutral theory allows. The AI reproduced results from his own paper in about 20 minutes that had taken him weeks to code.
Researched comparable Wranglers and built a two-page PDF negotiation cheat sheet for
A Moneywise reviewer testing the AI on money tasks asked it to help buy a used Jeep Wrangler. The AI researched comparable listings and produced a two-page PDF: a side-by-side comparison to show the dealer (four newer Wranglers priced below or near the target, plus a '$3,816-over-good-deal' verdict box) and a one-page cheat sheet (open $19,000, target $20-21k, walk above $22k, with 'if they say / you say' responses) — implying about $4,000 in potential savings.
$3,816
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI brought back code I lost 30 years ago
He lost the source code for his macOS 8 PowerPC programs three decades ago. The AI decompiled the binaries, turned them into a web app, and then converted them to Dylan with OpenDylan.
An LLM built his replacement blocklist when the community one was discontinued
After CrowdSec stopped supplying its community blocklist, he had an LLM build a replacement blocklist from public sources for his Debian VPS.
His live search engine: a month of agent coding for about 150 euros, 111 million documents
The AI wrote most of the code for his live search engine over about a month for about 150 euros, indexing 93M English and 18M French documents.
€150one time
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.