The AI stood up 4 unfamiliar server services in 2 days, a week of work compressed
Used the AI to get 4 unfamiliar Proxmox LXC services working, drafting configs and VPN-only firewall rules in 2 days instead of about a week.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasThe AI made a media player play discs in the browser, from the player's own codebase
Pointed the AI at the VLC codebase and built a bundled JS package and UI that can play DVD and Blu-Ray files in the browser.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Migrate my old MacBook onto my new Mac mini while I do other things
Mike Rodriguez gave the AI his migration plan for moving an old M4 MacBook Pro onto a new M6 Mac mini, including what went to the cloud and how storage should split, then walked away. Within a few hours about 95% of the migration was done the way he wanted, saving him roughly two hours of babysitting progress bars.
2 hourssaved
The AI packaged software for Slackware and the package ran
As a test he had an AI harness package GNU Bison for Slackware. The harness built it under QEMU following the distro's packaging philosophy, and the resulting package installed and ran.
The AI wired into his FPGA boards and troubleshot the chip build to a workaround
The AI interfaced with FPGA boards over USB, set up UART, created an on-chip logic analyzer, and troubleshot a synthesis problem to a workaround.
The AI turned my Pure Data patch into an Arduino program and my sampler into a granular synth
A few months back he had the AI convert a Pure Data patch into an Arduino program that runs on standalone hardware. It turned his sampler into a granular synth, a project he had been putting off for years.
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 mined five months of positive DMs and comments for a hand-written gratitude wall
The AI connected to the creator's Instagram and pulled every positive DM and comment from the past five months; she hand-wrote them on sticky notes arranged around a world map.
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 found the records I needed for my Canadian citizenship papers
He had to go through hundreds of pages of records he could not read to find what he needed. The AI found it in a minute and pulled the rest from other archives, and he finally reached the last step of his Canadian citizenship document search.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I built a pocket AI pet on an ESP32 that talks back and gets hungry
He built a pocket AI pet over a weekend on a Waveshare ESP32-S3 board with a 1.8 inch AMOLED touchscreen in a small case, running firmware he wrote, and you push to talk and it answers out loud in its own voice while the text shows on screen. Under the voice there is a pet layer: it gets hungry, reacts when you tap it, has moods, and runs on a small battery inside the case.
The AI updated his system packages to named versions and checked them for holes
The AI updated his system packages, including Node, Python, uv, OpenSSL and certifi to named new versions, checked a checksum, and checked recent vulnerabilities.
He turned a $15 Car Thing brick into a touch screen companion
He bought a Spotify Car Thing for about $15 when it was being discontinued, and it sat by his desk as a brick after Spotify shut it down. Today he had the AI help him turn it into a little touch screen companion.
GPT built a searchable catalogue of more than 700 mathematics preprints
When OpenAI released more than 700 mathematical preprints, a researcher wanted to search inside them, including proofs and bibliographies. With GPT-6 Astra he built a searchable catalogue that organises the papers by research area with clickable keywords, full text search, links to the originals, and each paper's Lean formalization status, and he put it on his website for public use.
Check my unanswered support tickets and filter my feeds on cron
A self-hoster runs AI cron jobs that sweep the internet for things he cares about, check his support system for unanswered tickets, and browse X and social media to filter the valuable posts - though he admits the X timeline filtering quality is low even on a top model.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI keeps my todos in a text file and sends me reminders
His AI runs on a server with Ollama as the backend, so his data stays private. It keeps his todos in a simple text file, sends him reminders about upcoming due dates, and gives him an overview when he asks in a Telegram chat.
He keeps his photography tool alive with an AI harness and dropped his Adobe subscription
Built and maintains a photography workflow tool with an AI coding harness and discontinued his Adobe subscription.
The AI built me a tagger for 20,000 photos I saved over 20 years
A man had the AI help him write an image organizer and tagger in an afternoon. He is now running it on 20,000 meme photos he saved over the last 20 years. Each photo gets described and tagged for use in LightCraft, the photo app he is building.
An AI assistant traced my family tree past 1,200 people and 13 generations
He set an AI assistant to work on genealogy sites and official archives to find his ancestors. It searches for a person with unknown parents, transcribes the record it finds, checks it against an official act and adds the new people to his family tree file, and the tree now holds more than 1,200 people across 13 generations on one branch.
An agent scored genealogy matches and missed the matches a human spots at once
A coding agent built and tested complex genealogy record-matching scoring rules against real datasets; results sort of acceptable but it missed human-obvious cases and produced false positives.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.