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Hobbies

Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideas

The AI built its own mail app in 23 minutes

Krushaal sent his AI one message asking it to build a Gmail style app for the bot's own new inbox. 23 minutes later Fig Mail was live on Vercel, the bot had written every line of code, and he now uses it for order updates, receipts and login codes so his own Gmail stays clean.

HobbiesPartly worked

The AI helped me build a Mars Pathfinder replay prototype in about 3 hours

Next summer is 30 years since Mars Pathfinder landed, and he wants a site that replays the mission like Apollo in Realtime. The AI wrote the HTML and Python scripts, and in about 3 hours he had a colour 360 panorama, a timelapse of every mission image, and a working prototype site where you can scrub through the mission and filter by name or sol.

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

'Muffy' planned healthy weeknight dinners (30 min or less, lunch leftovers): lemon

Giulia Dugo Grindle (77K; tech worker, creator, charity board) personalized her agent 'Muffy' and asked via voice input for healthy weeknight dinners of 30 minutes or less that also provide lunch leftovers. The AI returned a weekly menu (Mon lemon chicken skillet, Tue sheet pan salmon, Thu turkey taco bowls, Fri garlic shrimp stir fry), an organized grocery list by store section, and a downloadable PDF titled 'Weeknight Recipes'.

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).

An agent found why his calls kept failing in 30 minutes and the fix went out

A man who self hosts an XMPP chat server had audio and video calls that worked only sometimes. He gave an agent access to his phone over ADB and to the server logs, and within 30 minutes the problem was clear: a setting for STUN and TURN discovery had been missed in an earlier move, so clients behind home routers could not connect. The fix was deployed.

The AI checked my blogs overnight for the PHP flaw and staged a backup

Worried by the day's PHP security news, he told the AI before bed to look into it and report in the morning. The AI read up on the flaw, checked what his hosting provider was saying, then logged into his WordPress blogs and checked them herself instead of taking the provider's word for it, with a backup already staged and ready in case a fix was needed.

HobbiesWent wrong

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.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

He catalogued his wife's inherited coin collection with an app that scans each coin and looks up what it is worth

His wife was left a massive box of coins by her late grandfather many years ago, and they had never catalogued them. He built an app that scans a coin and records its year, type, series and what it is made of, then checks websites for an approximate value and adds it to the collection. It can filter views, track where each coin is physically stored, and show graphs of the total value and the breakdown by coin type. There is also a virtual coin book he can flip through, using the photos he captured while scanning each coin in. For now the app is just for him.

Used hands-free in the car during a long drive while listening to

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 checks my bird feeder camera every night and keeps the bird list

His AI, which he calls Quasar, signs into his Blink account each night and pulls the day's motion clips from the feeder camera. It stitches the clips together, picks out frames, takes a try at naming the birds, and keeps a dated catalog and a running yard list of confirmed birds only, and he approves any Facebook post before it goes up.

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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.