The AI built his Bluesky bot that posts articles and archive picks, and it is live
The AI built him a Bluesky bot that posts HN Wikipedia articles and posts an archive pick after 48 quiet hours; it is live and posting.
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Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasThe AI cracked an Enigma message after scanning 82 million combinations in 45 minutes
The AI in Antigravity built an Enigma decryption program, fetched repos, ran an 82M combination scan and decrypted the message in about 45 minutes.
45 minsaved
The AI Dispatch instantly ends every task on one Windows PC host
A Max subscriber uses AI Dispatch from his iPhone: on his daily Windows PC tasks run normally, but on his Windows 11 Pro server PC every dispatched message instantly returns "Task ended" and no task ever starts, even though regular Cowork tasks run fine on that machine. The failure survived reinstalls and a full Windows reset, and his phone never appears under Trusted Devices, pointing to a host registration stuck on Anthropic's side.
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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.
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.
The AI designed a VGA circuit, the board was made for $6, and it works
A maker had the AI design a circuit that shows a picture stored in a memory chip on a standard VGA screen, using common logic chips, and write the chip code for it. He routed the board himself, had it made for $6, fixed the one missed error with a wire, and the board works.
$6one time
The AI built my tool for spotting ships that stay off AIS
Over two weeks the AI built his hobby tool that matches free Sentinel-1 radar images with live AIS ship data around Denmark, recording AIS either side of each satellite pass on its own and marking radar spots with no ship as leads. In one check 2 to 5 of about 555 pairings were wrong.
Four months of permitted account logins broke overnight when the AI began refusing
A Reddit poster reports that scripts the AI wrote had logged into his various accounts with his permission for four months, working at 1 a.m. and flatly refusing by 11 a.m. the same day. Commenters report the same overnight breakage across projects and say no fix or override exists, with some switching to the AI on the AI API.
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The AI’s decision engine sorts his private photo library at just under 85 percent accuracy
The AI built and optimized his local decision engine for his private image organizer, reaching just under 85 percent accuracy across 500 validation prompts with sub-second responses.
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.
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.
I moved my old Twitter threads onto my own blog with AI
He mined his old Twitter archive with help from the AI. His old threads of more than three tweets and his collections of links are now on his own site as historic blog posts.
The AI on my phone says it cannot set reminders
He says that when he asks the AI on his phone to set a reminder, the AI tells him it is unable to set reminders and to use the built-in assistant on his phone instead.
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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.
The AI ported a game binary between two chips in 2 hours, no source
Ported a Linux game binary from Cortex-A7 to Allwinner A133P in about 2 hours using AI, with no source.
2 hourssaved
The AI set up his TV guide system, wrote the missing guide parsers, and runs it daily on his server
For football season a man pointed the AI at his utility server and had it set up Dispatcharr, a TV guide system. Finding his 50 channels among 80,000, with guide data that does not always work, is the hard part of this setup. The AI got it configured, wrote scripts to parse channel guides from sources the built in guide misses, scheduled them to update daily, and deployed the whole thing.
The AI catalogued my board games into BoardGameGeek
The AI in Chrome found the games he had ordered, created notes, downloaded the cover images, added metadata, and put the games into his BoardGameGeek account.
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.
The AI cleaned up his photo libraries across accounts and converted his old phone images
A homelab owner used AI on his Immich photo setup, which can only remove duplicates inside one user library. The AI found the duplicates across multiple libraries and quarantined them, found his grid based images from his iPhone 4 days, wrote the conversion software, and turned them into animated WebP files.
The AI set up his media cluster with storage, shares and a VPN container
The AI configured his arr stack plus NFS mounts, share templates and a VPN init-container in Kubernetes; the cluster is now easy to manage and debug.
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.