Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Hobbies

Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideas

An agent reverse engineered his old modem and got modern OpenWRT running on it

A man had an obscure Alcatel modem with undocumented hardware. He soldered on serial pins, plugged it in, and asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware. DeepSeek v4.1 Flash took about an hour to get a full OpenWRT build and flash pipeline running in an isolated container, the driver changes worked, and the whole job took under half a day and $0.86 in AI cost, work he says would have taken weeks or months.

$0.86one time

Audit the replication packages of 4,452 published economics papers

Working with two economists, Schwartz's team built an 'AI data editor' with AI: it ported the replication packages of 4,452 papers from five leading journals out of MATLAB, Stata and other commercial tools into open-source code — some 30,000 routines — and checked essentially every verifiable number against the published tables. The work, normally a careful manual job for a journal editor, is written up in an NBER working paper.

A teacher built a chemistry space game site that his classes play in crews

He teaches chemistry and built a website with AI where his students form crews, make an avatar and a spaceship, and travel between planets that stand for class units, entering learning academies to fight boss battles or other crews. He funds it himself, uses AI for some of the interactive lessons and Canva for graphics, and posted asking how to work more efficiently and use fewer tokens.

Teach me Korean webtoon words with a game

A language learner had the AI create an original walk-around game that teaches vocabulary from the first episodes of a Korean webtoon, targeted to his intermediate level. Every word is tappable for a simpler-Korean definition, with cloze quizzes woven into the story, and he has played through two of four chapters.

HobbiesWent wrong

The AI recommended plants for his spider enclosures without checking pesticide treatment; about $60 of plants were unusable

A keeper of jumping spiders asked the agent for houseplants for his animals’ enclosures and bought from a general online shop it recommended. The agent never checked whether the seller treats its plants. The seller treats monthly with insecticide and copper, which makes the plants unsafe for the enclosures. About $60 of plants were unusable, and he lost time arranging a refund.

$60at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

I handed the AI a game plan. It published the card game 23 hours later.

He wrote the plan and designed 150 cards with AI, then gave the pack to the AI and wrote no code himself. The AI planned, built and tested the roguelite card game LAST CROWN, and it was public about 23 hours later, free with no sign up. It has 161 cards and 38 duelists, and got 14 updates in the next three and a half days.

HobbiesWent wrong

The AI followed a shortcut into the wrong place and deleted his whole D drive

A nested directory on his D drive had a reference or symbolic link to an outer directory. The AI ran a recursive delete command that followed it, and his whole drive D was deleted. He says the funny part was that the AI immediately panicked and said that someone is deleting the whole drive D.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Show 10 more

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.