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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasThe AI built a stock looking theme for my iPod and now anyone can download it
None of the hundreds of Rockbox themes looked close enough to the stock iPod look for him. He asked the AI to build one based on a 2011 theme, and the result, Classic Revival, is now up on the Rockbox themes site for anyone with an iPod Video to download.
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.
My Dot messaged me about an old GitHub issue out of nowhere
An AI Dot messaged its owner on its own about a 3 year old GitHub issue from their time at Flipper, which had new developments. They say they never told the Dot their GitHub username, that they worked at Flipper, or anything about the issue.
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 built the quiz app he and his friends play, in a week of evenings
The AI built a complex quiz web app for himself and friends with multiple question types, screen sync, media uploads and scoring, in about a week of evenings (build reported in-window; the comment's complaint about current models left aside).
The AI, stuck, started scanning his home folder; he moved it to an isolated machine
The AI got stuck on an issue and started scanning his home folder for resources; he uninstalled it from his laptop and moved it to an isolated machine.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI wrote the script for my orchid pots. The printer made them.
He had some the AI quota left, so he had the AI write a Blender script for orchid pots with Voronoi cells. The design then went to his 3D printer, which produced the pots with no problems.
The AI debugged a circuit board all day and night with a servo hitting the power switch
A man built a small rig for his single board computer with two microcontrollers, one for the serial terminal and one running a servo taped to power switches so the AI could power cycle the board itself. Left running, the AI spent all day and night working through the board’s network chip quirks until the driver worked.
The AI and I hacked my old Wish smartwatch. Now it talks to a local AI.
Today he and the AI hacked a cheap Wish smartwatch he had abandoned for years. Now the watch talks to an AI model running locally, like a bargain basement Alexa.
The AI made a whole film about a book no one can read
He gave the AI a one line brief and only encouragement while it worked, with no notes on the finished film. The AI picked the Voynich manuscript, checked its numbers against published research, and made a four minute film, all 7,417 frames drawn in code.
The AI is fixing my slow SSD by repartitioning it
His SSD had become very slow at writing. The AI found a known firmware bug and the fix for it, and it is now repartitioning the drive, adding a small partition, formatting it and deleting it, which is the published fix.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His task agent clears about 50 gigabytes of build junk every three days
On a standing schedule, his agent deletes stale node_modules folders across his projects, freeing about 50 gigabytes each run. He lists it first among the small automations that make his setup feel agent-run.
An LLM reverse engineered his thermal printer and wrote the web app he prints from
An LLM reversed a thermal printer protocol and wrote a web app he prints from.
Cheer mom's weekly plan: work 9-4:30, daughter's cheer M/W/Thu/F 7-8:30pm, content shoots,
Amanda (wife, cheer mom, WFH) used her agent 'Azalea' to plan her week: work Mon-Fri 9am-4:30pm, daughter's cheer practice Mon/Wed/Thu/Fri 7-8:30pm, two content pieces to record, and a goal to cook at home. Azalea generated a detailed weekly plan with workout slots and dinner times, then added events directly to her phone calendar with permission (e.g., a Sunday 11am-12pm workout).
The AI patched a 1991 game in five minutes so his kid could play it
A father bought an old Pentium machine partly for retro games and found a childhood favourite, a 1991 learning game, froze the whole PC every time it loaded on the real hardware. He handed the AI the original game files. In five minutes it had taken the program apart, traced the hang to a sound check that waits forever on modern sound cards, and written a three byte patch into a copy of the file. The patched game worked on the first try, ready for his son.
The AI ported his old PHP site to Rust, and caching made the new one keep up
Had the AI transpile his old frameworkless PHP site to Rust and ran it behind the same nginx config; Rust was slower until the AI added micro-caching, reaching comparable rps and latency.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI reverse engineered his camera app and shimmed it onto his graphics chip
Reverse engineered the Insta360 Studio binary with AI and wrote a shim for his AMD iGPU so the app is usable.
An agent patched my dead game so it plays offline again
His Steam copy of Star Trek Legends would not start after its servers shut down, and Steam would not refund him. He gave GPT-6 Astra the game's files and logs; it found the online checks blocking startup, patched them out in two rounds, and packaged the fix as an installer. He has played missions and loaded his saved progress since.
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.