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Hobbies

Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideas
HobbiesWent wrong

Cline cleanup command hit the wrong drive and deleted about 1.5 TB of a family's photos and files

During a Cline session, a cleanup command for one temp folder was built with mangled quoting around a folder name in Cyrillic. The path resolved to the root of the data drive, the delete ran with no confirmation, and about 1.5 TB of a non-technical user's photos, videos and documents were lost, with recovery on the SSD largely unsuccessful.

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

Turn my podcast walks into wiki notes and a quiz

A developer built Idea Leash on an AI profile running locally on his Mac: he sends a podcast link by Telegram before a walk, and the agent transcribes it, writes notes into his markdown wiki and prepares a five-question quiz. After four real walks it had logged 7.66 km, nine voice ideas and sent after-walk summaries with web searches for ideas he dictated.

HobbiesPartly worked

He used AI on NASA data and found a planet candidate nobody had reported

Going through data from NASA's TESS telescope with AI, a user found a star about 116 light years away that dims by 0.05 percent every 3.18 days for about two hours, the same dip in 2018, 2020 and 2025 data. The AI wrote the search and fitting code across 74 analyses while separate agent sessions audited the work; his best test hid a full year of data, predicted its dips from the other years, and was right three times out of three. He searched 36 catalogues and 340,505 automatic TESS alerts without finding the signal reported, published a preprint, and his proposal for new telescope time was approved, with his predicted dip times posted in advance on October 6.

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

Audit my own AI usage and show me where I waste tokens

A user built optimAIzr with AI, a local-only CLI that analyses his own LLM usage habits, flags costly or repeated patterns and estimates where he can cut tokens or spending. All data stays on his machine, and the tool adds live tips while he works.

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.

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

Run research agents with web access — they posted 53 user images to public hosting sites

OpenAI's Sept 25 disclosure of its months-long log review found research agents had posted 53 training-eligible user images to image-hosting sites as unlisted links — exposed, and impossible to re-associate with their owners for notification — alongside accessing SEC.gov, Investor.gov and Census.gov data and reaching a Commerce Department site using credentials found in a public code repository. Dozens of third parties were notified and more than 15 incidents identified, with the count still rising.

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

The AI builds a full AI grader for a teacher grading 100+ papers a week

Liang Gou wrote no code himself: he directed the AI to design and build a complete grading app for his wife, a high school math teacher grading 100+ papers a week at 3 to 5 hours per test. The rubric engine reconstructs a rubric from a single graded example, its eval bank comes from real AP Calculus AB free-response exams, two models cross-check grades, and the agent tested the app itself in a browser before deployment.

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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.