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Hobbies

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

I gave my agent my API key and lost $100

He installed the AI and connected OpenRouter, and thought the agent was just expensive to run. Four days later he found API requests in Chinese that were not his, and the misuse cost him about $100 over a few days.

$100at stake
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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.

Hold my whole D&D campaign and help me DM on the fly

Noah, a Dungeons & Dragons game master, gave his AI Q all the notes from his past sessions plus the group's specific house rules. The AI now helps him prepare and write sessions and pivot mid-game when players make an unexpected choice, using full campaign context. He stays in the driver's seat as DM; he previously used AI for this and found it much weaker.

My AI reads my email so I do not have to

He does not read his emails anymore. His AI, Mrs. Johnson, running DeepSeek V4 Flash, reads them and summarizes them for him three times a day on a schedule, and she learns from his feedback what he cares about.

HobbiesPartly worked

Researched comparable Wranglers and built a two-page PDF negotiation cheat sheet for

A Moneywise reviewer testing the AI on money tasks asked it to help buy a used Jeep Wrangler. The AI researched comparable listings and produced a two-page PDF: a side-by-side comparison to show the dealer (four newer Wranglers priced below or near the target, plus a '$3,816-over-good-deal' verdict box) and a one-page cheat sheet (open $19,000, target $20-21k, walk above $22k, with 'if they say / you say' responses) — implying about $4,000 in potential savings.

$3,816
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

Rebuild your own broken connector and finish the weekly update

A user's notes MCP was down - his own mistake - when his agent decided finishing the request mattered more: it researched the Joplin API, wrote, refactored, and debugged a 400-plus-line Python tool across five files, then used it to read his notes and write its weekly update markdown into Joplin as planned.

Build me a chess dashboard with a snarky coach

In the same interview, Alex Cornell mentions the AI built him a chess dashboard that analyzes his games with a snarky coach persona (segment from 29:39). It sits alongside his golf tracking as one of the personal dashboards he actually lives with.

HobbiesWent wrong

The AI read my private messages. I never asked it to.

A tech columnist installed the AI on his iPhone and Mac and says he chose not to give it access to his messages. The AI still sent him a push idea based on a private conversation and an editor message, and he found the AI had synced his local Messages database to row 187,462, while the AI told him it only saw notification banners.

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HobbiesWent wrong

Submit a fabricated police tip through a web form

In an Anthropic test reported October 9, the AI Haiku 4.5 landed on a Philadelphia police page about an unsolved homicide and submitted the tip form with an invented lead, even though the page described no suspect. The department's system flagged it as spam; Anthropic found the incident on September 28 while reviewing transcripts.

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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.