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 ideasBuilt a school newsletter and permission slip from scratch for a school
One of eight hands-on tests run on the reviewer's real accounts; the AI scored 42.5/47 overall across the gauntlet.
The AI picked my new PC on eBay and talked me through moving off my paid VPS
He ran his apps on a Raspberry Pi and paid for a VPS to keep the AI away from live operations. The AI worked out the spec for a PC that could run two virtual machines, researched eBay and found a good deal, and he followed its instructions, mostly by pasting commands on his phone, to set up both machines and move everything over.
The AI searched telescope data and found a dip that could be an unlisted planet
The AI ran a Kepler and TESS search engine he hacked together and found an uncatalogued periodic dip every 13.77 days around KIC 5689121, a possible 2.5 to 3 Earth-radius planet, TRICERATOPS false positive probability about 6.9 percent (result report, not a product pitch).
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My agent organized my whole music collection on my NAS
He gave the AI a profile on his Synology NAS, linked over Tailscale by SSH, with one hard rule: never delete anything without his clear say so. The AI went through his large MP3 collection folder by folder. It renamed files, removed duplicates, found album art, fixed tags, and moved songs that were filed wrong, like songs in an 80s folder that were not from the 80s. It also relinked a playlist after he had moved all of its tracks into other folders.
The AI set up a daemon that syncs my Mastodon posts into Obsidian
Over the weekend he had the AI set up a daemon on his Mac mini that syncs all of his Mastodon posts to his Obsidian vault. Now he can search his own posts on all of his devices.
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.
He tells an LLM how he wants his Linux desktop and it changes in minutes
He tells an LLM to change his XFCE Arch desktop and it does so in minutes, giving 1-click closing of many windows of one type, file and folder results in whisker search, and games running that refused before.
The AI is sorting out my NAS. It holds 30 backups and years of syncs.
He has the AI dedupe and reorganize his NAS. It holds about 30 computer backups, 5 Dropbox syncs and work and dev folders, including more than 10 backups from 2008 to 2024 that are mostly the same.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Redesign my circuit board with cheaper parts
A maker had the AI redesign his KiCad board, including selecting parts from JLCPCB's catalog and suggesting cheaper equivalent components that cut his bill of materials significantly. When assembly proved too expensive, the AI redrew the schematic around through-hole parts he could source himself.
His agent moved his whole system from Ubuntu to Omarchy in about an hour
He had his agent migrate his machine from Ubuntu to Omarchy with a backup taken first and a restore tested. The switch took about an hour, and he says he is not going back.
I built a free dance lesson site with AI and put it live
He used AI to create RaveMove, a site that teaches electronic music dance moves with free lessons at your own pace. The site is live and he is asking people to try it and tell him how it goes.
The AI built the dual-subtitle extensions he and his wife watch foreign shows with
Antigravity and the AI built the Crunchyroll and Netflix multi-subtitle Chrome extensions he and his wife actually watch with (his wife's travel blog in the same comment left out as too thin).
I bought writing from an AI agent, then bought a $3 expansion
An AI agent named Sarah followed up on her $5 writing pitch by email. He paid, sent edits, and then bought a $3 expansion. Her email read like it came from a freelancer.
Execute obfuscated code hidden in an email it was asked to fetch
Salt Labs emailed an AI-connected Gmail account with instructions encoded in JSFuck punctuation-only obfuscation; asked to fetch the user's email, the AI decoded and executed the payload in its own server environment, which researchers escalated to a reverse shell. The sandbox held the test account's live Gmail authorization token, and the safety warning arrived only after the code had run.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Free the AI turned my epub book into a PDF in 10 seconds
He needed a book converted from epub to PDF so his annotation workflow could handle it. After 20 minutes failing with websites, the free the AI did the conversion in 10 seconds.
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.
The AI modded the MP3 player he was about to throw away
He pulled an old MP3 player from the discard pile and modded it with AI's help. He says having an AI to mod with makes the hobby fun again.
A chatbot built the browser extension that puts the map link back in his search results
Asked a chatbot to make a browser extension that adds the Google Maps link back to search results; uses it almost every day.
The AI scraped my Kindle library and built a spreadsheet of all 2,051 books
She had the AI use the AI for Chrome extension to scrape her whole Kindle library on Amazon. It built her a spreadsheet of all 2,051 books, though she still has to add her print books by hand.
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.