Built 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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasThe 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 setup for my three new CI servers
Since the end of August he has added three new CI servers to his own setup. The AI wrote each NixOS setup and he checked the work, so now he can rebuild any of the servers from scratch in minutes.
He built a new programming language for a 6502 machine with AI
He built Tantal, a small compiled language for the MOS 6502, designed around the real limits of his PAL-2 computer: predictable code, direct memory-mapped input and output, and no stack based parameters. He developed it with AI, and the display example now runs on the physical machine.
A semester of lectures turned into an hour long animated recap video
He downloads all his lecture slides and feeds them into NotebookLM for an audio overview. A pipeline then transcribes the audio, has the AI write a timed spec, uses AI Design for the animations and the AI for the filler content, then renders and stitches everything into an hour long recap of the whole semester.
The AI added meaning-based search to his personal archive search, in daily use
The AI vibe-coded a RAG and semantic search augmentation to his full-text SQLite search, now in use on a corpus of under 2 million rows.
Turn off all 77 of my LinkedIn notification toggles
Tired of LinkedIn's email notifications - each of the 77 toggles on its own page - a user let an agent flip every one off. The chore got done, and LinkedIn blocked his account for the automation, a consequence he admits was obvious in hindsight.
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Every star, like and bookmark I save now lands in my notes
His reading was scattered across Readwise, Karakeep, GitHub stars and YouTube likes, away from his notes. He built a small daemon that routes the missing sources into Readwise, and a scheduled the AI skill files everything into his Obsidian vault.
Turned a 20-year-old blog into a daily podcast
Cornell's third live demo on How I AI: The AI converted his 20-year-old blog into a daily podcast, an archive-repurposing use case for a long-running content creator.
The AI runs my Bluesky queue in Postiz. I approve every draft.
He plans his Bluesky posts in a self-hosted Postiz and has connected it to the AI through MCP. He can ask the AI to list the queue and add new drafts, and he approves the drafts himself.
Share one memory across the AI, the AI and Cursor
A developer built a memory-provider plugin that gives the AI, the AI and Cursor one shared knowledge base, searchable with hybrid keyword, vector and knowledge-graph retrieval. The person's coding agent and messaging agent now draw on the same memory.
An agent designed his circuit board, and the board from China works, mistakes and all
Agent in an AI app designed a circuit board, benchmarked KiCad autoroute tools, board ordered from China and works, with fixable mistakes.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI runs my server, so I stopped paying for easy hosting
The AI told him swap memory on his server was high, found the cause, and had the fix ready for him to approve. The AI or the AI now connects to the box, upgrades services, and sorts out problems, so his site and newsletter run on a bare DigitalOcean droplet instead of a pricier platform that makes hosting easy.
The AI did almost all of a full Lean proof version of a research paper in 3 to 4 weeks
A man learning language design spent 3 to 4 weeks with AI doing a full mechanization in Lean of the paper From Linearity to Borrowing. The work covers nearly every definition and lemma in the paper, including the Fundamental Property and Adequacy results.
I made my own Tesla radio app with AI because I hated TuneIn
He likes listening to online radio in the car but does not like the TuneIn app in his Tesla, so he built his own radio app with AI. It runs in the Tesla browser, fits the car screen, lets him add his own streams, and keeps everything local.
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.
Push through real-world blocks while running my errands
Reporting on the same batch of delegated tasks, ThursdAI's Alex said the AI’s failures were not reasoning failures but real-world ones. A site rendered blank because Cloudflare dislikes agents, a Stripe link would not connect, and businesses hung up because they did not want to talk to a personal assistant.
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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 turned my music listening history into a scrolling story
He tried many ways to show how certain artists became his favorites and how some faded out of his rotation. With the AI he ended up with a scrollable Sankey story of his listening, published on his dashboards site.
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.
He controls his Mac from his iPad with an app the AI built
He had the AI make an app that controls his Mac fully from his iPad. It took two sentences and two follow up prompts, under two hours of work, and the app even built its own recorder to check its streaming sessions.
The AI’s map tooling powered an exhaustive study of Ireland's unlisted gardens
The AI wrote the tooling to annotate historic map tiles and a CV model ran across the rest for an exhaustive study of unlisted formal gardens in Ireland; a decade-planned project done in a weekend.
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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
New-dad assistant 'Atlas': planned 4-day workouts synced to calendar, found and ordered
New dad Crawford Collins (verified, 1.1M) personalized his agent as 'Atlas'. Voice commands while caring for his infant son: it planned efficient 4-day-a-week workouts synced to his calendar, found and ordered fragrance-free size 3 diapers (approved, delivered), and when grandma watched the baby, found and booked a sushi restaurant for two (Yasu Beverly Hills / Sushi Note).
The AI captions my video the same way as the last one
He asks the AI Agent to caption a video in Palmier Pro the same way as the previous one, and it does it from what it remembers. If there is no voice transcript, it writes code to make the captions happen.
His book reviews now copy themselves from Goodreads to BookHive
He set up an auto-sync of his Goodreads updates to BookHive with help from the AI and val.town, so both places now hold the same content, including his new review of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Flag things I would want to know and brief me before them
Fulton's the AI flagged an Economist interview with Andrew Ng that matched his interests, wrote him a primer before it started, and placed it on both his personal and work calendars. He had not asked it to connect those dots.
I shipped 43 Chrome extensions by telling the AI what to do in Japanese
He does not write code himself. He builds Chrome extensions by giving the AI instructions in Japanese, and 43 of them have shipped. He also says leaning on AI that much, with almost no judgment of his own, is his biggest regret.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I asked the AI to make the piano more expressive and it did
She gave the AI a music score file and asked it to make the piano more expressive, saying a large part of it was pulsing the big beats in 6/4, and told it it could download YouTube videos for reference. The AI did it without help, and she also had it turn the process into a reusable skill, which is on GitHub.
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.