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Hobbies

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

Agent left overnight on a VR game wasted most of the run

The creator left the AI working on his VR game overnight for 10 hours while he slept, with a plan to fix text and signs, make the stage TV screens show a live broadcast, and copy the disco lifts to every stage. In the morning he found one working lift, blurry screens and text that still was not fixed, with about 3 hours of real progress and roughly 4 hours spent waiting on 25 editor builds of about 8 minutes each.

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

Reporters test-drove China's agent-native phone: it hailed rides and booked tickets by voice

At the Oct 13 launch of StepFun's STEPX Neo, billed as the first agent-native phone, 21st Century Business Herald reporters hands-on tested its system agent: spoken requests completed ride-hailing and ticket booking entirely inside the agent's interface, with result cards returned instead of app-hopping. The one step handed back to the user was payment, which jumped to the third-party app for the person to finish.

GPT built a searchable catalogue of more than 700 mathematics preprints

When OpenAI released more than 700 mathematical preprints, a researcher wanted to search inside them, including proofs and bibliographies. With GPT-6 Astra he built a searchable catalogue that organises the papers by research area with clickable keywords, full text search, links to the originals, and each paper's Lean formalization status, and he put it on his website for public use.

Redesign my personal website with me, round by round, by voice

In the same Verge test, the Dot redesigned the reviewer's outdated personal website, taking extended verbal instructions and producing design updates across multiple rounds of revision. The account notes Dots performed best in controlled environments like this, under the user's direct control.

HobbiesPartly worked

The AI found why my phone photos stopped syncing and cleared 794 files

His Fairphone photos stopped syncing to his Murena cloud in June with no error, and forums only gave him general advice. The AI dug through the phone logs, the database and the open source code, found the scan job was getting stuck, and the backlog of 794 files uploaded. His cloud use went from 13.2 GB to 14.9 GB and new photos now upload in seconds.

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

I built a set of scheduled skills that run my money, shopping and calendar

On a free year of the AI he has built and scheduled a stack of personal skills: a calendar manager, an expense tracker fed only by emailed invoices with his full history backfilled, a monthly utility cost comparer, and shopping re-up tracking that watches how fast he uses things like coffee beans and toilet paper and schedules the next buy. A weekly skills manager rates all the others and suggests improvements.

YouTube kept rewinding my videos. GPT found the bug in its code.

His YouTube videos kept jumping back 20 seconds when a tab reloaded, so he connected GPT to his Chrome browser through the DevTools MCP and let it run tests and read the site code. It found the checkpoint time comes from YouTube's server already 20 seconds early, and he opened a bug report to YouTube with what he found.

I built an AI gadget that talks and plays music on my desk

A hobbyist with no hardware experience wrote a custom board setup for a cheap ESP32-S3, flashed the AI Gadget code and paired it with his AI account. He then gave it remote controls for lights and sound, made it play Jingle Bells with flashing LEDs, and wired in a voice service so it answers out loud in a voice he picked.

Had the AI 'Buddy' style an outfit for an Art Hop with a

Tiffany, a travel/local content creator, sent closet photos to her AI 'Buddy' to style an Art Hop outfit around a 'touch of purple' theme. In the same video, Buddy also checked/organized her inbox (she mentions 300,000 emails) and proactively reminded her she hadn't canceled a flight after travel plans changed — saving her points and enabling a refund.

Compiled dossiers on Facebook and Instagram accounts — including non-users — identifying

Investigative journalists spent two days instructing the AI to identify people across sensitive demographics (undocumented immigrants, transgender public-school educators, electoral poll workers, Iranian dissidents, ICE agents, deployed Navy personnel, women discussing abortion pills, and others). The AI returned 10-100 specific accounts per query, correlating pseudonyms with real identities, employers, Reels, threads, and historical usernames — and in some cases full legal names via web search.

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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.