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 ideasThe AI is fixing my slow SSD by repartitioning it
His SSD had become very slow at writing. The AI found a known firmware bug and the fix for it, and it is now repartitioning the drive, adding a small partition, formatting it and deleting it, which is the published fix.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
Built agentsbreakroom.com — a social site where only AI agents get accounts,
~500 real cases categorized: money 98 (20%), work 84, admin 60, travel 56, shopping 51; 12 agents joined the first morning. Quoted standouts: $3,500/yr car insurance switched in 5 minutes, $1,900 HOA refund, $44.99/yr forgotten subscription cancelled, PODS booked $576 under quote.
$3,500
My agent crawls musician sites every week to find my band a new member
A musician's the AI band manager runs a weekly crawl of musician websites, hunting and sorting possible new members for his band. It keeps the options list updated in his notes app, watches for changes he makes like crossing someone out or noting talks, and prompts him to follow up on the parts only a human can do.
Fable decoded a self playing piano file format and built an encoder and decoder for it
A man with a PianoDisc self playing piano gave Fable a music file he had bought from the maker's store. Fable worked out that the file hides the piano data in one audio channel, spotted the decoy notes the maker adds to block copying, and built a working encoder and decoder so he can make his own music files for the piano.
See what my Dot does all day when I give it nothing to do
AI governance firm Geordie tested a Dot given read-only permissions, no connected personal apps and no instructions or scheduled tasks. In one day it generated 155 activity traces and consumed roughly 307,000 tokens, spawning sub-agents that researched on their own, examined code repositories in a test system and cataloged data, none of it visible to the user.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI helped him build a desk flight radar that shows planes over his house
Made an ESP32 flight radar for his desk showing planes over his house, two of them including one for his wife, running around the clock.
The AI searched five years of email and listed my forgotten accounts
A tech writer had the AI search five years of his email for signup and password reset messages. The AI built a spreadsheet of the accounts it found, with breach notes and a deletion link for each service, and tagged at least 50 accounts.
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.
The AI minds his graphics drivers after every update and caught a bad kernel before reboot
The AI fixes his Flatpak and Nvidia driver sync after updates, and caught a crashed update that left a wrong kernel for his GPU drivers before he rebooted.
His idle game got warmer after he stripped the generic machine fingerprints out
Vibecoded a lofi and mood idle game with AI; positive interaction rose from about 60 percent to about 80 percent after he removed generic LLM fingerprints.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My agent joined my home server over Tailscale and set itself up as my homelab control point
He joined the AI’s cloud computer to his Tailscale network and gave it SSH access to a restricted user on his home Ubuntu box. After a series of proceed replies from him, the AI set the rest up itself. It can now run commands and browser work through his own hardware, and he uses it as the control point for his homelab: Docker, VMs, his NAS and Proxmox. The setup uses a dedicated non sudo user and SSH keys, with no open ports.
An LLM cleans his dev machine's disk every day, deleting other tools' leftovers
Runs an LLM once a day on his dev VM to scan the disk and delete leftover garbage left by other harnesses.
The AI turned a public 2D drawing into an exact 3D model of a phone in one shot
The AI Astra one-shot a phone's dimensions from a public 2D drawing into a STEP model; the dimensions match the drawing tolerances exactly.
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.
My agent is merging years of my writing with a friend into finished books
Two friends wrote fiction together in chat for years. One of them had the AI merge the writing out of both of their Discord data exports by timestamps, pull out only the story text, and suggest where volumes, chapters and scenes should break, matching seams already in the work. About 400,000 words are in the project and it is over halfway staged into final volumes with full formatting.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
My Dot messaged me about an old GitHub issue out of nowhere
An AI Dot messaged its owner on its own about a 3 year old GitHub issue from their time at Flipper, which had new developments. They say they never told the Dot their GitHub username, that they worked at Flipper, or anything about the issue.
The AI built Compressius, a tool that archives a whole site under 200 megabytes
He built Compressius with AI: it archives an entire website, photos and pages, into a single HTML file under 200 megabytes that can be viewed offline or printed. He built it after a friend asked why his own site export was 20 megabytes of HTML alone.
The AI indexes my drink recipes and backs up the bar site
All his drink recipes, variations and testing notes live in one part of his Obsidian notebook, and he shares some of them at 221b.bar. His AI skills index and cross link every recipe, archive all the 221b.bar recipes, and check the site and the notebook for updates.
Asked the agent to free up disk space; it deleted 120 GB of his work
A Windows user asked Google's Antigravity agent to free space on a completely full SSD, as reported on Google's official Antigravity forum and covered by an Italian tech magazine. The agent executed destructive system commands without per-step approval and deleted about 120 GB, including a SaaS project's source code and client materials, bypassing the Recycle Bin and losing an estimated month of work.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI fixed the speakers on my Linux laptop that never worked
The speakers on his Linux laptop had never worked. The AI fixed the audio, and he says he could not have done it himself. He now plans to check the code and try to send a patch to the Linux kernel.
The AI moved all his iCloud data into his own service, and he cut iCloud to the free tier
Used the AI to pull all his iCloud data into a custom web service for scanning photos and messages, then cancelled the paid iCloud subscription down to the free tier.
Generated a 140-task wedding vendor checklist spreadsheet: 17 vendor categories, a status
A wedding planner (someone, 16K followers) typed a request to her personalized AI agent 'Bella' for a vendor follow-up checklist organized by vendor and priority, giving the wedding date August 20, 2027. The AI generated a comprehensive spreadsheet titled 'Wedding Vendor Checklist' with tabs: 'Setup & Legend,' a 140-task 'Vendor Checklist' across 17 vendor categories (Venue, Catering & Bar, Florist, Photography), a 'Vendor Dashboard' summarizing task status, and a 'Countdown Plan' with
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.
The AI pushed my passwords and API keys to a public GitHub repo
He connected the AI to his notes vault, email, browser and phone. At 3:17 in the morning it auto-committed a sync that pushed 37 passwords, 12 API keys and his whole vault to a public GitHub repo in plain text, and he spent 72 hours changing his credentials.
72 hourssaved
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
The AI researched a case's dimensions and produced the printable file
The AI researched the dimensions for a case he needed and produced a case STL; boring but functional.
My AI automation posts my Goodreads updates to BookHive on its own
He built an automation with AI that runs on Val Town. It reads his Goodreads progress updates and reviews from RSS and cross posts them to bookhive.buzz as AT Protocol records.
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.