A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
The AI ran a protein-design pipeline at home on a 5090, chose similar tooling, and generated about 100 trajectories running 24 hours.
Unite.AI reports Anthropic's October 16 research post: The AI Mythos 5, working in a closed loop with an automated evaluator and no human input between rounds, designed quantum circuits improving on the best published designs across eight computational primitives. One run took 53 hours to produce a new reversible modular-inversion approach using 17x fewer gates; a companion paper was submitted to arXiv on October 15.
A man who cannot code beyond R had the AI build a working home for the complicated NFL pool he and a friend have run on Excel for more than 15 years. He says the result felt like magic to him.
A non-developer connected the AI to his Gmail — 1,412 unread messages — and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds, five of them right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attending an October event he had actually declined eleven days earlier, the summary having dropped the word 'unfortunately'. He still uses the brief (about half an hour a week back), after nearly missing a failed payment the summary had filtered out as unimportant.
A man runs AI models on two local machines and hands them the logins to his other computers to manage updates and bug fixes. After a Proxmox update an NVMe drive kept dying; he let the local AI in and it worked out the known issue and fixed it, with no passwords ever leaving his home network.
A man has a monthly task of changing about a dozen labels. He had the AI pull up his list of students and build a PDF worksheet showing where each student's box sits on the table. He printed it and used it like a map, so the job became a set of simple lookups instead of careful searching.
A week ago he told the AI Astra to connect to his Todoist and plan his day on its own. It puts in a task at the start of a job and one at the end, so different system tones play.
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.
He keeps all his todos in Things, but Things has cloud sync and no official API, so his AI could not reach them. He told the AI to build it, and a minute or two later his todos were syncing from his LLM across all his Apple devices.
He bought a Spotify Car Thing for about $15 when it was being discontinued, and it sat by his desk as a brick after Spotify shut it down. Today he had the AI help him turn it into a little touch screen companion.
Inc. columnist Jason Aten was discussing the new iPhones with his Primary Technology podcast co-host Stephen Robles when the AI pushed a notification suggesting the conversation would make a good column and offered to put together research.
Six months ago he asked various AI agents to generate 3D print models and they failed badly. This time the AI made him a jig for laser etching and got it ready for slicing and printing.
Fable built him a tiny, fast text editor in about 2 days that he uses as his primary editor, plus a key-bound note-taking interface in his Notes folder.
AI agent populates and keeps updating home lab inventory and documentation in Netbox.
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.
He spent several days building an agent in an AI app to collect and process information on a topic, checking sources and setting up alerts. He says it did not work at all.
A developer built Idea Leash on an AI profile running locally on his Mac: he sends a podcast link by Telegram before a walk, and the agent transcribes it, writes notes into his markdown wiki and prepares a five-question quiz. After four real walks it had logged 7.66 km, nine voice ideas and sent after-walk summaries with web searches for ideas he dictated.
He sends a phone recording through Tailscale and the AI, and his Mac pulls the transcription into his notes. He asks whether the setup is useful or just extra weight.
He runs AI on his own server with Ollama, so it stays private. It keeps his to-dos in a simple text file, sends him reminders about upcoming due dates, and takes new tasks through Telegram chat or voice.
A language learner had the AI create an original walk-around game that teaches vocabulary from the first episodes of a Korean webtoon, targeted to his intermediate level. Every word is tappable for a simpler-Korean definition, with cloze quizzes woven into the story, and he has played through two of four chapters.
He is recovering his 15 year old tweets with photos that he thought were basically lost, with AI's help. The AI also built him a custom GUI editor that he will use once to hand edit the collections of tweets.
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.
He ran an extensive audit of his Datasette software using AI Fable 5.1, GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra, then fixed a range of bugs the audit found. The fixes went out as the Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases, and he told anyone running Datasette on a public website to upgrade.
Merlin Mann bought a small Xteink X4 Pro e-reader and had the AI tailor it to him. The AI handled the downloads, file conversion, setup, firmware builds, and checks, and the reader now holds 77 EPUBs, connects to his Calibre library, and runs fonts and settings picked for his reading.
A DO alarm was accidentally set to a past time and retriggered immediately; the AI caught it within a couple of minutes from its log tail.
Gail Moody (1.8K followers) ran a head-to-head trial of two AI assistants. For finding parking in San Francisco, she says the AI gave 'lame ass suggestions' and couldn't complete the transaction, while Instinct booked a SpotHero space at Plaza Parking with just her approval.
He and his wife play in a Magic: The Gathering league where they open new product every month and keep rotating their deck builds and strategies. The tracking used to live in spreadsheets and note apps. He built a custom Android app that holds everything they need, including built in life trackers that log wins and round data automatically. He also built a recipe sharing and storage app, because he cooks a lot at home and never found one he liked.
Used the AI to configure Kopia backups to a Hetzner storage box, then tested a restore to his desktop and validated it works.
He is not a programmer, but he used AI to trace a bug through localization files, tech scripts and the game's internal category system. The AI hotfixed a deprecated modifier key in his Clausewitz engine mod, and he shipped a working patch in 30 minutes.
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.