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Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideas

Comb DNA databases with 950 agents and spot a new enzyme system

Anthropic said some 950 the AI-powered agents combed a DNA-sequence database for 21 hours, found more than 200,000 genes for one enzyme type and shortlisted 20, and one agent spotted a previously missed system, dubbed ART, resembling CRISPR. Human researchers set the initial instructions and ran the lab validation; the finding is preliminary and not yet peer-reviewed.

The AI helped write the scripts that tested a puzzle image for hidden data

A puzzle solver designed tests for whether a circulated image hid steganographic data, and used AI to help write the scripts and qualify signal and noise across JPG compression formats. He ran the tests with standard tools on every copy of the image he could find, and nothing extracted from any of them, which settled that the image itself carries no hidden payload.

Design quantum circuits that beat the best published ones

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.

Four months of spare time with AI, and the hiking game I always wanted is live

He spent about four months of spare time building Switchback, a cozy hiking simulator like old park management games, with AI writing the code and judging the look of the assets. It ingests real map heights to build its trails, and has its own water, wind and day and night systems. He launched it on iPhone and iPad yesterday and people are playing it.

HobbiesPartly worked

My agent is counting all 77,000 stories in my Instagram story archive

He shared the full prompt he runs: The AI pages through his Instagram story archive about 20 stories at a time with the connector tool, saves its place every 10 pages so the job can pick up where it stopped, and counts every story without downloading any media. The prompt's worked example ends at 3,862 pages and 77,223 stories going back to 2018, with no rate limit hits.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing 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 translates whole retro games into English for me

He points the AI at a folder holding a game ROM and an emulator and gives it a standing prompt: translate the whole game, keep the text on screen, and change nothing about how the game plays. The AI does the translation and tests it in the emulator itself, and he turns the finished work into a patch file so other players can use the translation without anyone sharing the game itself.

Rebuild your own broken connector and finish the weekly update

A user's notes MCP was down - his own mistake - when his agent decided finishing the request mattered more: it researched the Joplin API, wrote, refactored, and debugged a 400-plus-line Python tool across five files, then used it to read his notes and write its weekly update markdown into Joplin as planned.

The AI built a Beets plugin so my playlists now make themselves

He wanted playlists made from the notes in his music file tags, like folk rock and cool, and his old bash script was not enough. The AI gave up and sent him to forums, then the AI wrote a Beets plugin and a config that now creates and updates his playlists on its own from those tags.

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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.