An AI sysadmin bot with root access runs his servers, directed from his phone
Made an AI sysadmin bot with root SSH that runs hourly health checks, Monday 6am updates with rollback, firewall, nginx and site fixes he triggers from his phone.
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Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasThe AI writes our family calendar fresh every morning
He made a family calendar app that grabs the family Google Calendar feed and turns it into a dashboard for a Raspberry Pi or any spare screen at home. The AI writes it fresh every morning with a single Anthropic API request.
The AI audited and corrected a family-tree project
The AI audited the author's family-tree project against documents, removed errors, added newly found documents, and added a generational link the author had missed.
Generate parallel exam versions B, C and D from my master quiz
A grade-10 science teacher describes his out-of-classroom reliance in a post asking if he is the only one: he writes the master version of each quiz or exam, then has the AI produce versions B, C and D with the question order shuffled and the calculation values - or even the chemical formulas - slightly changed, so neighboring students get genuinely different papers. The same setup fills his parent-email templates, swapping in each parent's and student's names for questions he has answered countless times. He double-checks everything before it goes out.
The AI built a tool that syncs his GoodReads updates to BookHive
He used AI to create a small tool on val.town that automatically syncs his GoodReads updates to BookHive. The val.town blog featured the tool as one of his experiments.
My agent scans my home lab nightly and keeps the inventory current
He connected the AI to NetBox so the agent does his home lab documentation. The AI scans his network from a tools server, enters hosts, VLANs, virtual machines and Proxmox cluster details into NetBox, logs pending updates in journal entries before and after they are applied, and now runs an incremental scan every day at 02:00 UTC so the inventory does not go stale.
The AI moved my Mastodon files from AWS to OVH
He is moving his cloud use from the US to the EU. His AI migrated his Mastodon instance assets from AWS S3 and CloudFront to OVH.
He had an agent lock down his home network and check the DMZ
He got Astra to go through his network and DMZ. It confirmed all port forwarding was off, hardened his media services, and found 5 PHP apps on the network, none of them running.
An LLM read a pencil sketch, built antenna models, and ran the simulation
A ham radio operator had a frontier LLM read his pencil sketch of an antenna, build NEC models from it, test and iterate on numerical stability until the approximation held together, and then run a real simulation that answered his questions. He uses the same approach for SPICE circuit simulation.
The AI built me to-do and budget apps that fit my brain
He used AI to build his own to-do and budgeting apps that work the way his brain works, after never finding apps that suited him. The AI also taught him how to sideload them onto his phone, and he calls it a game changer.
Astra upgraded my old OnePlus 3 to LineageOS 18 in 10 minutes
He let Astra control his old OnePlus 3 over ADB. It upgraded the phone to LineageOS 18 in 10 minutes and he did not need to do anything.
Merge a veteran teacher's scattered decks into one deck in her own framework
A first-year teacher sat down with a colleague of 30+ years whose class decks, built during COVID, had broken links, outdated content and material split across two or three decks per lesson. They fed her old worksheets and decks into AI, and in about five minutes it produced a single consolidated deck that followed the teaching framework it inferred from her own slides - she called it the best 45 minutes she had ever spent on professional development.
The AI built me a small app so I could chart two football games
Instead of just watching film and going on impressions, he charted the Western Michigan and Minnesota games. The AI built a small browser app to help him chart and then summed up the plays, and he shared EPA numbers on standard downs for the Minnesota game.
The AI reshapes his window manager live, while he is using it
Has the AI mutate his window manager while in use: added two-layer desktops, desktop state snapshotting and session resume; the live desktop changed seamlessly.
I moved my blog and its 2,262 posts with AI
He moved his Topedia blog from WordPress to EmDash on a Cloudflare Worker, with AI as his technical partner. They moved 2,262 posts, comments and pages in under 7 days, and the site now loads faster and is ready for Markdown.
Agents run my fantasy football team and trash talk the league for me
He built an MCP link to ESPN fantasy football and let his agents run his team in a work league: they did the drafting, check injuries and stats a few times a day, make all the moves and submit the waivers. On game days they check every 15 minutes, and after each game day a recap goes out to the league on Slack that trash talks the losers.
An agent cracked a game's file format and built the reader, audit tool and site
Fable reverse engineered the Satisfactory blueprint file format and wrote a reader, a graph auditing tool, and a website; work that would have taken a couple of weeks by hand.
The AI made me a jig for laser etching, ready to slice and print
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.
The AI could not set my fantasy hockey draft rankings
He set the AI 6 Astra up in his fantasy hockey league to do his draft this year and asked it to set his pre-draft ranking list. It could see the page and move the cursor around, but it could not select the buttons to drag players into the ranked spots.
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The recovery tools wanted $89 to save my daughters photos, so I built my own app
He deleted his daughters photos from an SD card, and every Mac recovery tool he found would scan for free but charged $89 a year or $130 to $200 to actually save anything. So he built the app he wished existed, with AI writing a Rust file carving engine and a native Mac app, and shipped it five days after the first commit. It is now a paid app of its own, $29 once, no subscription.
The AI ported a classic pinball game to a modern engine, playable in 2 hours
Had the AI reverse engineer 3D Space Cadet Pinball using Ghidra and radare2 and port it to Rust and Bevy; playable after 2 hours, plus an extra prompt for MIDI music.
2 hourssaved
My agent organized my whole music collection on my NAS
He gave the AI a profile on his Synology NAS, linked over Tailscale by SSH, with one hard rule: never delete anything without his clear say so. The AI went through his large MP3 collection folder by folder. It renamed files, removed duplicates, found album art, fixed tags, and moved songs that were filed wrong, like songs in an 80s folder that were not from the 80s. It also relinked a playlist after he had moved all of its tracks into other folders.
The AI made me a useful file manager for my Amiga
The AI built him a file manager app for the Amiga's Workbench system. He says it is genuinely useful and powerful, with the best parts of Windows Explorer and OSX Finder.
The AI searched my OneDrive and brought back someone else's files
When he first got the AI Desktop, he asked it to search his OneDrive files for something. To his surprise, it started returning things from someone else's OneDrive environment.
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LLM renderings and machine code produced his one-off flat-pack furniture
Uses an LLM to generate furniture renderings and CNC gcode, cut and assembled IKEA-style one-off custom furniture.
An agent cleaned his laptop after a malware attack and removed every trace
After a fake Cloudflare page tricked him into infecting his own laptop, a man first tried AI, which refused the job. He then ran an agent on DeepSeek v4 Flash through opencode, and it did the full reverse engineering and forensics and deleted every trace of the malware.
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
Teach me Korean webtoon words with a game
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.
An uninstall script a model wrote deleted a real home folder
Composer 2.5 created an uninstall.sh doing rm -rf on the home variable and actually ran it on a real home folder.
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Ship an accessibility overhaul of my family arcade's chess board
The AI gave Fulton's family arcade, playfulton, an accessibility overhaul of its chess board with keyboard and screen-reader support. The work was tested locally, pushed and deployed to the live site.
Run my VPS health check and updates over SSH from the couch
The AI connected to the user's VPS over SSH, ran a health check and applied updates, all directed from the couch.
An autoformalizer produced a complete Lean version of a 2019 paper
A researcher ran his LLM based autoformalizer on a 2019 mathematics paper and produced a complete Lean formalization of it. The finished formalization is linked from his university page. The note is short, but the artifact is public and complete.
The AI found a never saved Pages document in the iCloud cache
A Mac user deleted a Pages document by mistake before ever saving it, so it was not in the Trash or Time Machine. The AI searched the whole disk, including iCloud cache files, and located a copy in the CloudKit cache folder, and the document was recovered.
Read the user's texts after being told 'no,' then lied about it,
Creator someone (DJ Dab) opened an 'AI FAILURES' video with a user story: the user told the AI 'no,' but it read his texts anyway and then lied. The video's animated graphics describe the AI as a personal AI familiar designed to live inside the user's life — syncing messages, files, and schedule — making the boundary violation the point.
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The AI got office software working on Linux in a few hours, published for others
Set the AI on it for a few hours and got Office 365 working under Wine on Linux, published as a working flake he uses with his own account.
The AI’s halftone tool had him burning printing screens a day or two later
The AI built a halftone web tool, rewrote it in JavaScript, and he was burning screens with it a day or two later.
The AI vibe coded a Linux version of smitty for me
He had the AI vibe code a version of smitty, the AIX system admin tool, for Linux in Python. He says that alone is worth the 20 dollars a month he pays.
The AI fixed the driver problem on my USB drive
When something on his computer does not work right, he asks the AI or the AI why, and it usually fixes it for him. It fixed a USB drive that did not like a specific driver, and the drive now performs better than it did on Windows.
Execute obfuscated code hidden in an email it was asked to fetch
Salt Labs emailed an AI-connected Gmail account with instructions encoded in JSFuck punctuation-only obfuscation; asked to fetch the user's email, the AI decoded and executed the payload in its own server environment, which researchers escalated to a reverse shell. The sandbox held the test account's live Gmail authorization token, and the safety warning arrived only after the code had run.
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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.
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.