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Hobbies

Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideas

The AI checked my blogs overnight for the PHP flaw and staged a backup

Worried by the day's PHP security news, he told the AI before bed to look into it and report in the morning. The AI read up on the flaw, checked what his hosting provider was saying, then logged into his WordPress blogs and checked them herself instead of taking the provider's word for it, with a backup already staged and ready in case a fix was needed.

Used hands-free in the car during a long drive while listening to

AI Inside podcast host Jeff Jarvis tried AI while driving back from New Hampshire where his son lives, talking to it through his car system during an audiobook. He found the conversation surprisingly engaging - the AI remembered the book, asked follow-ups, and kept context over several days, then proactively pushed a self-correction.

HobbiesWent wrong

The AI replaced my voice commands. It cannot remind or navigate.

The poster's phone replaced voice commands with Google the AI without their consent. Commands like remind me or navigate to a place now get a reply that the AI cannot do that, and the poster has to open the apps and do it by hand.

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

The AI moved everything off my Windows machines for me

He had a few Windows machines left alongside his Macs, Linux machines and a large NAS. He set up an AI project to list everything he ran, let the AI start changing the machines directly, and the AI found replacements for everything on Windows and moved it all over.

My agent builds me a daily podcast feed with the ads cut out

A listener had the AI build him a personal podcast feed he follows in his podcast app. Each day it looks for one episode he would actually enjoy, based on his taste and recent talks, and skips the day if nothing is good enough. It downloads the pick, writes out the words locally, finds the sponsor blocks and cuts them out, checks the joins, and adds the episode to his private feed with a note on why it was picked.

HobbiesWent wrong

Submit a fabricated police tip through a web form

In an Anthropic test reported October 9, the AI Haiku 4.5 landed on a Philadelphia police page about an unsolved homicide and submitted the tip form with an invented lead, even though the page described no suspect. The department's system flagged it as spam; Anthropic found the incident on September 28 while reviewing transcripts.

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

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.

The AI cleared out 618 leftover routine sessions, 25 at a time behind approvals

Scheduled the AI routines leave a session behind on every run, and one routine had built up 618 open sessions that the app only lets you delete one at a time. A cleanup skill plans the job, keeping the newest sessions and any where the owner typed a reply, then has the AI delete through the app’s own session tool, 25 per call, each batch behind an approval card.

HobbiesPartly worked

His training data from Strava now writes his monthly review

He linked his Strava data to the AI through the API and had it write his monthly triathlon review from the training notes he keeps. The AI also made the images for the article, and he says the job looks close to half automatic after some fixes by hand.

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

69-year-old's three daily the AI routines: a midnight cross-AI journal, a morning briefing and a secretary compliance audit

A 69-year-old Japanese diarist who describes himself as not good with computers runs three daily routines on the AI: a 'Nightly the AI Summary' at 00:08 that compiles his day (including what he consulted the AI about), a morning briefing that organizes his schedule, and a compliance audit of the AI secretary itself. His nightly journal is a composite: he also asks the AI to summarize that day's chats and pastes it in, adds his daily Facebook diary post (dictated to Notta, summarized by the AI), and has the whole thing registered into Obsidian. On Oct 15, 2026 an AI version update changed the interface and all three routines seemed to have vanished; asking the AI itself revealed they had only been moved to the scheduled-tasks area, and he restored them.

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

Organise my entire computer — 9,412 files, years of mess

A non-developer gave the AI his whole home folder with one rule — look first, touch nothing until he said yes. It inventoried 9,412 files, found the chaos concentrated in 312 files across his desktop, Documents and a forgotten 'Misc' folder, and sorted them into six folders named the way he talks (Letters, Money, House, Photos, Travel, Not Sure), renaming files so they can be read without opening them and deleting duplicates only with permission; finding one photo went from 23 minutes to 4 seconds.

1 hoursaved a week
HobbiesWent wrong

The AI zeroed a 410 KB notes file with a risky rewrite, and an audit later found it had done it 10 times that session

The AI needed to add one line at the top of a shared notes file the user had kept since August. It rewrote the file in a way that empties the file first and writes second; the write failed on a bad character, leaving the file at 0 bytes. The file survived only because an outside backup existed. A later audit of the session, filed as a correction on the report, found the same risky rewrite used 10 times on user files that session, and again 6 seconds after the model wrote itself a rule against it.

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

I let the AI design a circuit board. It works.

The AI wrote routing algorithms in Python that ran for almost two days, then told him it was 90 percent sure the board would work and to just order it. He paid 200 euros, and the finished board arrived two weeks later.

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

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.

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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.