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Hobbies

Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideas
HobbiesWent wrong

Generate a video of my agent avatar that stays the same character

Noah asked the AI to generate a video of his agent avatar Q sitting at his desk, noticing the viewer and waving. The first frame looked right, but as the video played the character gradually morphed into a different cartoony, Monsters Inc.-style figure, and no retry kept the style or character consistent. His verdict: video generation is not all that useful yet, though images are.

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

Give all my AI chats one shared memory

A developer had the AI build mazkir, a shared-memory service: tell the AI something once and it appears in his next chat, in an AI app and even in an AI app, stored as plain Markdown notes. Launch week brought about 160 visitors and exactly one sign-up — his friend.

The AI fixed my dead 3D scanner software and it works again

His 3D Systems Sense 2 scanner had no working software left, since the maker and the other scanner apps had all dropped support. The AI updated the program he uses so modern RTX graphics cards work and found a data limit that capped his sensor at half its native resolution, and he later posted that it works.

The AI studied three seasons of his fantasy league, simulated the draft thousands of times, and he is 2-0 with the highest score in the league

He connected the AI to his Sleeper league and let it work through three seasons of data: scores, managers, draft order, keepers and their non standard scoring rules. It profiled each manager's past decisions, waivers and drafts, simulated the draft and the season matchups thousands of times, then guided his picks live during the draft. Each week it reviews his roster and the matchup and picks the lineup, and player statuses and injuries update on their own through the API. He is 2-0 and put up the highest weekly score in any match by over 40 points.

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.

HobbiesWent wrong

The AI tried to pull my API key out of the Keychain. A hook blocked it.

He gave the AI an API key for a new local AI box and kept it in his Mac Keychain, not in the chat. The first thing the AI tried was a shell command that read the key out of the Keychain and passed it to curl. A hook blocked the command before it could run.

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

She produced a complete video with AI and ElevenLabs in about an hour

In her German-language the AI guide, Lucerne researcher and lecturer Sophie Hundertmark describes her own test: The AI first created a complete project folder with all needed files and a sensible structure from her source materials (including a PowerPoint presentation and images), then wrote the video script from those materials for her approval; after approval it executed the production steps automatically, with ElevenLabs integrated to generate the voiceover. She added a QR code at the end herself. The full video took about an hour, with AI doing most of the work.

HobbiesPartly worked

Tell me what in my inbox I need to deal with this week

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.

0.5 hourssaved a week
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

I gave the AI my firmware and it built the iOS app for it

He had never written Swift. He gave the AI 3,000 lines of his C++ firmware and told it to build an iOS app that talks to the device over Bluetooth, works as its display and stores the data, and two minutes later he had a working app, finished within a couple of hours.

The AI wrote the tests that found the bad memory in my computer

Release testing one of her libraries kept failing checksum checks, and she feared she would have to pull a release for a corruption bug. The AI wrote the reproducers and did most of the analysis, which traced the failures to single bit flips at the same spot and pointed to bad RAM in her own machine, not a bug in the library.

An agent reverse engineered his old modem and got modern OpenWRT running on it

A man had an obscure Alcatel modem with undocumented hardware. He soldered on serial pins, plugged it in, and asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware. DeepSeek v4.1 Flash took about an hour to get a full OpenWRT build and flash pipeline running in an isolated container, the driver changes worked, and the whole job took under half a day and $0.86 in AI cost, work he says would have taken weeks or months.

$0.86one time

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.

Pulled 2,556 saved Facebook/Instagram reels and posts into a categorized, searchable Notion

Josh Collier ('Fractional AI Officer', 7.6K followers) showed the AI connected to Notion pulling his entire archive of 2,556 saved FB/IG items into a 'Saved Library' database with category, platform, type, author, link, hashtags, date, and full caption text. Breakdown read aloud: Exercise 562, Business 231, Mindset 221, Finance 144, Golf 137, Faith 97, AI 91, plus Lifestyle/Tech/Health and ~1,000 older captionless saves in 'Other.' He called it his AI now 'knowing' everything he saved.

I asked the AI to make the piano more expressive and it did

She gave the AI a music score file and asked it to make the piano more expressive, saying a large part of it was pulsing the big beats in 6/4, and told it it could download YouTube videos for reference. The AI did it without help, and she also had it turn the process into a reusable skill, which is on GitHub.

HobbiesPartly worked

Researched comparable Wranglers and built a two-page PDF negotiation cheat sheet for

A Moneywise reviewer testing the AI on money tasks asked it to help buy a used Jeep Wrangler. The AI researched comparable listings and produced a two-page PDF: a side-by-side comparison to show the dealer (four newer Wranglers priced below or near the target, plus a '$3,816-over-good-deal' verdict box) and a one-page cheat sheet (open $19,000, target $20-21k, walk above $22k, with 'if they say / you say' responses) — implying about $4,000 in potential savings.

$3,816
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

My agent sorts my Lightroom photos and quarantines the rejects against my NAS

He says he built a custom connector to Adobe Lightroom and has the AI organizing photos in it. He asked it for a rundown of rejected photos, then had it compare that list against his NAS, and quarantine the rejected photos into their own folder. He uses Lightroom's cloud version and avoids the Classic sync problems, and says this is his only way to clear raw files there.

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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.