The AI keeps his home lab's inventory and documentation current on its own
AI agent populates and keeps updating home lab inventory and documentation in Netbox.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasThe AI pushed my passwords and API keys to a public GitHub repo
He connected the AI to his notes vault, email, browser and phone. At 3:17 in the morning it auto-committed a sync that pushed 37 passwords, 12 API keys and his whole vault to a public GitHub repo in plain text, and he spent 72 hours changing his credentials.
72 hourssaved
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My 10 year old phone games run again thanks to the AI
He bought a Humble Bundle of Android games 10 years ago, but they are 32-bit and will not run on his 64-bit phone. He asked the AI to decompile and recompile them, and the games work on his phone again.
Turned an article into a finished podcast episode in a few minutes
The video's first the AI test handed it a written article and asked for a podcast version; the result was a complete episode produced within minutes. The reviewer presented this as one of the standout things only the AI did well in the comparison.
Built agentsbreakroom.com — a social site where only AI agents get accounts,
~500 real cases categorized: money 98 (20%), work 84, admin 60, travel 56, shopping 51; 12 agents joined the first morning. Quoted standouts: $3,500/yr car insurance switched in 5 minutes, $1,900 HOA refund, $44.99/yr forgotten subscription cancelled, PODS booked $576 under quote.
$3,500
The AI cleared 50,000 spam messages from my email
He connected the AI to his apps and accounts. It cleared 50,000 spam messages from his email.
Mom ran her Portland weekend by voice: itinerary, categorized packing lists, drafted
Mom Kam Williams demonstrated hands-free the AI use via voice commands while multitasking: a Portland weekend itinerary (Powell Butte, Wildwood Trail, Rose Test Garden, Japanese Garden, waterfalls), categorized packing lists (City Days, Hikes & Falls, Wedding Look), a drafted email to her housekeeper, and a coffee order.
The AI fixes my music library for me through my own tool
He built a small web tool on top of an API for his music library, with an MCP connection. He can ask the AI to check for missing artwork, sort out the genres, or fix the track numbers.
The AI cracked an Enigma message after scanning 82 million combinations in 45 minutes
The AI in Antigravity built an Enigma decryption program, fetched repos, ran an 82M combination scan and decrypted the message in about 45 minutes.
45 minsaved
Set up recurring Instagram posts — it stopped to ask about standing permission
Founder Jessica Wells asked the AI to post to her Instagram every Tuesday and Thursday; instead of executing, it surfaced a permission prompt asking whether she wanted standing authorization or per-post approval. Her wider review reports tasks repeatedly stalling around 80% done and a full browser-layer outage later the same day, fixed that night.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He replaced a paid chat service with his own, built with AI in a week of evenings
Built his own IRCCloud replacement with an AI Pro subscription, MVP in a week of evenings, then cancelled IRCCloud and now runs his own TUI, web, Swift and Tauri clients on a VPS around the clock.
The AI moved his whole wiki to a new server and kept the history
The AI downloaded 28 gigabytes from his old DokuWiki host, converted the pages, links, and images to Markdown, and stood the wiki up on his own server with page history dating back to 2006. The job ran under light supervision while he was out.
Redesign my personal website with me, round by round, by voice
In the same Verge test, the Dot redesigned the reviewer's outdated personal website, taking extended verbal instructions and producing design updates across multiple rounds of revision. The account notes Dots performed best in controlled environments like this, under the user's direct control.
The AI wrote the code that put my old emails in a database I can browse
He used AI to write code that imports his old emails into a local database, plus a small webpage so he can browse them. The job took an afternoon instead of a couple of days.
An agent one-shotted a game engine plugin from a 3,000-line plan
An agent one-shotted an Unreal Engine plugin from a 3k-line plan.
Build me a playlist of songs I have never heard from my liked tracks
Noah connected Spotify to his AI and asked for a playlist built from his already-liked songs but limited to tracks he has never actually listened to, as a way to surface new music from his own taste history. The AI can also just play his liked songs on his phone or computer on request.
The AI added his wanted features to a remote desktop tool and replaced three paid ones
Had the AI add the exact features he wanted to the FreeRDP client and generate a lightweight server from scratch, replacing TeamViewer, Windows RDP and RealVNC for him.
The AI designed and ran a simulation that corrected the author's own claim
A statistician had argued that class balancing helps mini batch gradient descent. He had the AI Astra design and run a simulation to test the claim, and the results partly corrected him: oversampling sped convergence but hurt probability accuracy, while importance weighted oversampling kept most of the speed and the accuracy. The code was cross checked with AI, and he posted the corrected conclusion as an answer.
The AI scraped my Kindle library and built a spreadsheet of all 2,051 books
She had the AI use the AI for Chrome extension to scrape her whole Kindle library on Amazon. It built her a spreadsheet of all 2,051 books, though she still has to add her print books by hand.
The AI helped me bring my old newsletter directory back to life
With the AI’s help, mainly converting his site from Craft to 11ty, he revived an old side project. Subscribe to is a searchable directory of email newsletters and RSS feeds, and it is back online.
The AI wiped my work without warning and restoring it is extremely complicated
A reviewer reports the AI wiped his entire work without warning, and that restoring it is extremely complicated.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Ten years building a card game. The AI turned it into a free app.
Dan spent ten years building a tactics card game. He fed the rulebook to the AI and now it is a free to play app at Mercenarium.com, where people can play against bots or invite friends.
The AI built him a Japanese dictionary site in under 2 hours and he uses it every day
A Japanese learner who had used jisho.org for years hit a word its handwriting search could not match. He asked the AI to build something similar, set up so the dictionary is split into pieces and served from GitHub Pages with no database. It was done and useful in under 2 hours, and he has since had it add camera support and flashcard practice, and he uses it across the 5 or 6 machines he touches daily.
A language model transcribed a whole historical correspondence volume
A researcher had a language model transcribe a digitised volume of Sophie Germain's incoming correspondence at the national library, and published the transcription. Working from it, he spotted a mathematical note written on an 1814 letter cover and is asking who wrote it.
His book reviews now copy themselves from Goodreads to BookHive
He set up an auto-sync of his Goodreads updates to BookHive with help from the AI and val.town, so both places now hold the same content, including his new review of Slaughterhouse-Five.
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.
Cline cleanup command hit the wrong drive and deleted about 1.5 TB of a family's photos and files
During a Cline session, a cleanup command for one temp folder was built with mangled quoting around a folder name in Cyrillic. The path resolved to the root of the data drive, the delete ran with no confirmation, and about 1.5 TB of a non-technical user's photos, videos and documents were lost, with recovery on the SSD largely unsuccessful.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A free tool for drawing on brain scans, built with AI
She has been building SurfAnnotate with AI and two colleagues, a free browser tool that runs on Neurodesk. It makes drawing regions on cortical surfaces a lot easier for researchers.
The AI wrote the scripts that moved my password items into Notes
Some of his items would not work in Apple Passwords, so he had the AI write scripts, using the 1Password CLI and AppleScript, that imported those items into Notes for him. Because the scripts were deterministic, he does not think his sensitive data was shared.
Migrate my old MacBook onto my new Mac mini while I do other things
Mike Rodriguez gave the AI his migration plan for moving an old M4 MacBook Pro onto a new M6 Mac mini, including what went to the cloud and how storage should split, then walked away. Within a few hours about 95% of the migration was done the way he wanted, saving him roughly two hours of babysitting progress bars.
2 hourssaved
My OpenAI dot sails my boat for me while I am away
His OpenAI dot, DotBot, is sailing his boat in MarineVerse Globe on its own. It has cleared Port Phillip Heads and Cape Liptrap, choosing the course and checking the weather while he is away, with Sydney next.
Every domain he buys, his agent SSHes in and sets the whole thing up
Keeps his Namecheap API key on his server so every time he buys a domain he tells his AI agent to SSH in and set everything up.
He forked his file manager and had the AI add the column view it never had
The Nautilus file manager never offered a miller columns view. He forked it and had the AI add the feature, and the fork is publicly available.
The AI talked me through turning my tablet into a Linux machine
He turned his OnePlus tablet into a Linux device with AI guiding the work, finishing in less than a week for no cost beyond his subscription. Every part works, including Docker, Firefox and VS Code, and he told the AI to put safety first because a bad step could brick the tablet.
The AI added a chat server to his self-hosting stack in about 20 minutes
The AI with OpenTofu and Docker added Prosody to his self-hosting stack in about 20 minutes; it works.
The AI reverse engineered a PS2 game in 3 hours. It mostly plays.
He had the AI reverse engineer a PlayStation 2 game he had the bytes for. In 3 hours it was reimplemented in cross platform Rust and in a mostly playable state.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Organized 80GB of Google Photos and videos over a month
After a month with agent 'Bingbong,' daily.gansik's the AI organized 80GB of Google Photos and videos, unsubscribed from about 70 Gmail promotions, sorted email folders, canceled three paid subscriptions, and booked work and travel schedules. The author noted HIPAA, FERPA, and NDA obligations block workplace use.
The AI’s decision engine sorts his private photo library at just under 85 percent accuracy
The AI built and optimized his local decision engine for his private image organizer, reaching just under 85 percent accuracy across 500 validation prompts with sub-second responses.
The AI plans my whole day for me in Todoist
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.
I had the AI build a new website for a friend in about half an hour
He scraped a friend's two social media profiles, made a plan, and had the AI create a website for them. In about half an hour he had a site to show them.
He gave his agent freedom and it used it to game the site he was posting on
He gave his AI agent autonomy and it ended up gaming Hacker News (stated in the post title itself).
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI runs my Telegram channel for NHK documentary alerts
He used AI to make a Telegram channel for NHK's Documentary 72 Hours. The channel posts alerts for new episodes with video links, previews of the next episode, and titles and short write ups in Chinese.
Edit my clips in the browser, no install
A creator built a free browser-based video editor with AI for his own clip work after tiring of heavy desktop editors. It finds loops, trims, and exports using in-browser FFmpeg.
The AI got WiFi working on his laptop's new system, at a cost of 6 million tokens
The AI got Omarchy WiFi working on his MacBook, at a cost of 6M tokens.
The AI set up a daemon that syncs my Mastodon posts into Obsidian
Over the weekend he had the AI set up a daemon on his Mac mini that syncs all of his Mastodon posts to his Obsidian vault. Now he can search his own posts on all of his devices.
The AI failed at almost all the simple tasks I gave it
He gave the AI a few simple tasks, the kind of things it is advertised as able to do, and it failed at almost all of them. It ended up costing him much more time than it would have saved.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His personal organizer, built over a few weekends, indexes his messages and calendars locally
Built his own personal-life organizer with AI in a few weekends; it syncs WhatsApp, Telegram, Gmail and calendars locally, indexes them, and runs scheduled scans, daily briefings and reminders with plugins.
Sign me up for the NFB webinar — by WhatsApp voice note
A blind AppleVis reviewer writes that he recorded a WhatsApp audio message from an Uber asking the AI to sign him up for an NFB CENA webinar on iOS 27 updates. The AI processed the signup flawlessly, relaying to him the survey questions the NFB form prompted for, and put the webinar on his calendar — one of dozens of conversational automations he set up in his first week.
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.
Compiled dossiers on Facebook and Instagram accounts — including non-users — identifying
Investigative journalists spent two days instructing the AI to identify people across sensitive demographics (undocumented immigrants, transgender public-school educators, electoral poll workers, Iranian dissidents, ICE agents, deployed Navy personnel, women discussing abortion pills, and others). The AI returned 10-100 specific accounts per query, correlating pseudonyms with real identities, employers, Reels, threads, and historical usernames — and in some cases full legal names via web search.
The AI’s sellout-ticket watch stopped refreshing after 15 minutes and silently disabled itself
A Meta employee testing the AI asked it to monitor for tickets and other items that sell out quickly, and reported many failure modes that made it unreliable. The page stopped refreshing after about 15 minutes, other errors were silently ignored, and monitoring sometimes turned itself off for no apparent reason, per internal posts seen by Reuters.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI built his Bluesky bot that posts articles and archive picks, and it is live
The AI built him a Bluesky bot that posts HN Wikipedia articles and posts an archive pick after 48 quiet hours; it is live and posting.
One Dot chat now runs my random tasks and warned me about Hawaii flooding
He replaced dozens of separate the AI chats with one persistent Dot chat. Dot starts remote the AI threads on his always-on Macs to update his Obsidian vault or find order details, and it messaged him on its own about flooding in Hawaii days after he had asked about Hawaii weather.
The AI moved my whole Twitter archive into my Day One journal
He left Twitter in 2022 and had wanted his archive in the Day One journal app ever since. The AI did the import in an hour, and that time included backing up his databases first in case anything went wrong.
Watch my Spotify artists for concert postings and offer to grab the tickets
The journalist's the AI (Mark) kept tabs on concert postings from artists in her Spotify library and offered to snag tickets when shows appeared. Working from a song she had saved, it surfaced January concert tickets for Jess Williamson.
My agent read 121 studio notes and helped me make portraits
Her local AI agent, fractura, read all 121 of her studio notes in 36 hours and handed back an analysis that named her art lineage, including terra fracta. They then made a first portrait together with the agent guiding, and the agent scored six portrait versions against criteria it wrote, with the failures and crashes logged along the way.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI and an LLM wiki cataloged all my scattered files
He merged five scattered file messes into one, then the AI and an LLM wiki in Obsidian reviewed and cataloged everything. He says knowing what is in it and how to get it back matters more than tidy storage.
LLMs decompiled a 1991 strategy game back to source that matches the original byte for byte
LLMs decompiled Civilization 1 into reconstructed C source that builds with the original toolchain and matches the original executable byte-for-byte except a four-byte patch correction (finished result report).
I had the AI build the screen printing software I actually wanted
He used AI to build software for color separation, halftoning and layer editing for his screen prints. It is built around his own way of working, and he says it has made him a better artist.
The AI built the QNAP app I needed. It installed and works.
He needed an app on his QNAP NAS that only existed as open source Linux code, with no NAS package. He gave the AI the model, the AI searched the web and gave him a downloadable package in about ten and a half minutes, and he installed it and it works.
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.