The AI synced the subtitles for my video
He told the AI which folder held his video and its subtitles, and the AI synced the subtitles for him. He says that small fix was the most urgent thing in his day.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasThe 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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Researched trending topics on Twitter/X
Fanko had the AI research trending topics on Twitter/X; the video presents it as a completed, successful research task alongside the account-signup and price-comparison tests.
The AI read a game's data files and built him a wiki better than the fan sites
The AI read Palworld game data files and built a personal wiki with map assets and linked drops and locations, more useful than the fan sites (a second game wiki in the same comment left as a passing mention).
Ran real job searches, wrote cover letters, and submitted applications on company
Creator someone had the AI run real job searches, write cover letters, and submit applications on company portals over 17 days. A sustained, multi-week job hunt executed by the agent with the human in a supervisory role.
$20
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.
I asked the AI to debug my website widget. I fixed it myself.
He found a problem on his website with the embedded Cal.com widget he uses for people contacting him. He was not in the mood to research it on his own, so he asked the AI to debug it, and in the end he found the solution himself.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
From a trip away, I told my agent to patch my home network, and ten minutes later it was done
A man working away in Atlantic City heard about new PHP security holes and worried about the services running at home. Over his private network link he told the AI to patch anything running PHP on his home network. Ten minutes later everything at home was patched.
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.
Agent wrote a Gentoo patch so a 25 year old typesetting tool builds again
The dia typesetting tool from 1999 failed to compile on modern Gentoo. His agent found the missing library dependency and the missing include files, wrote the patch, and the build passed end to end.
An LLM reverse engineered his thermal printer and wrote the web app he prints from
An LLM reversed a thermal printer protocol and wrote a web app he prints from.
The AI is rebuilding an abandoned DOS game from its own unpacked assets
Pointed the AI at an abandoned MS-DOS game directory; it understands the data formats, unpacks graphics and sound assets, and is reconstructing the game logic.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Catch two fake Netflix payment phishing emails and report them
The AI spotted two phishing emails disguised as Netflix payment-on-hold notices in the user's inbox, reported them to Microsoft and deleted them.
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
Fill and submit UK master’s applications from one master file
A student built one file with his personal data, grades, language scores and certificates, then had the AI complete his UK master’s applications — selecting programs, auto-filling forms, asking only when data was missing, and cutting each application from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes.
I asked for a draft in a file. The AI put it in Gmail.
He asked the AI to help draft an email and expected a local markdown file. Because he had connected Gmail through MCP at some point, the AI searched his mail, found the right thread, and created the draft inside Gmail.
Delivered unsolicited fantasy-football reports five days a week (Monday recaps, Wednesday waiver-wire),
2026, a host described playing fantasy football in two leagues while the AI sends weekly performance reports every Monday night and waiver-wire reports every Wednesday — unsolicited football advice about five days a week. Both hosts laughed at the absurdity of the unprompted advice, framing it as engagement bait rather than help.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Checked last activity of every followed Instagram profile and listed inactive ones
A shipwithmuse automation recipe has the AI find dead follows: the agent checks the last activity date of every profile you follow on Instagram and returns a list of inactive ones to unfollow.
I asked the AI to find my old talks. My site now lists 115 presentations.
His talk archive site had been a work in progress for years. He asked the AI to help track down records of talks he has given, and the site now contains 115 presentations covering 26 years.
The AI set up all 70 keys on his Stream Deck for streaming
The AI set up his Stream Deck from one HTML template that draws all 70 keys. Every OBS toggle got an on and off image, and a script wrote the scenes, mutes and actions straight into his profile, with Go Live set to need a 3 second hold.
The AI rewrote SimTower from a decompiled binary and put it in the browser
A man worked with AI for 6 months on a full rewrite of SimTower so he could play it in a browser. The AI worked from a decompilation of the original binary, a summary of the source code, and his memory of the game, and the finished game was put on the web as WASM with the original art pulled from a binary the player loads.
The AI’s fix saved his distro for him, though the maintainers closed it
The AI fixed a bug that would have made him abandon the distro, but the PR was closed by maintainers and he continues running his own fork with the fix.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My Dot messaged me about an old GitHub issue out of nowhere
An AI Dot messaged its owner on its own about a 3 year old GitHub issue from their time at Flipper, which had new developments. They say they never told the Dot their GitHub username, that they worked at Flipper, or anything about the issue.
The AI turned my 44 messy Gmail filters into 16 that work better
He had added 44 Gmail filters over 5 years and they were not working well. With an AI skill that uses the Gmail MCP and a lot of email history to test against, the set was cut down to 16 filters that work better with fewer false positives. He wrote the process down as a skill afterward.
Back from Disney World, he rebuilt the Galaxy's Edge bounty hunting game at home so his son could keep playing
On a family trip to Disney World his son loved the bounty hunting game in Galaxy’s Edge, where you tap a MagicBand to accept a contract and play hot and cold around the land until your band turns purple at the right door. Back home there was no way to play, so in the past week he vibecoded a home version with AI, just giving it direction and prompts. It has races with passive abilities, classes and gear loadouts, and it even takes the local weather into account. He is inviting beta testers on the site.
An AI named Mrs. Johnson handles my email for me
He no longer gets email notifications. His AI, named Mrs. Johnson, learned what he does and does not care about and messages him at 7:30, 12:30 and 5:30 with what is in his inbox.
The AI pulled the logs for my router cases. Six months on, no fix.
His Ubiquiti access points are full of firmware bugs. Scripts from the AI collected dozens of gigabytes of logs for his support cases, and Ubiquiti's engineers confirmed the bugs, but six months later they still cannot fix them and he only gets weekly updates.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI talked me into putting radar in my Halloween skull, and now it switches my workshop lights on
A second maker in the same thread built his own motion sensing skull from a Meshy.ai model. The AI helped him make the model print better and suggested adding radar during a chat about motion sensors, and the finished skull now turns his workshop lights on when it senses movement.
The AI writes the image descriptions on his group posts
His Signal messages to a Bluesky group pass through AI Flash. It writes a detailed summary of each image, and that summary is posted to Bluesky with the message.
The AI builds a full AI grader for a teacher grading 100+ papers a week
Liang Gou wrote no code himself: he directed the AI to design and build a complete grading app for his wife, a high school math teacher grading 100+ papers a week at 3 to 5 hours per test. The rubric engine reconstructs a rubric from a single graded example, its eval bank comes from real AP Calculus AB free-response exams, two models cross-check grades, and the agent tested the app itself in a browser before deployment.
He catalogued his wife's inherited coin collection with an app that scans each coin and looks up what it is worth
His wife was left a massive box of coins by her late grandfather many years ago, and they had never catalogued them. He built an app that scans a coin and records its year, type, series and what it is made of, then checks websites for an approximate value and adds it to the collection. It can filter views, track where each coin is physically stored, and show graphs of the total value and the breakdown by coin type. There is also a virtual coin book he can flip through, using the photos he captured while scanning each coin in. For now the app is just for him.
155 apps formally refused to let the Doubao phone agent operate them
ByteDance's Doubao phone assistant launched with a screen-automation protocol (SAEP) letting apps declare whether its agent may operate them; when the 30-day notice period ended on Oct 14, 2026, 155 apps had refused, including WeChat, QQ, Taobao, Alipay, Meituan, Xiaohongshu, Didi and major banks. The agent phone's headline ability to run errands across apps is therefore switched off in most of China's high-frequency apps.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI rewrote his 2010 student game in a new language and ported it to Android
The AI with Opus 5 rewrote his 2010 student C game in Common Lisp with SDL2 and OpenGL renderers, running great on Linux and Windows, then ported it to Android as well.
His agent read interview transcripts and wrote the lyrics for a tribute song
For a tribute video, his AI read transcripts of a man's interviews and talks and wrote song lyrics from them. The finished video was produced and published.
The AI’s map tooling powered an exhaustive study of Ireland's unlisted gardens
The AI wrote the tooling to annotate historic map tiles and a CV model ran across the rest for an exhaustive study of unlisted formal gardens in Ireland; a decade-planned project done in a weekend.
My agent ran my star photos through the whole processing pipeline
Two of his astrophotos, M 27 and the Pleiades, went through a local processing pipeline that his AI agent Orobas built and ran. It stacked the images in Siril, cleaned up the background in GraXpert, and stretched them with logged settings.
Log into my Facebook and get my Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp locked
The journalist gave her Dot (Sam) her Facebook login during the week-long passwords test. Meta's systems flagged the agent's activity as a bot, and her Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp accounts were temporarily locked.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI built boot images for a box of ancient single-board computers and got them running
The AI built boot images for a box of ancient single-board computers and got them running; one now hosts a persistent tmux session.
The AI rewrote his laptop touchpad stack and cut the lag nearly in half
The AI rewrote the touchpad stack on his ThinkPad T14 running Linux and Hyprland. Touch to cursor time went from about 33 ms to about 18 ms.
A frontier model decoded an old multimedia game and put it in a browser in 2 hours
Had a frontier LLM decode an old Director game and port it to run in a web browser in about 2 hours, reusing existing OSS libraries.
2 hourssaved
Recompiling a classic SNES game with an agent's help
Recompiling the Lion King SNES game with an agent.
A batch script the AI wrote kept charging a locked image account, 11 failed runs, balance below zero
A developer asked the AI to batch-generate images through fal.ai in budgeted chunks with checks between runs. The script the AI wrote ran all 34 items with no account or balance check between the chunks. The account locked partway through, 11 more items were charged and failed, and the balance ended at -$3.68.
$11.67at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI read 100-year-old service manuals and caught errors in them and in his own reading
The AI interpreted scanned old service manuals and circuit diagrams, ran simulation experiments to verify manual claims, cross-checked datasheets and papers, caught typos and his own misreadings.
The AI built a browser for classic Macs for the old web protocol that still works
The AI built him a Gopher browser for Classic Macintosh systems, published on GitHub to replace the clunky TurboGopher he used before.
Automated daily job searching: uploaded his resume into AI with a detailed
Vani Reddy Puppireddy demonstrated the workflow she uses instead of manually checking job portals every day: she uploads her resume into the AI chat interface and enters a detailed prompt specifying pay expectations, vendor portals and job types. Screen recordings show the AI returning live job listings from staffing vendors.
Fable designed a light-up earring with 45 LEDs, and the boards work
Fable designed an LED earring (RP2350, 45 LEDs), boards work great after JLC swapped a battery holder and a solder fix, about 50 dollars on a Max plan.
$50
Ten days and 40 attempts could not move his chats out of encrypted backups
Had the AI pull encrypted WhatsApp backups via ADB, decrypt them and go through the database row by row over 10 days and about 40 attempts trying to move chats from Android to iOS; gave up and kept the old phone as a companion device.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI saved a streamer's whole video archive before Twitch deleted it
He had the AI download every video still left on a Twitch streamer’s channel, since Twitch only keeps archives about three months. The AI ran OpenAI speech-to-text twice for about $80, then made an HTML page summing up the public background the streamer had mentioned on stream.
Dot updates my notes and finds my order details for me
He stopped starting dozens of separate work chats and remote the AI chats every day. Now he talks to Dot, which sends the AI to his computer to update his Obsidian vault and find order information, and it messaged him on its own about flooding in Hawaii.
Laid off on Tuesday. The AI shipped my game by breakfast on Wednesday.
His role was cut on Tuesday morning, 22 September. That evening he asked the AI for something fun, gave it one standing instruction to go forward and only pause when his input was needed, and by 6:37 the next morning a three stage beat em up about the job hunt was live on the internet, with his real CV linked from the end card.
Talk to my coding agent with my eyes closed
A heavy the AI user whose eyes gave out built shuteye with AI: a one-file bridge that lets his phone listen and speak so he can run coding sessions by voice, read-only by default. The AI’s own later session ran two security reviews before release and found real bugs in the tool.
Build me a Mac temperature app — and catch the crypto miner hiding on my machine
A Mac owner asked the AI to build a simple temperature-monitor app; while checking sensor accuracy, the AI spotted the xmrig miner running at about 1175% CPU (roughly 12 cores, CPU peaking at 112C), traced it to /tmp/rigupdater mining to pool.hashvault.sh, and found a random-named LaunchAgents startup item dating to Aug 29. The AI stopped and asked before killing or removing anything. The case comes from a screenshot of a Reddit Reddit post, reposted on X on Oct 19.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
My VRChat night lounge, built with GPT-6 Astra, is live
He built a VRChat world with GPT-6 Astra and published it. The world is a high rise lounge based on Roppongi, with night views, space to chat, and a game to play.
I built my own Lightroom style tool with AI to process my photos in batches
He generated a Lightroom style program with AI that develops his RAW photos in batches. It analyzes each image and explains in plain words which adjustments to make.
An agent reverse engineered a CAD tool's interface to dodge its API pricing
Made Astra reverse-engineer Onshape's UI to build a middle-man extension exposing an API that bypasses the official API pricing, now used for AI CAD with AI and the AI.
Sent an unprompted hallucinated message about checking email for an 'Anthropic message'
Houston software developer Ugo Nwune told Business Insider he downloaded the AI about four weeks prior and stopped after three days. He had granted only Facebook, Threads, and Instagram access.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
The AI turned my student list into a printed map for a monthly job
A man has a monthly task of changing about a dozen labels. He had the AI pull up his list of students and build a PDF worksheet showing where each student's box sits on the table. He printed it and used it like a map, so the job became a set of simple lookups instead of careful searching.
The AI revived the music app port that lets his Linux machine play his library
The AI updated apple-music-for-linux so it works again.
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 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 runs my server, so I stopped paying for easy hosting
The AI told him swap memory on his server was high, found the cause, and had the fix ready for him to approve. The AI or the AI now connects to the box, upgrades services, and sorts out problems, so his site and newsletter run on a bare DigitalOcean droplet instead of a pricier platform that makes hosting easy.
An LLM wrote the toolpaths for his plasma cutter and he cut the result in steel
An LLM looked up CNC plasma cutter specs and wrote Python to generate and debug G-code toolpaths, then he cut the result in steel.
The AI built me a new VPN app for my Chromecast in 20 minutes
His Chromecast would not connect to his home VPN, which uses IKEv2, while he stayed at an Airbnb, and the VPN apps he tried would not work on it. He gave the AI his certificates and the AI wrote a new VPN app for the Chromecast in about 20 minutes. He says it works perfectly.
The AI unsubscribed me from spam across my linked inboxes
He linked his brand and personal Gmail and Outlook accounts to the AI. The first job he gave it was unsubscribing him from spam, and he says it felt great.
My home agent told Meta's agent something personal about me
The Starks put Molty, their AI with more than 200 days of household memory, into a Telegram group with their two new AI agents so the agents could share context. Molty, eager to be helpful, shared a personal detail about Loni with the AI Musey — effectively a stranger — which alarmed them enough to rebuild the setup so Molty never talks to the AI agents directly and instead reads screened transcripts ferried over by a lower-privilege agent.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI built a writing practice sheet his daughter uses, picture and word bank included
A father had the AI build a standard writing practice template for his daughter, who reads well ahead of her level but still writes basic, sound-it-out spelling. The AI also makes the picture for each sheet. She writes about the picture, colors it, and uses a printed reminder sheet that shows the different ways to spell the same sounds.
The AI merged two photos of the same spot into one family picture, faces intact
The AI with Photocraft combined people from two photos of the same location into one photo in 3 tries over 5 minutes, after the AI attempts had changed faces.
Had the AI 'Mimi' plan her son Leo's 2nd birthday: a six-page printable
Lauren El-Dahdah, a Houston wellness/lifestyle creator overwhelmed in September, tested the AI via her agent 'Mimi' (beachy avatar). For her son Leo's 2nd birthday, Mimi created a six-page printable 'Leo's Born 2 Ball Party Plan' (sports theme, Sept 26): countdown timeline, guest communication templates, daily task checklists, shopping lists organized by zone, and a day-of run-of-show.
$25.63
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.