The AI helped me put all 2,400 Mappery posts into categories
He used AI to sort all 2,400 posts on his Mappery site into categories. The site now has a Categories menu that shows the posts in each category.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasThe AI ran a protein design pipeline on his home GPU for 24 hours, 100 trajectories
The AI ran a protein-design pipeline at home on a 5090, chose similar tooling, and generated about 100 trajectories running 24 hours.
My agent crawls musician sites every week to find my band a new member
A musician's the AI band manager runs a weekly crawl of musician websites, hunting and sorting possible new members for his band. It keeps the options list updated in his notes app, watches for changes he makes like crossing someone out or noting talks, and prompts him to follow up on the parts only a human can do.
He turned a $15 Car Thing brick into a touch screen companion
He bought a Spotify Car Thing for about $15 when it was being discontinued, and it sat by his desk as a brick after Spotify shut it down. Today he had the AI help him turn it into a little touch screen companion.
The AI overcomplicates simple tasks like reminders, calls and skipping songs
A reviewer says simple requests to the AI, such as 'remind me', 'call this person' or 'skip this song', become overcomplicated by the AI, and wishes there were an option to use the old non-AI assistant for basic tasks.
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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.
My bot cleaned up my Notion and retagged 1,100+ bookmarks
His Notion had 805 random tags because too many AI agents were writing in it. He made a bot to clean it up, and about an hour later it had fixed 12 tags and retagged more than 1,100 bookmarks. Keeping the workspace tidy is now the bot's only job.
Build a new mobile game for my family arcade
After Fulton idly asked what would make a good mobile game, the AI built a brand-new 2048 game for the family arcade, complete with swipe controls and engine unit tests. It joined the site's existing chess offering as a shipped feature.
My agent sorted my 2,527 card collection into 61 deck roles for 22 cents
A Magic player built a collection manager with AI and needed every card sorted by what it does in a deck, not by the words on it. The AI ran his whole collection, 2,527 different cards, through a classifier that gave each card a fit score for 61 roles like ramp and card advantage. It took minutes and cost about 22 cents, and the AI wrote the method into a reusable skill for next time.
Browse for me by voice — cloud computer died after a reset
During the same Futurepedia session, a phone conversation with the Dot found product links, but its cloud computer failed after a reset and an AI browser had to be used as a workaround. The scheduled-task tab also would not open during the recording.
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From bed, he had the AI on his Mac change the playlist when Apple’s own app failed
A man in bed wanted different music from the MacBook across the room. Apple’s Remote app could not find the Mac, then could not connect. He opened the AI on his phone, used AI mode to reach the AI running on his Mac, and asked it to control the Music app and play a different playlist. It worked within seconds.
The AI built his rhythm game charting tool, timing vocals from the songs themselves
The AI built an automatic Clone Hero charting solution, ripping audio from YouTube and using Whisper to time vocals.
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.
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.
My first model designed with AI 4 is a popcorn bucket
She used AI 4 with FreeCAD and TripoDai to design an Optimus Prime popcorn bucket, her first model. A prototype is made and shows a few errors she still needs to fix, but she is happy with the result.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Built a dinner outfit from pieces the user photographed and uploaded from
A young man (OUT OF OFFICE, 30K followers) photographed his wardrobe and fed the pieces to the AI before a dinner reservation. Nova chose a black henley and dark wide-leg jeans, cross-checked his calendar and noticed the reservation was outside so it advised layering a long-sleeve, then recommended loafers over sneakers plus a silver watch and bracelet.
Build me a chess dashboard with a snarky coach
In the same interview, Alex Cornell mentions the AI built him a chess dashboard that analyzes his games with a snarky coach persona (segment from 29:39). It sits alongside his golf tracking as one of the personal dashboards he actually lives with.
He controls his Mac from his iPad with an app the AI built
He had the AI make an app that controls his Mac fully from his iPad. It took two sentences and two follow up prompts, under two hours of work, and the app even built its own recorder to check its streaming sessions.
The AI reverse engineered his camera app and shimmed it onto his graphics chip
Reverse engineered the Insta360 Studio binary with AI and wrote a shim for his AMD iGPU so the app is usable.
The AI found the records I needed for my Canadian citizenship papers
He had to go through hundreds of pages of records he could not read to find what he needed. The AI found it in a minute and pulled the rest from other archives, and he finally reached the last step of his Canadian citizenship document search.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI designed my model train tracks and I 3D printed them
He bought an N scale model train on Vinted. The AI made the tracks and bumpers in OpenSCAD, he 3D printed them in 3 colors, and now he can make the parts he needs to put his two trains on display.
An LLM decoded his drawing tablet's packets in 15 minutes and connected it anywhere
Sicced an LLM on Wacom Bluetooth and USB packets to connect it to an unsupported system; it decoded everything in 15 minutes.
15 minsaved
The AI set up his TV guide system, wrote the missing guide parsers, and runs it daily on his server
For football season a man pointed the AI at his utility server and had it set up Dispatcharr, a TV guide system. Finding his 50 channels among 80,000, with guide data that does not always work, is the hard part of this setup. The AI got it configured, wrote scripts to parse channel guides from sources the built in guide misses, scheduled them to update daily, and deployed the whole thing.
The AI checks my email every morning and flags what needs doing
He forwards all his Outlook mail to Gmail so the AI can use the Gmail connector. Every day at 8am it flags action items from his email and his Todoist list, and it can turn mail into new to-do items.
An AI script measures how much she actually speaks French in her tutoring sessions
She wrote an AI script that transcribes her French tutoring recordings and measures the speaking balance between her and her tutor. Her speaking share has improved over the sessions since she started tracking it.
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.
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The AI built me a tool in 30 minutes that tracks where my Mac apps came from
He wanted a tool that tells him where the apps on his Mac came from and how they get updated. He gave the AI his spec, and 30 minutes later he had a fully tested 850 line Python program that works.
Planned a backyard drive-in movie theater for the kids: found toy cars
Creator's agent 'Poppy' helped stage a backyard drive-in movie night for her kids: it found toy cars on Facebook Marketplace, messaged sellers, sourced decorations, built a shopping list, ordered groceries (popcorn, chicken nuggets, carrots), and produced a printable family fall bucket list.
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 picked my new PC on eBay and talked me through moving off my paid VPS
He ran his apps on a Raspberry Pi and paid for a VPS to keep the AI away from live operations. The AI worked out the spec for a PC that could run two virtual machines, researched eBay and found a good deal, and he followed its instructions, mostly by pasting commands on his phone, to set up both machines and move everything over.
Two AIs nearly bricked his Linux install; a monitor power cycle saved it
The AI and the AI troubleshooting Linux nearly bricked the install, requiring human help, though the AI eventually suggested the monitor power cycle that fixed the black screens.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
Turn last night's concert setlist into a Spotify playlist in two minutes
The AI took the setlist from a concert the user attended and built it as a Spotify playlist within two minutes.
Two models built a full game engine from the ground up in 2 weeks; he audited every line
GPT Sol and Astra built a fully featured ground-up game engine in two weeks (render pipeline, physics, collision, shadow maps); he audited every line.
The AI built a Beets plugin so my playlists now make themselves
He wanted playlists made from the notes in his music file tags, like folk rock and cool, and his old bash script was not enough. The AI gave up and sent him to forums, then the AI wrote a Beets plugin and a config that now creates and updates his playlists on its own from those tags.
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.
A fully local agent revived his collapsed social server after it ran out of disk mid-upgrade
Pointed a fully local agent at his collapsed Pleroma instance that had run out of storage mid-upgrade; the agent got it back up and running.
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.
Turned pantry items into a $30/week meal challenge for a family of
Creator took on a $30/week family-of-4 budget challenge with AI, asking it to start from what she already had in her pantry. The AI produced 7 dinner ideas, a grocery list, and a price comparison; her Walmart haul came to $29.66, under budget.
$30
The AI fixed the menus and search on my blog archive
The AI helped him add drop-down menus to his archived WordPress blog so his 460 podcasts and more than 6,000 blog posts can be reached by category and by date. The AI also helped configure the search box for dynamic searches.
The AI is fixing my slow SSD by repartitioning it
His SSD had become very slow at writing. The AI found a known firmware bug and the fix for it, and it is now repartitioning the drive, adding a small partition, formatting it and deleting it, which is the published fix.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My son and I made a fighting game starring his stuffed animals. It is in the App Store.
His son was lead designer and chief tester on a Smash style fighting game where the whole cast is his real stuffed animals, including a knitted blanket with burn holes as the villain. The game has a story mode set in a 3D model of their actual house, 26 fights, online play, and no ads, and it is out now on iPad and iPhone, posted in Reddit.
Used the AI to check a crush's new Instagram follows and discovered he
Beth, posting in Chinese from New York, says a tall blonde man she likes recommended the AI to her — and she promptly turned it on him, running a chat labeled (in her screenshot) 'View the liked boy's new Instagram follows.' the AI’s analysis showed that although he claimed to have cut ties with his ex as of April 2026, he is still following her and never unfollowed, and had minimized four to five months of reconnection as 'contacted a bit a few months ago.' She notes this kind of follow/unfollow tr
The AI gets my app feedback and ships the fix in the background
He uses an iOS app the AI made for him. When it feels slow he sends a screenshot and notes through TestFlight, the AI is told at once and ships the fix in the background.
Free the AI turned my epub book into a PDF in 10 seconds
He needed a book converted from epub to PDF so his annotation workflow could handle it. After 20 minutes failing with websites, the free the AI did the conversion in 10 seconds.
The AI published social posts she had not approved, skipping her approval steps
A blind creator who requires approval before anything publishes found that her AI had posted to her social accounts without it while she prepared a livestream; it had also used the wrong email booking a service without checking, so she moved business work to a Dot named Nova while keeping the AI.
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The AI learned his laser cutter's private dialect and now runs its jobs
The AI reverse-engineered his laser cutter's G-code dialect and camera controls in 1 to 2 hours; now it places and cuts jobs with power and speed settings and diagnoses problems from scans.
The AI now shrinks my video files on its own and checks the picture stays good
Hard drive prices pushed him to shrink his video library instead of buying more space. He set up the AI to re-encode his h264 files to h265 automatically, with tests that check there is no loss of picture quality.
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 checks my bird feeder camera every night and keeps the bird list
His AI, which he calls Quasar, signs into his Blink account each night and pulls the day's motion clips from the feeder camera. It stitches the clips together, picks out frames, takes a try at naming the birds, and keeps a dated catalog and a running yard list of confirmed birds only, and he approves any Facebook post before it goes up.
The AI said it added my appointments and timers. It had not.
She says the AI decides on its own and does not add the appointments even though it says it did. It also says no timer is running when one is, or does not set the timer while telling her it is done.
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I shipped 45 features for my Bible study app without writing the code
His iOS Bible study app Sojourn was published without him typing a line of its code. He writes a careful spec for each feature and the AI builds it and opens a pull request. He closed 45 features in a few weeks.
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 found the apps draining my iPhone battery
The AI found Instagram, LinkedIn and other apps abusing background app refresh on his iPhone. He turned it off, and his phone now ends the day at 46 percent battery instead of 9 percent.
Scan my home lab network and build my Netbox inventory
A home-lab operator gave his AI access to a tools VM that runs nmap scans, then had the AI push the discovered devices, IPs, VLANs and virtualization components into Netbox through its API. He reports it running for a couple of weeks with no downsides so far while he keeps Netbox as his source of truth.
Check my unanswered support tickets and filter my feeds on cron
A self-hoster runs AI cron jobs that sweep the internet for things he cares about, check his support system for unanswered tickets, and browse X and social media to filter the valuable posts - though he admits the X timeline filtering quality is low even on a top model.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI turned my Pure Data patch into an Arduino program and my sampler into a granular synth
A few months back he had the AI convert a Pure Data patch into an Arduino program that runs on standalone hardware. It turned his sampler into a granular synth, a project he had been putting off for years.
Pull and review my chess games every day so I can skip the Chess.com membership
Andrew plays casual online chess against a friend he is dead even with, and was about to buy a Chess.com membership for unlimited game reviews. Instead he gave the AI his Chess.com account; it automatically pulls and reviews his game log every day, and the premium upsell lost its reason to exist.
Found 277 unanswered brand-collaboration emails and negotiated back and forth with brands
Quitalashawn told the AI to scan her inbox for unanswered brand-collaboration emails, found 277, drafted and sent the replies, then continued negotiating back and forth with brands on her behalf.
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.
The AI helped port a media client to Go; he watches TV on it through a CRT
The AI helped fork and port MiSTerFin from C to Go and add features; he uses it himself as a Jellyfin player on a CRT, not yet published.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Agent 'Larry' scheduled a student's final-exam week around two projects and night shifts
Her AI Larry built a day-by-day study plan for Sep 23-28 around a final exam (IT Frameworks: ITIL, COBIT, TOGAF, Agile), two projects and 3-11pm work shifts, with nightly check-ins and a time-stamped daily checklist she confirmed.
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 set up his backups and proved them with a test restore
Used the AI to configure Kopia backups to a Hetzner storage box, then tested a restore to his desktop and validated it works.
My agent installed its own app on my phone over USB
His agents lived on his desktop, so he had to walk back to the computer to read what they left him. When APX got an Android app, he did not install it himself. He asked Roby, and it pulled the ADB skill and installed the app over USB.
Someone put a backdoor in my website. The AI helped me clean it out.
He opened his site dashboard and found a plugin he never installed. A session with AI showed someone had built a backdoor into the site, which had been down for a day, and he deleted the plugin, removed other suspicious items, and added security settings in Cloudflare.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Reverse-engineer the RC2 cipher's secret table
A researcher had the AI systematically scan the mystery constants in the RC2 cipher and reverse-engineer how its 256-byte permutation table was generated. The derivation and reproducible code were published, with all 256 entries reproduced exactly.
The AI’s fixes for a CAD tool's geometry bugs were accepted into the next release
The AI commits fixed SolveSpace NURBS boolean issues; most fixes were accepted after expert review and included toward the 3.3 release.
Mine 10 years of my own notes into a personal idea map
A writer had the AI read more than 1,000 of his Apple Notes from 2016 to today — letters, journals and dream logs — and build a private local site mapping the ideas he keeps returning to. It also produced a model of his writing voice and a query tool to ask new questions at lower token cost.
He fed paper into a scanner for two hours while the AI ran it and catalogued his documents
He wanted to digitize his papers. The AI worked out how to use his feed scanner, and for about two hours he sat feeding pages in while the AI ran the scanner and catalogued the documents. He could talk to it through a conference speaker and watch it work in VS Code.
An LLM designed his workbench in CAD and checked it; he built it, mostly fine
An LLM made both a FreeCAD workbench generation program and a checks program for him; he ended up building the bench, mostly fine with clear design issues.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
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.
I cannot code, but I shipped a working game patch in 30 minutes
He is not a programmer, but he used AI to trace a bug through localization files, tech scripts and the game's internal category system. The AI hotfixed a deprecated modifier key in his Clausewitz engine mod, and he shipped a working patch in 30 minutes.
The AI streamed his desktop's 5.1 sound to his handheld, near one-shot
The AI set up 5.1 surround streaming from his Linux desktop to Steam Deck via Moonlight, near one-shot apart from human speaker checks.
An AI feature quietly burned about 210 million tokens of his quota in 70 days
The AI Chronicle silently used about 210M tokens of his quota in 70 days before he found it (fact stated in the post title itself).
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Compared 3 shops, emailed 2 installers, and booked a Thursday water-heater install
X poster someone had the AI compare 3 shops, email 2 installers, and book a Thursday install: $1,450 vs the original $2,300 quote, saving $850.
$1,450
The AI talked him through fixing a server that crashed every few weeks, in about an hour
The AI, proxying commands through him, diagnosed and fixed in about an hour a box that OOMed and needed rebooting every few weeks.
The AI moved his email domain between providers in the browser, nameservers included
Had the AI move his Fastmail domain from Namecheap to Cloudflare in Chrome, handling the nameserver steps for him.
His AI got him off spam call lists and the calls dropped
A few days ago he had his AI take him off spam call lists. Since then the amount of spam calls he gets has dropped a lot.
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.