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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 960 ideasI asked the AI to fix my laptop fan. It disabled my keyboard.
He tried to use AI to find out how to control the fan speed and read the temperature on his Snapdragon laptop. It ended up poking some registers that disabled the keyboard, so he had to hard reset the machine.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
Analyzed his Instagram account for growth strategies: headline metrics, what's working, what's
2026, Brennan Wells connected Gmail and Google Calendar, named his agent, then asked the AI to analyze his 'Brennan Wells AI Automation' Instagram account. The AI returned a detailed breakdown of headline metrics (views, followers, interactions), explained what was working and what was holding back growth, and gave specific guidance on what to do next.
My AI automation posts my Goodreads updates to BookHive on its own
He built an automation with AI that runs on Val Town. It reads his Goodreads progress updates and reviews from RSS and cross posts them to bookhive.buzz as AT Protocol records.
The AI packaged software for Slackware and the package ran
As a test he had an AI harness package GNU Bison for Slackware. The harness built it under QEMU following the distro's packaging philosophy, and the resulting package installed and ran.
Turn my podcast walks into wiki notes and a quiz
A developer built Idea Leash on an AI profile running locally on his Mac: he sends a podcast link by Telegram before a walk, and the agent transcribes it, writes notes into his markdown wiki and prepares a five-question quiz. After four real walks it had logged 7.66 km, nine voice ideas and sent after-walk summaries with web searches for ideas he dictated.
One the AI-factored system config now runs three of his machines, rollbacks included
Set up NixOS on an ancient laptop using AI to factor the config; now uses the same config to manage three machines with easy rollback.
The AI fixed my VR headset setup on Linux and solved my debugging problem
The AI patched the MDQH app to work on Linux with his Bluetooth adapter, worked out how to keep certain permissions over ADB, and wrote a small APK that turns on wireless ADB by itself. He says debugging is now solved.
AI designed and routed about 15 of his circuit boards, with known mistakes in the pile
AI through tscircuit and OpenAI models designed and autorouted about 15 ordered RP2040 and ESP32 PCB designs; known mistakes include improperly rotated connectors and routing loops.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.