The AI brought back code I lost 30 years ago
He lost the source code for his macOS 8 PowerPC programs three decades ago. The AI decompiled the binaries, turned them into a web app, and then converted them to Dylan with OpenDylan.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Hobbies
Making things, learning and having fun · 988 ideasA background campaign is matching a classic game's code function by function, 17,352 done
The AI set up and runs a background matching-decompilation campaign for Age of Mythology; 17,352 of 21,965 functions matched so far.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He had an agent lock down his home network and check the DMZ
He got Astra to go through his network and DMZ. It confirmed all port forwarding was off, hardened his media services, and found 5 PHP apps on the network, none of them running.
The AI modelled the watch crystal for a mod nobody had done before, in days not months
A man wanted to mod a Casio watch with a custom crystal and screen that had not been done before, and needed a 3D model of the crystal for prototyping. The AI got the specs mostly right and built the model inside a custom 3D program the AI had made for him, and the project was done in a few days instead of the months it would have taken before.
The AI moved my computer from X11 to Wayland in an hour
The AI handled his X11 to Wayland migration in an hour, on a HiDPI screen.
Created a personal AI podcast
Leslie Samuel put the AI to work on 11 real tasks with screen recordings, showing what worked and what needs supervision. One was generating his own personal AI podcast.
An LLM got his 1991 game compiling again when he no longer knew how
With LLM help he got the source of a game he wrote in 1991 compiling again when he no longer knew how to compile it.
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.
His agent plugin let him leave X11 for Wayland after years of trying
He built a plugin that lets his agent drive the Sway window manager directly, and used it to switch from X11 to Wayland, something he says did not work for him before. He now asks the agent things like which window is taking the most memory and has it start and stop power profiles.
The AI rescued my old blog and every Linux Journal piece I ever wrote
For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.
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.