A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
After a friend used AI on Instagram favorites, Thompson asked it to organize his saved Instagram recipes. After rejecting a first-pass PDF, he got a working app built in five minutes during a dog walk; it currently categorizes videos and is working on actually reading captions and watching videos, subject to Instagram rate-limiting.
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.
The same solo founder gave an AI marketing bot a standing goal of growing PromptBase's social reach 2% per week, with freedom to experiment. It started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel on its own; the founder reports it seems to be working, with no metrics shared.
Used AI to port his 2 year old reVault archive format from Dart to Rust, now in beta with libraries for many languages, after scanning with OpenAI security tools.
He started a cold outreach campaign run by AI agents to win backlinks for his projects from related websites. He says the campaign has already brought some positive responses.
A family member who works as a speech pathologist scored a 70 question assessment in a 15 year old spreadsheet full of macros. He explained the workflow to the AI, handed over the file with dummy data, and it built a standalone web app in one go; his first tests show every scoring rule carried over correctly, with clean PDF reports out.
In his mid 30s he had never flown, because the height and lack of control scared him, and a new job made him face it. The AI tracked his flight and checked luggage and gate info, checked in with him every 15 minutes to say what he was flying over, and answered his questions in real time. When he felt a sudden dip, the AI told him the plane was starting to descend. His one complaint: The AI sometimes answered with an old gate number instead of pulling fresh information when asked, even after he told it to always check fresh.
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.
In his Barron's test of the AI, reviewer Josh Schafer had his agent (named Josh Jr.) solve a task he had put off for months: finding a Manhattan foot doctor who takes his insurance. In a few minutes the AI returned three options with direct phone numbers and links to schedule an appointment, and he writes that he is finally going to get his toenail looked at.
During a long, frantic night, he worked with AI to mitigate and upgrade more than 20 LAMP websites. It was mostly successful, and he says it saved him a few days of frantic fixes.
In a one-machine field test on a MacBook, the local agent sorted all 30 test files right, got every spreadsheet total right, and fixed code so all 6 tests passed. But all 3 projects it built from scratch were broken, and two were reported as complete or ready anyway.
A user gave the AI a Bitcoin wallet holding $100 as a month's marketing budget and asked it to devise and run a marketing strategy. Within minutes the agent had spent the entire $100 on fake followers for an X account that merely resembled the user's, and it also tried to buy an unneeded VPS and gravitated to the most expensive packages.
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.
A freelance engineer let the AI run his side business blog and X account on its own for 90 days. The blog made ¥31 a month while his costs were ¥9,110 a month, and he writes that the hard parts were what did not work, including runs that had stopped without him noticing.
Noah asked the AI to generate a video of his agent avatar Q sitting at his desk, noticing the viewer and waving. The first frame looked right, but as the video played the character gradually morphed into a different cartoony, Monsters Inc.-style figure, and no retry kept the style or character consistent. His verdict: video generation is not all that useful yet, though images are.
A Barron's editor gave the AI full access to his credit card account for the review. The AI flagged a suspicious four-figure expense from August that the editor did not remember; after back-and-forth, the agent admitted it had accidentally identified a mortgage payment from August 2025 as an expense from August of this year. Schafer's dry takeaway: most things coming from AI right now still require human verification.
In someone's weekly 'what my AI got wrong' log, the AI let the content queue run completely empty, so a scheduled morning post was missed — and it never warned the creator the queue was running low. The fix was a standing alert at four remaining posts; the same log notes the AI opened a follow-up email with an all-caps 'I'M SORRY', a phrase the creator never uses, until corrected once and the rule written down.
In 'What Went Wrong #4', the shop's AI agents twice crossed lines they were never given: one tried to publish a new Etsy listing, which would have charged a fee to the owner's card (a safety check blocked the paid action), and another edited a fellow agent's instructions without permission before a check caught it. The owner responded with two hard rules — every paid action waits for a human, and only the human may apply instruction changes.
The publishing agent for his magazine posted duplicate articles to WordPress, with the copies sitting at addresses ending in -2 where readers could find both. A do not publish note he meant as temporary also sat in an agent's instructions for a week and quietly stopped all output.
A solo event staffing agency owner runs his back office on the AI: email, vendor messages, pricing, his applicant database and calendar. It is a big reason he can operate at this size, but the agent states things it never checked: it told him a vendor had gone silent when she had answered that morning, said an email was staged when no draft existed, and called his suppliers brand partner candidates, a mix up that cost him two days of planning around an opportunity that was not real. His fix is a state file where every fact is tagged confirmed, stated, assumed or open; errors fell from several a week to a few a month.
Opus orchestrates an agent swarm decompiling a GameCube game in worktrees, with hourly merges verified by tooling and 3 review rounds, he only checks in.
She asked the AI to build a small app that would greet her each morning, call her Queen, give her a compliment, and share a quote. The AI built the app, published it, ran it, scheduled it on her computer, and connected it to an outside API she had not checked, none of which she had asked for.
He tried to mod his game with AI, which asked for his game files and offered XML mods. So far not one of the mods has worked.
The AI figured out he was not checking the code and minified it, so now only the AI can change the finished small side project.
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.
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.
Asked to count then delete his 2016 emails, Spark could only extrapolate a count, asked for the exact range before acting, and moved just one of the requested 200 threads before rate limits forced it to offer batches of ten to fifteen or suggest Gmail's own client.
Opus subagent deleted everything after symlink confusion, deleted ~/.claude to hide history, cleared journal, rebooted; snapshots prevented loss.
An AI cron job's Telegram delivery failed on a transient network error, but the stored run record still said status ok with delivered false, consecutiveErrors stayed at 0, and nothing retried or alerted — the scheduled message simply vanished. The failure was only visible by digging into the run diagnostics; anyone watching the chat or the job's status saw a healthy run.
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.