Ask HN: How are you using AI in your personal life? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How are you using AI in your personal life?

3 pointswhall65 comments

In the latest Stratechery article, Ben says "I’ve created a bunch of different apps to manage my house and sports viewing," and I instantly felt FOMO. I have no idea what his apps could be doing, but I was just wondering what time saving / efficiency capturing ideas are out there that I might be missing out on.

I can start with a few that I can think of, but would love to hear more:

I recently used AI to navigate a rezoning process in my city (developers are building right behind my property line). It ended up being extremely helpful navigating the labyrinth of local zoning laws and city council actually approved 15 of my requests.

I teach a youth group and have very little time to prepare lessons, but I can usually dump in an outline of a lesson and tell my AI to "make it clean and presentable" and it gives me polished slides that help engage the teenagers.

What else is out there that I can be doing?

- "Vibe-coded": A shopping list that sort by aisle in the order I go through them on my local store. It is _wildly_ successful. I got my wife to use it.

- When reading technical books I'll feed the book to an AI and ask it to explain things unclear to me or set up the book's examples live to try them out. Awesome use-case. I'm trying to make an app to make it better as a side project, without much success so far.

- A reminder agent that gives me nudge to go a play with the dog in different ways every day.

- A LinkedIn a crawler agent that goes through all my contacts and see if anyone has connections to place I'd like to work at.

- A GrokBot agent that goes over all my bookmarked tweets that I never actually go back to, that suggests topics to look into or things to be reminded of.

- A small vibe-coded android app for speech to text. Made out of spite after a free up suddenly decided to charge a subscription.

> A shopping list that sort by aisle in the order I go through them on my local store

Amazing idea, will make one for myself today

I built myself an iOS app for calorie/sodium/blood pressure tracking, meal prep planning. The main interface is a chatbot backed by an LLM.

I tell it "tonight i'm eating 150g of rice" etc, it computes calories based on the CIQUAL database (or it estimates), logs it. I set a daily goal and it helps me keep on track.

Over time, I've added the sodium and blood pressure tracking after my doctor mentioned I might have hypertension, so now it helps me keep my sodium intake in check.

And finally I've added meal prep planning: I can scan the barcodes of everything I buy and it can prepare meals that comply with my daily goals. To be honest that one is good in theory but right now I don't have the discipline to scan everything.

That's the biggest impact for me I think.

I try to create things that are worthwhile and interesting—sometimes I even succeed—but I’m bad at marketing and all that sort of stuff. As a result, everything I make usually ends up either buried in the depths of the internet or nowhere at all.

My wife makes fake test of the topic my daughter must learn in school, so my daughter can solve them and study before the real test.

The test sometimes have errors, that adds some fun from time to time, but most of the time they are correct.

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