What’s the best use of AI you’ve seen so far?

use of ai to train another ai is best usecase if you believe lol

Beyond programming, I like using it to get organized.

I've connected Claude Code to my calendar and my Notion Kanban board. And every day, morning and night, I plan how to get everything done.

Hey Nika! Great topic.

I’ll jump in here, but I don’t want to talk about the obvious stuff everyone already knows and uses. Sure, text and image generation are cool and all... but mostly they just make things faster. Honestly, does your life really get better just because you wrote something in 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes or 10 hours?

For me, the real value of AI is in the things that actually improve your quality of life.

I mean all the real-life stuff where it helps me think strategically. A specific example: I have a form of allergy. The problem is, figuring that out usually takes tests, doctor visits, a doctor who can even guess what might be wrong and then refer you to a specialist. Then that specialist needs to actually have the time and willingness to pay attention to you. And even then, there’s no guarantee they’re actually competent. But with AI, I can give it the background/context, let it ask me the right questions, narrow down the symptoms, and get the problem down to two or three likely causes. So when you finally go in for testing, you already have useful information for the doctor to think through.

And beyond the actual medical side, it also advises me on practical stuff like what devices to buy, what kind of air purifier makes sense, what kind of tool I can use to measure pollen levels. No specialist is going to know all that. Doctors treat people, they’re not out there researching hardware.

And just for context, here’s something that happened recently. I saw a really close friend last weekend. He also suffers from allergies and had just started treatment. But before that, he had surgery on his nose. Two years later, he realized that didn’t help either. Then an allergist told him to start immunotherapy. Right now, they’ve only tested him for 12 things. Meanwhile, AI told me that in recent years there’s been a test covering 295 types of allergies. In other words, his doctor didn’t point him toward the most accurate or comprehensive test.

On top of that, they started his immunotherapy on April 20. And every model I’ve talked to (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT) says that’s exactly when you’re not supposed to start, because it’s active allergy season, and it can actually have a negative effect in the first few months. You’re supposed to start in the fall.

So the doctors made several mistakes that could have been avoided: they operated on his nose when that wasn’t the real cause of his symptoms, they started treatment during active season, and they based it on a test that wasn’t the most precise one available. Whether that’s incompetence or financial incentive, I don’t know, but it’s a perfect example of how people end up doing things that are not actually in their best interest. With AI, you can be much more precise about the direction you’re taking.

I have hundreds of other health and quality-of-life examples where I use it like this. And for me, that’s the biggest benefit of AI: helping you live longer, helping you improve your quality of life. Because let’s be honest, every single one of us has some small health issue dragging us down in one way or another. That’s worth way more, like, not even close, than generating a piece of text in 10 seconds.

I am using the AI for building cooking recipes for my multicooker :D Not exactly innovative, but very useful to me personally

LOVE this question! Lurking! ;-)

use as a second brain

stuff like ai coding assistants, mcp integrations, real-time research agents etc feel way more transformative than just text/image generation because they actually change how people work day to day 😅

This resonates a lot! For me, the most "useful and innovative" aspect of AI isn't just writing code it's the drastic reduction in the barrier to entry for side projects.

Recently, a friend's website got defaced due to a leaked WordPress admin password. I had an idea to solve this: a lightweight browser extension that only requires a simple 5-character token. It routes authorized users to the WP admin via a secure gateway, while anyone else trying to access the login page just gets a standard 404 error.

Using AI, I was able to validate this concept and build a working prototype in just a couple of hours. From there, it snowballed. I used AI to help write a custom Go gateway and a user-friendly control panel so non-technical folks (editors, SEOs, contractors) could set it up in a few clicks without touching any config files.

I’ve been in web development for over 20 years. I absolutely could have built this entire stack without AI. But realistically? The time investment would have been so high that I probably wouldn't have even started.

To your point about recreating tools: AI didn't just save me time, it acted as the activation energy to turn a fleeting "what if" into a fully functional, deployed tool.

@busmark_w_nika Honestly, the most underrated use is people building tools that replace $500/month subscriptions over a weekend. Not glamorous, but that's where AI actually changes lives for small teams and solo founders.