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How are you using AI(NOT FOR WORK) - strife - 09-02-2026
Just kind of curious how y'all are using AI for non-work functions. I know it can code, I don't care about that, just looking for other ideas that maybe I didn't think of.
Other than basically replacing Google with Copilot(I use copilot the most since it's built into Windows and it does a pretty good job for most of what I do), here are a few of the ways I've used it.
- Dungeon Master for D&D (just single player, had it be my dungeon master and it built campaigns and ran everything for me)
- Learning Blackjack. Not really learning how to play, but learning how to really use good tactics and running through trials.
- Design - I do a lot of CNC, Laser, 3d printing design. I use it quite a bit for helping me with design ideas, helping me with creating flat images that I can import into some of my software for tracing out designs, that kind of thing. I have used it a little bit for actually building 3d models, but I don't really like it for that(and they are all pay to play).
- Advice - I think this is a huge area for it.. I use it a lot for work, but have also used it for dealing with personal situations in my life. Obviously I'm just using it as a data point and not blindly following it's advice, but I think it does a really good job in this at the very least as a sounding board.
I do a lot of automation and such for work, so kind of avoided that for my non-work life.
RE: How are you using AI(NOT FOR WORK) - Slamz - 09-02-2026
- I've talked about this one quite a bit and maybe it falls under "coding" but: this forum, this website. Some of the customization I tried to do fucked it up in small ways that I could never fix. Claude fixed it. It also runs backups for me, it can check the health of the server, and basically anything I feel like doing with this website, I can just tell Claude to do it. Really if you ever wanted to make a website for any reason, just get one of the AI tools and tell it what you want and let it walk you through the entire process.
- I made a skill that is trained on what my gaming machine is (hardware, software) and can keep an eye on it, help me fix problems, and run updates. Some app won't start? Fix it. Some app crashes? Find out what happened and fix it. Need something new installed? Fix it. Next time I visit my mom I'm going to put a Claude CLI on her computer, set it to start every boot, and enable remote control so next time she tells me something doesn't work, I can just tell Claude to figure it out, from my phone.
- Gmail was complaining about running out of space. I used Claude to help sort out what we can delete. Freed up a bunch of space by deleting a bunch of obvious junk mail from folders like "Social" and "Updates" that were > 3 years old. I think it deleted like 50,000 messages. (I still have another 50,000. My gmail account is old.) Note that for this, it was a hassle getting gmail setup in such a way that Claude could easily use it but it did walk me through the whole thing. (Protip: when stuck, tell it to take a screenshot of your browser so it can see what you're stuck on. For a while I was screenshotting, cutting and pasting but then I was like "wait, why don't I just tell it to get its own screenshot".)
- I, too, have used it for advice and ideas. Work, personal, social. Not a lot, but it's convenient to have something to bounce thoughts off of sometimes.
My latest idea was to make something to help me learn Spanish, mostly just for fun. I thought Duo Lingo was kinda dumb and never got much out of it, but something I could play with and customize might be more fun (I will never need to ask how to get to the library, nor do I want to learn how to do a shopping trip, so if we can skip that part, that would be great). I have temporarily ruined this idea by trying to create it with Fable 5.1 set to ultracode, which ate my 4-hour window in about an hour and ate quite a lot of my weekly limit in two hours (and I'm on the $200/month plan), but I might end up with something neat.
I also have in the back of my mind something that might help me learn to play the accordion (no, really!). I have one I bought a couple years ago and it's pretty fun but "teach yourself to play the accordion" almost does not exist. I got tired of spending ages learning to play sheet music of tunes I don't like, but it was all the beginner stuff I could find. A customized program might be what I need and I bet I can get agentic AI to pull something together. (I am too lazy and anti-social to want some meat-bag instructor that I have to make arrangements with).
I do think that most people have not caught on to what AI is like in 2026.
It really turned some kind of corner this year and is wildly better than what it was like just 2 years ago.
AI still has flaws, issues, and tips and tricks to make it work better, but I think that will all get baked into next year's AI, and we aren't far from being Captain Picard shouting wishes into the air and having a computer that does a bang-up job of delivering what you imagined.
RE: How are you using AI(NOT FOR WORK) - strife - 09-02-2026
I probably need to do #3. My oldest email is from 2008 so it's at least that old. Although I only have 10k emails
I deal with AI so much at work, when I come home I just don't feel like spending any real time doing anything that takes actual work, so must of the stuff I do at home is kind of mindless.