Lots of Fun Ideas
Created: 2023-2025
Tunnels are Underrated
A lot of people are working on securing the oceans, air, and land. But who is securing the subterranean?
Good, cheap, fast tunnel-boring robots could help secure supply lines in war zones, where drones make the surface dangerous. They could also help with traffic, desalinated water, and package delivery straight to apartment buildings.
Fix the baby supply chain
How do we make it easier to conceive, deliver, and raise children? (essentially building the foundations for 1 Trillion Humans across our galaxy)
- ”Costs of child care now outpace college tuition in 38 states”
- Also, there needs to be more of a social movement around this. For example, airlines have known for decades that flying with babies is difficult, yet they haven't done anything. Why?
- Fertility numbers have fallen dramatically in most countries. Not good not good!
New Types of Guns
I fundamentally believe in the right to self-defense. But guns still feel like a primitive way to defend yourself and your family. Given the technology we have, they are probably the most cost-effective option, but we should be trying much harder to make non-lethal weapons that neutralize threats instantly: temporary paralysis, tranquilizers, etc.
Synthetic meat is lazy
- We should think of food from first principles.
- Also, we should make really good food for astronauts!
- If you could talk to animals, then would you stop eating them? It is not unreasonable to think that we will be able to talk to animals soon given advances in AI. So, given this scenario, shouldn't we prepare for this future and take synthetic food seriously?
New types of clothes
Why are clothes so boring? Feels like we have regressed. Why don't the big designers make more technologically advanced clothes?
I wanna see Off-White Iron Man nanotech hoodies, a Tom Ford bulletproof men's suit, solar-panel t-shirts, full-camouflage quarter zips, indestructible shoes, and Dior skin-tight overalls for Amazonian exploration so no insects can bite you. Put that stuff at the Met Gala. Edna from Incredibles would understand.
- How can I make my own clothes? Surely AI tools are good enough now that they can design clothes for me?
I have beef with IKEA
Midjourney is already so good at designing novel interior, furniture, clothes, accessories, etc. Now how do we productize this? Maximize experimentation, chaos, and beauty. Fight back against mass manufactured standardized slop (IKEA)!
IRL Pokemons: Make Robot Pets
- Animatronics for different form factors (see how the Disney robot communicates via its gait, head bobbing, sounds, etc.)
- Fun idea: How do we collect pet dog/cat data and use that to make robot pets?
- Even more fun: Your robot pet levels up as it interacts with other robot pets. It unlocks new skills, techniques, voices, etc.
- if not physical: foundation models for dog motion/voice, this decade's Talking Tom
Better Health Tools For Women
I've been dating my gf for ~7 years, and have seen how bad period pain can be. Why aren't there better health tools for this?
Daily life health optimization tools are non-existent
Every day is different. How do you make sure you are ~100% optimized every day?
At-home testing, diagnosis, custom med delivery, food recommendations, etc. Imagine if your organs could talk to you and tell you how they are doing. I mean this quite literally.
Books -> Movies
I want to see and feel what it must be like for Juan Trippe to build Pan Am. Imagine the crowd, the excitement, and the curiosity of seeing a metal bird for the first time and humans come out of it! Imagine what it must be like to fly in the glory days of flying. Imagine the conversation with FDR that led to the creation of InterContinental Hotels!
Better HVAC systems
- How do we make HVAC systems that can detect, identify, and analyze pathogens? Imagine if HVAC systems at major airports alerted us in 2018 of new types of viruses.
- UVC: UVC light can kill all sorts of microorganisms. We don't know for certain if we can put it safely around humans, so just put it in the HVAC system!
- How do HVAC systems change as we move to solar?
- Can they help us fix the mold problem? Is there an insurance play here?
- Could a better HVAC system have detected the early signs of a COVID leak inside the Wuhan lab? Why didn't it?
- I suspect that the bathroom hand dryers are actually pretty useless since they don't really kill germs/remove odor. I bet we can install technology I mentioned above here as well. Moreover, bathrooms are likely very good places to detect outbreaks.
Cure UC
More than 5 million people have ulcerative colitis (someone very close to me also has it)
Drone ideas
- Is it possible to mass manufacture extremely strong and light nets to put around public areas, expensive assets, etc?
- Put a camera/mini radar/microphone on a lot of rooftops in a city to blanket it and create a protective "shield". Early detection & tracking is very important.
Company Archivist
We should do a better job of archiving the history and stories of companies: the characters, weird decisions, core events, near-death moments, etc. Wikipedia captures very little of this and is often outdated.
There should be a platform where you can read Walter Isaacson-style biographies of every major company. I think LLMs can help a lot here. Imagine digesting all published news and continuously updating each company’s record.
(there is still no authoritative and comprehensive book on the development, history, and people behind Pokemon!)
Better Wargaming Environments
We can now make incredibly complex environments using LLMs to simulate different scenarios and training. Current wargaming software is likely not dynamic and intelligent. You could make a really really good game with this too!
- Wargames == evaluation engines for war. They close the feedback loop when testing complex AI systems and groups of systems. Imagine pushing an update to your drone to make it more robust against jamming, then immediately testing it in thousands of scenarios.
- The Air Force is looking into it
AGI Questions & Trades
- What will the internet look like in five years when bots account for more than 90% of traffic (~50% right now)?
- Number of bits per second will increase by a lot? Internet is going to be so much bigger! Meter, Cloudflare, etc. companies that make bits move will do well.
- AI models are going to be everywhere, and my bias is to 10x whatever people think the demand for inference is going to be. The entire supply chain to construct and supply power to a data center needs to be looked at.
- Good questions: https://dcgross.com/agitrades
- How is the world going to look like when labor (humanoids or task-specific embodiments) cost <1k?
- Humanoids are going to be such interesting members of everyone's household!
- What do browsers and websites look like when everyone has a personal AI agent?
- Purely from a speed perspective, calling one API is better than clicking 10 buttons. So how does your agent use the internet and find info? How do websites tell you this?
- Should websites have micropayments to allow bots to use them?
- How do I make it so my personal assistant LLM can tell a website my preferences? The website LLM can ask questions back, and the two systems can coordinate to show me the best content and ads.
- Marketplace of specialized AI agents: When you ask your agent a question, instead of googling, it goes to a marketplace, chooses the best "docgpt", "lawyergpt", etc., pays it, and returns the answer?
- Was the Mighty Browser ahead of its time? A browser in the cloud with a GPU attached to it that runs a personalized model would be very useful. Long live Mighty! Browser = OS
- Build things for AIs with their personalities and preferences in mind. Treat them more like entities and less like tools.
- The context storage problem: soon I am going to generate infinitely more personal data than I do right now. Toothbrush, toilet, wearables, implants, sunglasses that record everything, and all the conversations I have with LLMs about my work and personal life.
- The funny thing is that all these data points need each other to give me the best answers. If my health assistant does not have my toothbrush data, it will probably miss something!
- Also, there will be a lot of "appliance" businesses that sell me good hardware and collect my data. But if only they have the data, it is useless to me. I want consumer apps built on top of it: health assistants, personal assistants, business assistants, etc.
- So who owns this data? How do they talk to each other? How do they compensate each other? Where is it stored? Should every human get some dedicated compute/storage?
World's Getting Older! What happens next?
- Long companies catering to old people given an aging population? esp food, drugs, services, and housing tailored to their needs
- What happens to life insurance companies (and Bermuda)?
- Aging population -> more demand for exoskeletons to move around?
Solar & Future of Petrochemicals
How do petrochemical margins change with increase in demand for renewables? Which ones do we not have alternatives for? What are the downstream economic and n-order effects?
- Buy land? There's probably a finite number of prime locations for solar farms
- China currently dominates the supply chain (and deployment) of solar panels
- Cheap Chinese solar in Pakistan is terrible for its grid. What happens to the grid in other countries like Pakistan? Rich people and industry stop using grid electricity, less money flows in, upgrades slow down, infrastructure decays, outages increase, poor people lose access, loans default?
- https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/the-solar-industrial-revolution-is-the-biggest-investment-opportunity-in-history/
- The future of plastics is interesting. If the cultural reaction to microplastics is extremely negative, then will we start phasing them out slowly? Obviously, it will take a long time and it is unclear what the replacement will be but will likely coincide with petrochemicals getting more expensive.
- Will the price of jet fuel go up? If so air travel is going to be so much more miserable
- If Solar cost curve keeps falling, then the current state of geopolitics backed by US energy exports also changes?
- For Africa: Does this help the continent? Cheap electricity everywhere without depending too much on any external power?
- My prediction for the chemical industry: China will make what China wants, then flood the world with cheap chemicals. That will be disastrous for countries that don't protect their domestic industry. But you can only protect your own industry for so long. If China supplies the world, it gets the higher learning rate and ends up far ahead. I genuinely don't know how to fix this beyond finding better branches of the tech tree.
Arctic's warming up! What's the trade?
- new shipping routes -> ports, infra, ships, fuel, insurance, etc
- interesting:
- Arctic has roughly a quarter of the unexplored oil and natural gas reserves on earth, as well as 150 rare earth deposits
- The Arctic Sea is relatively shallow, making it amenable to exploitation, climatic conditions permitting, with 240 species of fish in ample quantities
- Most importantly, the US has failed to build up domestic icebreaker capacity.
- It also has not built the naval capabilities needed to contest the Russian and Chinese buildup along Arctic sea lanes.
- The US has no Arctic deepwater ports that can host heavy container ships. Canada has only one, and it is 500 miles south of the Arctic Circle.
- Russia has over 40 icebreakers, several of them nuclear-powered, plus an active building program. The US currently lacks even a single heavy or medium-duty icebreaker active in the Arctic.
Hyperlocal Geoengineering
How do we reduce the temperature of a city by 10 degrees Celsius for 10 days?
Cities in India already hit 50 degrees Celsius during the summer. Millions of people live in these places. There isn't really an option here? Either we learn how to do this, or we accept hundreds of millions of people living through extreme heat and thousands of deaths every summer.
- Plus, we should learn how to terraform planets. Earth and Mars both need it. The closest other planet is Venus, we should use it as a testbed to experiment with planet scale geoengineering.
- Could an adversary take out your solar farms by basically sending a big cloud or making it rain a lot? Best to develop capabilities to understand the weather better, manipulate it more precisely, and defend against it at a moment's notice.
Prune Laws
How do we prune laws and "dead code" laws to make government, tax code, etc. more efficient?
Would be fun to do something like this: https://x.com/deanwball/status/1993184056293703691
Finding new things in existing datasets with LLMs
What domains have large, poorly-organized digital datasets that likely contain undiscovered insights, similar to how:
- Six new tree species identified in Colombia and Panama were found in existing botanical data
- AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose were discovered in existing survey data
- What other fields might yield similar breakthroughs through brute-force LLM analysis?
- lots of other archaeological stuff?
- can we organize, clean and expand the world’s datasets? what are the most important datasets in each field?
- https://x.com/raven_brah/status/1999499762064900285
- finding flaws in existing papers: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00648-5
- can we use LLMs to solve MH370?
- astronomy prolly has really cool things like this: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09818-x
Information backup to restart civilization
- Snapshot, compress and store the internet every day in a secure facility. Like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, construct a backup for all of the world's information.
- A good way to do this would be to fork Wikipedia and have AI Agents continuously update and create new pages based on things that happen every day.
- We can document all movies, shows, recipes, videos, etc. like this
- also you want to get the hidden info as well like food recipes!
- Lots of interesting compression and retrieval problems here. How do you store the information? How do you communicate it? How will people find it when they need it?
Vaping became popular ~10 years ago
How many more years before we see an explosion in related health issues and what might they be?
Strengthen civilization infrastructure
You don't have to look too hard to realize that it is a miracle that anything works. We really really need to strengthen the core services our lives depend on like water, food, sewage, medicine, electricity, etc.
How do we protect ourselves against a Carrington Event? Can we put a machine between us and the sun that could deflect/absorb CMEs?
Things NASA should’ve done but hasn't
- Congress tasked NASA to find >90% of NEOs (bigger than 140m) by 2020 in 2005, but as of 2020, we are only tracking ~43% of them. will NEO Surveyor cover the rest?
- Important climate satellites are going to die soon: Three NASA Climate Satellites Are Dying. There’s No Plan to Replace Them
- Tangentially, how do you monetize finding aliens? telescopes, lenses, optics, etc?
Agriculture ideas
- I want new types of fruits/vegetables!
- Technology makes the non-scalable, scalable. Right now, we monitor/harvest/plant/fertilize farms at scale vs at the level of each individual plant. What would be a good reason to NOT focus on such technologies?
- Also, I know that soil erosion is a massive problem. What is the solution?
- COOOLL: https://news.mit.edu/2025/engineered-bacteria-emit-signals-spotted-from-distance-0411
Food science is one of the most underrated fields of study
- It’s kinda funny how little we know about food.
- It’s also kinda funny that we just eat random food every day. Why is there nothing that can recommend specific products from specific stores near me based on my health markers, goals, and how I feel today? Why does personalized food not exist? The answer is not "hire a chef". Technology makes the non-scalable scalable, and I’m interested in technology answers.
- Also, how much do we actually know about each vegetable/fruit? Why don’t we have chefs that are also engineers/scientists? I want new recipes that go beyond mixing ingredients. I want to taste flavors that nobody in history has tasted!! For ex: cook ingredient X at a specific temperature, and chemical reaction Y happens that will produce a wonderful smell!
- "Global food demand will rise ~51% by 2050 while farms face shrinking labor, aging workers, and higher input costs."
I think there is a massive opportunity here for a company to do the following:
- we have no idea what we eat, how good it is for us, where it comes from, etc.
- so, verticalize this. become a company that researches, tests, makes, grows, etc. all sorts of basic food products.
- branding + marketing this is easy. engineering + science is the hard part, but I think it is doable. I don't think anyone has tried this before?
- (there might be a way to tighten up the feedback loop here by figuring out different ways to track what people are eating, how it makes them feel, how it changes their vitals over time, etc.)
Movie ideas
- [Disney-style movie, a fly’s perspective/universe] A fly and its family live close to an airport. The airport is forbidden territory. One day, the fly and its friends sneak in, make their way onto a plane, get transported to another country, and have to find their way back.
- The Alchemy of Air
- AI tools are good enough now that we can make really good alternate history shows/movies
- History is monetizable now
- video ai models are really good now
- POV/day-in-the-life short-form videos do really well on all socials (example: how the Egyptians celebrated when the last brick was laid on the pyramids, what a French peasant's day was like on some random important day in French history, what a firefighter saw during 9/11, etc.)
- If you rack up hundreds of millions of views a month, then build tools that let anyone make this kind of content, you can make a lot of money. Use that money to fund history research, then make the most accurate and detailed videos possible.
- time machine would be a good name for this
Cities are the most undervalued asset class
- Most cities are horribly managed. Small improvements in niche systems can have a huge impact on the lives of ~everyone living in that city.
- It really pisses me off that the government doesn't have respect for the time of its citizens.
Claude Code for Everything
- Claude Code / Codex are new types of tools. They are "universal interfaces". Not only do they change how we interact with software, they also completely change how we interface with the physical world.
- For example: I had an issue with my 3D printer recently. I wasn't able to figure out why my prints were not sticking to the bed. So I connected it via USB to my laptop, opened Claude Code, gave it the model number of my printer, and asked it to help me debug it.
- First, it gave me a checklist of things to make sure it wasn't due to something dumb like a loose screw, residue on the bed, etc.
- When that didn't work, it wrote Python scripts to read the state of my printer. It knew how to do this for the specific brand I have. It inspected my STL files, edited print parameters to fit the quirks of my 3D model, and ran calibration tests by itself. At this point, Claude was in charge of my printer. It had figured out the best settings for my model and created a dashboard for me to monitor the run.
- My printers were ~2h long, and I didn't want to babysit the printer. So I took an old Logitech webcam I had, connected it via USB to my laptop, asked Claude to write me a script, and within a few minutes I was all set up! Claude had vision now. It could actually see how the print was doing.
- Do you realize how insane this is? An AI debugged a physical machine, configured it, and then helped me monitor it.
- All machines built in the future, from your dishwasher to your router, will be "Claude Codeable". They will either talk to their manufacturer's AI to help fix themselves when things break, or the user will be able to connect to them via wifi/serial and fix it themselves.
- You will fail if you don't make your machines keeping in mind the strengths and limitations of these (and future) models.
- (Related: What does iFixit for the Claude Code era look like?)
This brings me to my next point! There is a good business reason now for us to start rebuilding a lot of our physical world. Example:
- Claude code can interact with the physical infra/machines all around us, but up to a limit. It will always be constrained by how good the hardware is, and the interface to program it. The Tesla analogy is perfect here. You can retrofit an ICE car with better software/sensors to build autopilot, but it is far easier to do it with an electric car.
- When designing new machines, infra, etc. you will have the option of designing the "perfect" machine for a given task based on its requirements. But I think we should nudge away from that a little bit by adding another requirement: The machine must be claude codeable. I must be able to program the machine in a way that exploits the strengths of the ai coding models
- This way we can ride the wave of 100s of billions of dollars spent on these coding models!
- Tangential, but new types of UX unlock if you treat machines like this. If controlling hardware becomes a code problem, you can add convenience features cheaply. Tesla doors unlock as you get closer to them. It's all software! The more programmable a machine is, the more alive it feels, and the more we can do for the user.
It’s kinda sad that there is no more land left
- How can we mass produce islands?
- Are there geographies where this is actually possible? Shallow waters, sparse islands, available materials, etc.
- Take remote island -> cover half the island with solar panels, the other half is some energy-intensive industry -> pay reflect orbital to reflect sunlight back to the island -> cheap unlimited energy??
Protecting the world's rubber trees
More than 90% of the world's natural rubber comes from Hevea rubber trees in Southeast Asia (mainly Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, plus some India). Natural rubber is still used in a lot of industries (ex: airplane tires). South American leaf blight is a fungus that destroys Hevea rubber trees. We don't know how to prevent it, and are just relying on hope that it doesn't make it to Southeast Asia from South America.
This video is a good summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFXLZ7FEJc4
The world is vastly underestimating how much things will change with Waymo+Zipline.
Exoskeletons are Underrated
Why is my toilet so dumb, how do we make it smarter?
How do we strengthen our bodies? We are so weak physically! How do I make it so that I can get hit by a car and simply dust myself off?
Quest: Claude Code meets Dungeons and Dragons
Added 24th April, 2026
It has been 3 years since ChatGPT came out, and I still cannot believe how little we have explored the surface area of games + claude code/codex.
Here's a fun idea:
A multiplayer CLI game designed to be played in between coding sessions. You and your friends form clans, get dropped on an island, explore, build skills, and try to defeat every other clan. Think MUD meets Diplomacy meets A Dark Room, but the dungeon master is Claude and your character's abilities come from how you actually use Claude Code.
What specific things can we do to improve our culture for the LLMs?
Added 24th April, 2026
“There should be grants/funding for culture-building for LLMs! fixing the rotting cultural feedback loops >>> policy for saving the world” https://x.com/anthrupad/status/1896962309572157625.
We should make the digital world healthier for the llms. Garbage In, Garbage Out.