A recurring focus on playful "stupid side projects" motivates building small, useful tools. AI products that generate outputs from prompts enable rapid experimentation but carry risks of poor input quality. A common household problem is tracking which bin is collected and when, with current solutions ranging from asking neighbours to printing council PDFs. A minimal solution called whatbin.fyi provides a straightforward interface to display bin and recycling collection dates and view options. The creator used a collaborative AI weekend with tools like Lovable, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to prompt and produce the web app quickly.
In particular, products that allow people to describe what they want, and it creates it for them. That obviously sounds great. And it is. But it can also be bad. Trash in, trash out. There's a billion articles and opinions about this, so I won't add another. But I will talk for 3 minutes about how I used one of these products, Lovable, to create another one of my stupid ideas.
This might just be a problem I'm solving for me, my wife, and my parents, but the big dilemma is: How do you know which bin gets collected, and when? Do you look for guidance from your neighbour, by peering out the window at 6am? Do you add repeating events on your phone calendar? Or do you enter your postcode on your local council website, print a PDF of the collection calendar and stick it to the back of your kitchen cupboard?
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