Ingenious ideas that solved difficult problems. Explore what made them work.
The full archive, in the appRashiq Zahid's McBroken bot tries adding a McSundae to a cart at every US McDonald's every 30 minutes; the cart is the sensor, the menu the status page.
Read the caseA travel publisher turned its media audience and five multilingual reviewers watching 1.5M chats into the loop that took its bot from 85% to 98% accuracy.
Read the caseMadrid tripled its metro in 12 years: regional power, standardized stations and round-the-clock tunneling beat the good-fast-cheap trilemma.
Read the caseAn MIT team textured surfaces at micro/nano scale so capillary forces anchor a lubricating oil - a slippery coating 70+ companies signed up for.
Read the caseA hundred WhatsApp groups became a live FX order book; exchangers arbitrage hour-by-hour rates while the official peg pretends it's still 1997.
Read the caseAn internet-connected gadget tapped the Taylor machine's internals, decoded its operating data, and kept the famously broken machines running.
Read the caseA 15,000-member drivers' union circulated laminated rate cards at least 50% above Uber's fares; once the cards were everywhere, passengers stopped resisting.
Read the caseA sensor, fan and insulated box on each old radiator gives tenants control and evens heat through the building — 43% less energy at an 80-year-old complex.
Read the caseHàng xách tay Facebook shops stream UK supermarket purchases live, making authenticity proof the sales channel itself.
Read the caseA Mandiant persona spent months earning trust until hackers invited it into their inner circle — letting Google warn victims and disrupt the extortion.
Read the caseAfter the April 2024 earthquake, 590 Gogoro battery-swap stations dropped 6 MW of demand in seconds, helping the grid recover in 12 minutes.
Read the caseGitHub's Primer team migrated the whole design system off styled-components over three years without breaking github.com — SSR time fell 55% along the way.
Read the caseDigita's Patrick Wardle repurposed Apple's GameplayKit, the rule engine behind video-game behaviour, to evaluate macOS security events and flag the suspicious.
Read the caseLet an LLM write candidate programs, let a checker score them, recycle the best back as prompts: a few days yielded a new, verifiable cap-set result.
Read the caseFedEx and robotics startup Dexterity built DexR, a two-armed AI robot that plans and stacks randomized boxes into tight walls inside delivery trucks.
Read the caseFachos posts deliberately offensive content to bait prominent critics into amplifying it — one politician's angry quote-tweet lifted site visits 300%.
Read the caseIn a Vox interview, author Brendan Koerner recalls 159 US hijackings in 11 years — and how the FAA's January 5, 1973 screening order finally stopped them.
Read the caseTold its product was hated, a Massachusetts dryer maker hired retired MIT physicists, found 90% of dryer energy was waste, and built the 12-second Xlerator.
Read the caseSepsis Watch scores ER patients hourly and gives rapid-response nurses the call — flipping the hospital hierarchy was the price of making it work.
Read the caseEntering after Kuaishou and years after Alibaba, Douyin coupled 1–5% commissions with feed ads and on-platform checkout to dominate livestream shopping.
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