Real things everyday people got it to do, and how to try them yourself.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Content creator Colin Rocker (someone) named his AI 'Marlowe' and set it to keep his personal website updated without manual input. Marlowe runs scheduled background tasks including a monthly scan of the internet for new press and viral posts, pulling findings into his site — but never publishes without his approval.
A puzzle solver designed tests for whether a circulated image hid steganographic data, and used AI to help write the scripts and qualify signal and noise across JPG compression formats. He ran the tests with standard tools on every copy of the image he could find, and nothing extracted from any of them, which settled that the image itself carries no hidden payload.
A small business owner linked PayPal to the AI. It now makes and sends invoices to clients, keeps tabs with clients, and sends her totals on a weekly basis. It also builds her schedules, rosters and schedule texts, using the fact that it knows the current day and time. She says the setup made her cancel her $20 AI subscription.
Over four weeks of evenings, an AI agent wrote the firmware, the live web chart, the Node-RED automation and the enclosure CAD for his radar stair light, driving a live Fusion 360 session through its scripting API. He reviewed, printed and measured, and the second half of the video lists what the agent got confidently wrong, including a radome gap that landed on exactly a quarter wavelength.
He runs a small home service business. On site his crew capture photos and notes into a CRM; the AI reads the CRM over a connector, studies the photos and writes the full client report he used to write himself. When the report is done he tells the AI to send the invoice, and it builds the Stripe invoice from the project notes and sends it to the customer.
Niraj Rajgor's unused 10th generation Kindle is now a photo frame. Working through AI over Wi-Fi, GPT-6 Astra built tools to run custom software on the Kindle and installed a slideshow app that cycles ten photos, four minutes each, and picks up where it left off after sleep.
He had the AI answer a Slack notification from a Datadog monitor. The AI checked the issue through Datadog MCP, found the right Slack group to ping, and sent a summary of what needed fixing.
His kids' school sends 4 to 5 messages a day through My Child At School, an app he calls a beta version of AOL Instant Messenger. He created an agent with AI that logs in to it and sends him and his wife a daily summary email.
A developer tired of managing terminal windows one way and other windows another way grew his own replacement with AI over the course of a few months, one that treats graphical apps as part of the session too. He uses it now and says he has never looked back.
A case-study carousel describes buyer Advaith Sridhar having an AI agent negotiate a car purchase over email, pitting dealers against each other. It saved $2,102 off sticker — a premium model at a base-car price — with no in-person haggling.
Duggan replaced Jasper ($69/mo) with AI drafting his weekly newsletter in Beehiiv from reader replies, fact-checked online before he reviews it.
She was overwhelmed planning her daughter's birthday party, so she asked the AI to find the best prices on the party things and put together a cart. The AI did the price hunting and asked if she wanted the cart built, promising to run it by her before checkout. She said yes. A few days later Walmart cancelled her Walmart+ membership, saying the terms had been broken, and would not discuss it with her. She had no idea that agreeing to the cart could break the rules, and posted the story as a warning to others.
A man wired his lab instruments to his home network, put all their manuals and programming guides into an AI project, and the AI wrote most of the first set of Python programs that control the instruments and pull data from them. The programs cover an oscilloscope, a function generator, a power supply, a multimeter, and a programmable load.
A machine-learning user built a bridge ('wand') letting his AI act on his Mac remotely from his phone. The AI reads his Terminal, reports training-run stats like epoch, loss, and accuracy, and can lock the machine on request.
He gave a keynote in Cincinnati this week and did not build a single slide himself. He told his AI assistant the talk, it made the deck, and he fixed it by text.
In the same Vergecast clip, a host describes the AI connected to his Google Calendar: seeing a media dinner party in his evening, the AI advised taking a city bike instead of the subway because it would be faster, and pinged him at 9:20 to leave in time for a 9:30 arrival. The hosts frame it as the AI being proactive to the point of feeling directive.
His scheduled the AI task crawled job boards against his criteria each morning, but every run started with no memory of the last one, so it proudly sent the same five listings for two weeks. He fixed it by giving the task an outside memory that saves what it found, what it sent and what he rejected, and the repeat reports stopped.
His AI Scout built a staged pre-trip checklist ('a few days before', 'day before', 'morning of') for traveling with his dog — pet-friendly lodging, vaccinations, mail hold, packing — then sent reminders that day and a final 8:41 AM morning checklist before they drove off.
Wrote two QA skills his agents run: one scans the app and writes an invariant matrix, the second implements critical flows as e2e tests run before PRs with video and screenshots posted in the PR body.
An AppleVis user had the AI file missing American Airlines mileage-shopping claims for two Best Buy purchases made during a tax holiday, pulling receipt data from Gmail. The user got the confirmation email that the claims were filed.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.