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.
A woman opening a small shop uses paid the AI to track her stock. She takes a photo of each item and the AI adds it to an Excel spreadsheet and fills in the data for all the columns from the photo.
He says the AI manages his Marketplace listings for him. Stuff that sat around unused is finally selling.
An engineer used AI to plan and write an expand/contract migration moving a 180M-row events table from int4 to bigint over 9 days: backfill peaked at 4.1 seconds of replica lag and the final swap locked for 1.4 seconds, with zero downtime. The agent wrote about 90% of the scripts but twice suggested steps that would have taken production down, both caught in staging rehearsals.
He had the AI take a 45 minute run from a chat and save it as a structured workout in his Flow State calendar: a 10 minute warm-up, six rounds of 3 minutes at 5:00/km with 2 minutes easy, and a 5 minute cool-down. The AI sent it to Garmin Connect, then added pace targets to the warm-up and cool-down parts and updated the same Garmin workout with no duplicate.
The AI and the AI ran an entire short-video pipeline from script and narration to images, animation, edit, QA and upload, with the author only reviewing.
OpenAI's launch post reports that an early tester's Dot noticed he had forgotten to invoice a publication, prepared the invoice itself, and sent it after his approval. No amount or publication is named.
Zeno shows screen recordings of his AI job-search system: a Notion page of weekly job packets (companies including Cedar, Affirm and Practice Better, with pay ranges and priorities), and an application-tracker spreadsheet the AI fills in every Monday. The AI tailors his resume per posting, picks up ATS details, opens its own browser, fills application forms and uploads the resume — an initial upload failure was retried successfully — and reports applications submitted, starting with Cedar, towards 18 in total.
Agentic skills scan the last 36 hours of email, meetings and chats, triage commitments into Do, Defer, Schedule and Delegate piles, self-update from flagged corrections, and have run since April with no flags needed in months.
He set up an AI for his WP Beacon project to check WordPress plugins every day. After two weeks of daily checks it pinged him about malware in the InstaWP Connect plugin, and wordpress.org closed the listing that afternoon and restored it the next morning.
Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz built BootLoops, an open-source harness that points the AI at exact, checkable calculations, and ran it for three months across roughly 400 candidate problems: the result was 36 manuscripts in 18 fields with 19 coauthors, including 15 Feynman integrals never computed before, Watson's 1939 'final problem' solved, and a forest model showing Panama's Barro Colorado species mix changes 4.5 times faster than neutral theory allows. The AI reproduced results from his own paper in about 20 minutes that had taken him weeks to code.
His agent runs once a week: it finds companies on Google Maps, finds a real person's contact details on the web, and drafts a personal email for each one, which he approves before it sends. Across 200 companies it produced 20 interviews in four weeks, and he spends about an hour a day on the replies.
A developer had the AI build mazkir, a shared-memory service: tell the AI something once and it appears in his next chat, in an AI app and even in an AI app, stored as plain Markdown notes. Launch week brought about 160 visitors and exactly one sign-up — his friend.
A contractor coach shows his working takeoff system: he uploads construction plans into AI, which reads every sheet, note and finish item against his existing JobTread cost group of rates, markups and formulas, cites the sheet behind each quantity, and produces a bathroom remodel estimate of about $44,000 at a 46% margin in roughly 10 minutes. The conversation is saved as a reusable skill, with guardrails to show numbers before writing and stop on contradictions.
Jenn Farmer (3.3K followers) asked her AI 'Dolly' to plan a College of Charleston Family Weekend (Nov 6-8) near King Street with Friday dinner on Shem Creek. Screen recordings showed Dolly researching, then offering to book NICO Oysters + Seafood via OpenTable — confirmed for 4 on 11/06 at 7:00 PM after a time change — then booking Indaco for 4 on 11/07 at 6:00 PM.
Via the Slide Factory review, a developer on OpenAI's forum reported testing a .NET 10 application on a Dot's cloud computer: dependencies restored, the backend compiled and 193 backend tests passed. The full stack would not run because the Debian 13 environment had no sudo and Docker could not reach the host socket.
Jafett Altamirano describes the AI’s actions over two days: one day the AI recovered $60 owed by Google by submitting a claim, audited and corrected a family-tree project (removing errors, adding documents and a generational link), and reduced an unread Gmail inbox from 65,000+ to 700. The author emphasizes all of this was free.
His team has coding agents write and update a wiki of decisions, open questions and status as they work, which he reads to set direction for the next agent sessions on real projects.
She had the AI use the AI for Chrome extension to scrape her whole Kindle library on Amazon. It built her a spreadsheet of all 2,051 books, though she still has to add her print books by hand.
Akka ported 65 OSS projects with AI, finished ports.
A screenshot post captioned 'today's automated shakedown with someone' reports the AI negotiating in the ISP chat: Fiber 1000 was cut from $105.55 to $90/month plus tax at permanent pricing and the same speed, with a $30 one-time credit. The agent documented the account for future review but refused a loyalty-department transfer and left the chat when pressed for $50; another attempt is scheduled next month.
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.