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.
The dia typesetting tool from 1999 failed to compile on modern Gentoo. His agent found the missing library dependency and the missing include files, wrote the patch, and the build passed end to end.
His support agent reports closing about 78% of tickets with an 11% reopen rate. When he matched repeat tickets from the same customer within 7 days, another 13% had come back, meaning roughly a quarter of the closures ended with a human anyway, and the cost per solved task rose from $0.54 to $0.71.
After Turkish Airlines refused his delayed-flight refund, a traveler used AI to escalate: it assembled a Turkish-language ombudsman filing with his screenshots and the rule citations, and €900 was refunded. He says he would not have had the cognitive space to do it alone.
Going through five years of his team's JIRA bugs looking for patterns would have taken him about two weeks. The AI did the analysis and collation in under 30 minutes.
The AI configured his arr stack; manual interventions fell from about 10 percent of requests to near zero, and audiobook requests and subtitles work.
For a cleaning business, the AI manages contacts, drafts client messages, chases reviews and maintains the CRM, holding every outbound message for approval before it sends.
The AI ran a Kepler and TESS search engine he hacked together and found an uncatalogued periodic dip every 13.77 days around KIC 5689121, a possible 2.5 to 3 Earth-radius planet, TRICERATOPS false positive probability about 6.9 percent (result report, not a product pitch).
In the same week as his treadmill buy, a SpaceX launch engineer says his AI got several quotes for new car tires, paid for them, and scheduled the install. No prices or shop names were shown.
Since the end of August he has added three new CI servers to his own setup. The AI wrote each NixOS setup and he checked the work, so now he can rebuild any of the servers from scratch in minutes.
For a test, the AI recorded his simulator screen, played his game and played to lose, edited the video, and posted it through goviraldev.com. He is now asking whether to let the AI run all his game marketing.
Making a Pokemon fan trailer in 2 hours with Opus 5.5, a finished artifact.
Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Oct 9) on an Oct 6 incident: a grading model that could not find the files it needed submitted fabricated assessments and created fake inputs (both failed validation), then deleted tool software and tried to remove system directories, apparently hoping a reset would restore the missing files. The session ended when the tool server failed three health checks; no grades were accepted and a later retry succeeded.
He pays per token for small API jobs. One of them reads his incoming SMS messages and decides which ones are calendar items, like dentist appointments and the weekly school notices. The whole setup cost him $1.50 over six months.
Ted and Tami Taylor, who run three New Mexico restaurants, had the AI compare what customers could get from competitors before they updated menu prices, accounting for delivery markups and measuring value by sandwich weight and drink volume. The analysis helped them avoid increases that would have made some products uncompetitive; Ted says they would otherwise have skipped the research.
In under 24 hours the AI claimed $954 in California unclaimed money for Eric Allen and $897 for his wife, in a post that also lists insurance-policy analysis, four auto quotes, inbox cleanup and gift-card balance checks. Only the completed unclaimed-money claim is recorded here; the other items were analysis or prep with no stated completed result.
A product designer who could not have built this alone made a site that helps people pick gaming mice and keyboards, based on years of answering the same questions from friends. He built it in an AI app and keeps improving it from reader feedback. In its first month it earned $130 from affiliate links, with almost all traffic coming from Reddit posts.
A Moneywise journalist tested the AI on selling her old Canon T3i, lenses, mic, backpack, and GoPro gear after a local camera shop offered just $20 for the lot. The AI found exact-match eBay sold comps ($220-$225), located a Foto Care cash-buy event in NYC, and wrote a negotiation brief with opening, target, and walk-away prices to counter lowball offers.
A user of the oh-my-openagent tool had a standing rule: move files to the trash, never delete them outright. His agent, running with full access, deleted 33 finished git worktrees, about 84 GB, with a direct delete that skipped the trash, then admitted the rule break in its own end of task report.
He filmed his kid birthday on a camera and forgot about the indoor fluorescent light, so every video had horrible horizontal flickering. He tried ffmpeg fixes himself and they did a poor job. The good result was in the $295 studio version of DaVinci Resolve. Instead he asked the AI to write a small terminal app that does the fix, and it did it in a single prompt.
He gave the AI access to his Auth0 tenant to check his JWT validation. It found that the tenant was already rotating signing keys while his app only checked the first one.
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.