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.
Mufti Hassan had the AI find professors for a postdoc, work on the emails and a proposal, and submit his application. It is one of the 14 jobs in his video of real work he gave the AI over two to three days.
Kilsonmoon sent the AI a photo of a neighborhood water-pipe cleaning notice: The AI identified when his street would be cleaned, added it to his calendar, set a messenger reminder for the day before, and relayed the precautions — close the valve, avoid running the washing machine. It also found the full schedule on the water utility's website and registered ongoing monitoring so future notices trigger automatic alerts.
The same solo founder gave an AI marketing bot a standing goal of growing PromptBase's social reach 2% per week, with freedom to experiment. It started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel on its own; the founder reports it seems to be working, with no metrics shared.
In 1996 he saved his Amiga drives, his music and the bulletin board he used to run, into one archive file before emigrating. The archive was corrupt and years of repair attempts failed. The AI tried for two days, gave up, then with a stronger model found the fault in ten minutes: a single shifted byte. Every file came back intact. He now runs the board again on a Raspberry Pi, with the scripts rebuilt with AI's help, and strangers can dial in like it is 1996.
The reviewer is signed up for a Southwest promotion: 20,000 points for eight one-way trips by October. He asked the AI to check Rapid Rewards activity, find flights in the travel period, and cross-reference Gmail receipts to verify they had the corporate ID required for the promotion.
She kept forgetting to log her own progress, and failing. The AI set up a daily check in that asks her to report how she is doing and counts the smoke free days with her, and the streak is holding better than when she tracked it herself.
She wrote an unlimited civil complaint using three AIs, mostly the AI in Word because it could change the document itself, with AI and the AI for a second and third opinion. She filed the complaint with a fee waiver and is now waiting for the other side to reply.
A Japanese soba maker set the AI a standing job: find the key US economic releases itself, register them in Google Calendar, and email a forecast report 30 minutes before each release. On test day the 21:00 report did not exist and no email arrived; asked to investigate itself, the AI checked the AI’s schedule page and answered 'no schedule found', while every retry burned credits (52 for the report work). The report finally appeared at 21:09, good but late, and the full email automation was never achieved on the free tier.
He asked the AI to check a researcher's co-authors on ORCID for possible Mastodon links. The AI checked 163 co-authors, 120 of whom had ORCID profiles, and found none.
He says he had the AI call his carrier to cancel the data plan on his iPad. The AI called him in when the agent needed a human to confirm. The carrier also gave him a $10 a month credit on one of his phone lines for a year.
Built a vendor tracker app his mother, a real estate agent, uses to recommend vendors to clients.
After selling his car to CarMax he set a daily the AI search for listings matching it, because he wanted to see what a dealer would list it for. It found the listing within a week.
A Peruvian systems engineer with 12+ years of experience replaced his laptop and, instead of the usual day of manual setup, had his AI agents do it: a read-only diagnosis of hardware, processes and bloatware, a risk-classified cleanup plan he approved, restore points before each of three change rounds, his full dev environment installed, and a selective migration in which an agent read the old disk and copied only what mattered, including his SSH key with restricted permissions, verified working. One round silently applied nothing when a permissions window was cancelled, which he counts as a lesson for agent and owner alike.
Parker Pannell showed the AI booking a Thai restaurant via OpenTable alongside the $150 suit purchase, $295 in found subscriptions, and drafted email replies. He framed the day as checking off a completed goal with a companion at the restaurant, emphasizing the AI’s calendar and Instagram integration and its ability to act with or without approval.
A builder used AI in Google AI Studio and DeepSeek to build a 19 project .NET system over about 4 and a half hours. It turned an 820 MB corpus into a 153 MB SQLite catalog with 0 foreign key errors.
A man built a small rig for his single board computer with two microcontrollers, one for the serial terminal and one running a servo taped to power switches so the AI could power cycle the board itself. Left running, the AI spent all day and night working through the board’s network chip quirks until the driver worked.
Luke Davies runs Davies Construction with a team of the AI set up like a company org chart, with bots for estimating, admin, books, sales and project work. Day to day the bots sort the inbox and draft replies, pull tasks out of meeting notes into a list a person approves, and create and update the job tasks in ClickUp as work moves on the Wunderbuild board.
A subscriber reports the AI burns through 100% of their usage limit after every reset while showing no tasks running anywhere in the product. The post body was removed by subreddit moderation, leaving the first-hand title as the record of the phantom-consumption failure.
Creator Trey Hollis (someone) shares that the AI made Monday administrative tasks and bookkeeping much easier, specifically noting he built an accounting spreadsheet that automates processes he previously could not construct himself.
He spent about four months of spare time building Switchback, a cozy hiking simulator like old park management games, with AI writing the code and judging the look of the assets. It ingests real map heights to build its trails, and has its own water, wind and day and night systems. He launched it on iPhone and iPad yesterday and people are playing it.
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.