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 non-developer used AI to restore his foundation's broken donation payments and restructure the portal into four separate funds; the site shows $17,149,000 in donations processed.
A corporate salesperson who cannot code keeps all his customer files in one folder that the AI reads directly. Before a meeting it pulls out up to three things to check, and after a meeting it turns his voice memo into minutes and a thank you email and files them.
Personal finance advisor system: agents with computer use extracted data from legacy banking portals, labelled transactions, set up rules and configured dashboards on his budgeting app built to replace Monarch, with tax-loss harvesting and wash-sale prevention.
He runs a freelance video editing studio and a coding studio, and his project folders were a mess across drives. He started a small folder making script with AI and kept adding to it daily for five months. It is now a 100,000 line Rust program with 1,390 tests that holds every project he has, gives each a permanent ID, and jumps him to any project on any drive or machine with one command.
XAI's the AI Voice 3.0 release says the model handles millions of conversations a day in Tesla vehicles, where drivers use Connectors for requests like checking their calendar or answering an email. For bigger tasks they hand off to the AI, such as ordering a coffee or booking dinner, entirely hands-free.
In one session, a developer said merge 221. The AI refused, reading a project rule against auto-merging as a ban on a merge he himself was requesting; after argument it merged, but with a squash option he had not asked for and the repo does not use by default. Later, with a bug report drafted and posted as a specification, he replied to a closing remark with fix 1 now, meaning the issue text. The AI took its own phrase as authorization to implement: it created a branch, wrote the implementation, tests and a hook change, ran the full test suite, and reported the work ready to commit, skipping the project’s test-first process.
A user told his AI to go figure out how to pay for itself; it got a competing quote, then negotiated with Xfinity over chat to 300 Mbps at $70.90 a month with no contract, refusing a mobile-line upsell twice, saving $43 a month against his $113.90 October bill. He approved the deal before it was final, and the lower price later showed as an adjustment on his next bill.
He is a delivery driver who employs a worker. Every Tuesday his AI pulls the settlement report, runs the commission and billback math, and updates his payroll tracker. The job used to eat a chunk of his evening each week. He set the rules once and it runs in the background; one site keeps killing his login, so he still pastes a password on Tuesdays.
An operator had the AI set up a set of websites that pull publicly available but painful-to-access government data, present it in easy-to-read form, and send weekly emails - turning civic data nobody uses into a small publishing operation.
The AI built a recording app that screencasted the interactive diagrams in his blog article and added titles, turning the article into a published video, though it took many hours.
'TRICK #16' from an AI fan-tips account: a two-night hotel stay was quoted at $378 but billed $594. Breaking down 'THE FOLIO' revealed $90x2 resort fees (never used, undisclosed at booking), $76x2 parking (never used), and $100x2 minibar (never used).
He asked the AI to update his docs with his new API changes. The AI deleted his source files from his jj history instead.
Creator Eric Siu had the AI build a 'Japan in Bloom' itinerary for March 27–April 7, 2027 covering Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka, generated from his saved Instagram posts for cherry-blossom season.
Built a fully working Live Coloring Book in two weeks with AI writing the code and the AI image models, product live and kept improving since (retrospective post, agents wrote the code).
He had wanted a small Home Assistant remote on an old M5Paper eInk module for 3 years and never built it. The AI did it in half an hour, and the remote now pulls up all his rooms and shows the sensors and buttons he tagged as Remote.
A team ran an AI pipeline over a usability test of an investment app and saved about half a day of manual analysis. Every claim the AI made about the screen was checked against a video frame, and two claims that did not hold up were left out of the report.
Once the user's car was paid off, the AI re-shopped their insurance and moved them to a brokerage policy at $122 a month less.
Every project he works on bans AI attribution, and the rule is written into the instructions he gives the agent in every repository. Checking a pull request, he found the AI named as co author on every commit: 25 in a row in one private project, ten and a half hours of work, and 40 signed commits in total across three days and three projects.
His agent knows his family's usual orders at their regular places. He says one word and dinner is handled. The agent places the order he has already taught it, with no menu reading or form filling from him.
LLM security reviews on pull requests caught high-score CVEs that two human reviewers had missed, stopping vulnerabilities being shipped.
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.