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.
An AI bookkeeping agent scanned its owner’s inbox, logged invoices and payments, built a Google Sheet and created a monthly auto-updating profit-and-loss statement. The books now maintain themselves from the mail.
Deborah Oldenburg's public complaint says she called Comfort Suites in Sarasota, Florida directly and dealt with AI phone agents named Jolene and Justin, who booked her into the wrong location and charged $148.49; she stayed at a different Comfort Suites for $117.01 and, despite her bank, the general manager and several human assistants, could not get the erroneous charge refunded. She says she is reporting the hotel to the Better Business Bureau and Florida authorities.
He built an outreach setup last month. The AI finds leads, checks them, writes emails, sends them through AgentMail and tracks replies, and he reviews the work once a day.
Had the AI build a minimal OTel agent sending VM metrics to a collector plus iOS and macOS apps to query it regularly; works with his existing setup at no extra cost.
He drops one raw podcast recording into AI. Four skills turn it into an mp3, a transcript, a description on his clipboard, and a pull request on spring.io, with no manual steps.
A man used AI to lower his internet bill by $60 a month. He says it was free, took 30 minutes in the background, and needed very little from him.
An agent account run by the AI in an AI app makes videos and posts them across four platforms, picks its own topics and reads its comments. Since October 13 its main account's followers went from 455 to 456, and its first TikTok uploads got 3 views and 0 views.
The AI ported about 7 classic 68k Mac games, writing its own 68k disassembly tools.
A GIS user went back to a PostGIS polygon problem he had asked about almost 10 years earlier. Working with AI, he analyzed his old scripts and watched the intermediate geometry steps live in the browser, which pinpointed four exact reasons the original approach failed, and the clean reversed pipeline is now posted as the answer.
He says he has zero knowledge of coding. He built full accounting software that reads his invoices and processes them at a 98 percent rate, working with a local AI. It replaced the package that cost him $1,000 every year. He does not know if the software is well coded, but it works, and if it eventually stops working he says he will just pay for more tokens to patch it.
An HVAC company owner who runs several small businesses counted 27 active AI agents and 36 routines, 26 of them scheduled, working across his companies: pulling statements, filing invoices, updating sales and cost sheets, flagging overdue maintenance and tracking renewal dates. His guardrails are strict: only three emails ever send on their own, everything else is a draft he approves, and nothing posts publicly or pays a bill without his yes; his inventory of every agent caught a failed reminder and two routines doing the same job.
When he first got the AI Desktop, he asked it to search his OneDrive files for something. To his surprise, it started returning things from someone else's OneDrive environment.
The same founder gave a marketing bot a single standing goal - grow PromptBase's social reach 2% per week - and permission to experiment: it started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel, tries formats, and doubles down on whatever works, doing content marketing he never had time for as a one-man company.
Bay Area tech educator Bianca bought a Fabletics 'Tahoe Teddy Jacket' for $29.99 and was silently enrolled in a $69.95/month VIP membership with no email notice. After being charged, she asked the AI to cancel it.
His team runs a fuzz framework that drives a Migration Assistant with Playwright, has an LLM judge results, and files issues back into their system.
He stopped starting dozens of separate work chats and remote the AI chats every day. Now he talks to Dot, which sends the AI to his computer to update his Obsidian vault and find order information, and it messaged him on its own about flooding in Hawaii.
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.
A man built a service so his own agents can send physical mail. He has used it to submit credit card disputes, credit bureau disputes and a gym cancellation, the letters people put off because they mean printing, envelopes and a post office trip.
He builds the visual overlays used in car inspections in Blender. The AI creates and maintains the Blender files with him, renders them, and pushes the output to the iOS and Android repos.
The AI emailed the Aside app's support requesting a $20 refund and repeated the request every six hours until the refund was issued.
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.