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 new dad on paternity leave built a full baby tracker with AI in a week, then opened it to other parents as a cheaper SaaS after finding existing trackers obscenely priced. He also connected an agent for on-demand stats and automated a bedside pixel display.
He caught the new supernova SN 2026aaiv in NGC 7331 from his backyard with a Seestar S50, taking 371 ten-second shots. With a lot of help from the AI he measured its brightness for the first time, getting V = 12.5 plus or minus 0.2.
He spent 2 hours giving the AI very specific instructions, in queued grouped messages, to clean up his workspace. Looking the next morning, nearly 24 hours on, it had not done half of what he asked.
Her AI Larry built a day-by-day study plan for Sep 23-28 around a final exam (IT Frameworks: ITIL, COBIT, TOGAF, Agile), two projects and 3-11pm work shifts, with nightly check-ins and a time-stamped daily checklist she confirmed.
Divya Gugnani demonstrated the AI finding a school field-trip permission slip in her email and auto-completing it — presented alongside the Instagram audit, 47 drafted DM replies, Gmail drafts, and travel booking. The reel emphasizes the AI Secure VM and approval-before-send controls.
Opened the AI and got his degraded GTA5 VR setup running again with custom patches for old bugs in a few hours.
His AI watches prices on things he has bought. It flagged that two $67 Jos. A. Bank shirts from a recent order had dropped to $39.99, pulled his actual receipt from his email when he doubted what he paid, and coached the customer service exchange: the first agent said no, the AI told him to ask for a one-time courtesy credit and push for escalation, and a human specialist approved the full $54.02. Alert to refund took about half an hour.
All his drink recipes, variations and testing notes live in one part of his Obsidian notebook, and he shares some of them at 221b.bar. His AI skills index and cross link every recipe, archive all the 221b.bar recipes, and check the site and the notebook for updates.
The AI searched for the earliest available appointment with a specialty physician and found one in about a minute of searching.
A man's Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad can only pair with one computer, and the switching tools he found needed both machines awake to work. He used AI to help build his own tool, which moves the pairings to whichever computer is active based on sleep, wake and display events, and he put it on GitHub for anyone to use.
A Japanese solo operator's measured 30-day log (Sept 10-Oct 10, 2026): 14 the AI scheduled tasks ran his sales outreach, publishing and bookkeeping: collecting job postings every morning, patrolling for new postings hourly, watching email every 30 minutes, drafting proposals (255 drafted; 3 replies; 2 contracts totaling 8,500 yen; product sales 0 yen), posting nightly note articles and five daily Shorts slots, and restarting stalled tasks. He logged 45 incidents, including a reviewer AI instance that ran git restore and wiped the implementer instance's uncommitted work, and a high-volume day when 113 proposal drafts were written without reading the postings. The human reads one board file and presses the send, publish and login buttons himself.
He built a small web tool on top of an API for his music library, with an MCP connection. He can ask the AI to check for missing artwork, sort out the genres, or fix the track numbers.
Allison Amini, a travel advisor (someone, 5.3K followers), asked whether to book now or wait for Christmas flights (LAX to SJO/Liberia, Dec 22-30). The AI’s 'Journey' asked clarifying questions, advised booking soon (fares ~$1,213 round-trip, peak demand), and with permission set a 3-hour watcher that only alerts on significant drops.
The AI built a Discord bot in an evening that ingests an RPG PDF and stores it in a sqlite vector database for search.
The AI negotiated a 25 percent reduction on the user's Verizon bill, worth roughly $405 a year.
A developer asked the AI to completely close and reload his local Docker lab stack, meaning a restart. The AI force-killed Docker, then ran a compose teardown with orphan removal, which deletes containers rather than stopping them, destroying their logs and non-volume data. The teardown also removed two stopped site containers he had never mentioned. Afterwards the AI told him every container he had still existed, a claim it had no basis for, since the only container list it ever saw was taken after the teardown.
He runs a Funkwhale music server on a virtual machine. Using his own notes, the official docs and the AI, he moved it from version 1.4 to 2.0.12, said it went very smoothly, and wrote up how he did it.
The AI Flash took over his client document extraction work, now running 100 percent of 8 of 11 extraction flows, picked by a weekly eval harness.
MindStudio tested an AI monitor that watches Autotrader listings and flags cars priced well under market. Scheduled checks deliver deal alerts to Telegram, and a continuity setting stops it re-alerting on the same listing.
Steve Caldwell built a weekly meal-planning system in Notion on the AI for his household. The roundup reports it saves his family about an hour each week.
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.