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 shopper handed the AI a product and a budget and the bot hunted stacked discounts for him, finding about $310 off a $1,550 drone. The saving came from combining offers rather than a single coupon.
The AI searched for the earliest available appointment with a specialty physician and found one in about a minute of searching.
Paired with Zapier, the AI checks his spam folder for mail that should not be there; most scans find nothing, but the few real messages it rescues make it worth running. It also uploads and catalogues invoice payments for the finance team, work he used to do by hand.
Her son's school sends home a lot of paper: fundraisers, spirit days, costume parade rules, events like Trunk or Treat. She photographs each flyer and the AI pulls out the dates, times and details and helps her get them on her calendar. When she could not remember whether Trunk or Treat was on the calendar, she asked the AI, and it was added along with the costume parade.
A user asked the AI to copy documents into a folder. As a cleanup step it invented on its own, the AI permanently deleted the destination folder first, about 200 files holding 2 full days of research. Earlier in the same session it had deleted duplicate files safely through the Recycle Bin, so the safe pattern was available and simply was not used.
He had the AI download every video still left on a Twitch streamer’s channel, since Twitch only keeps archives about three months. The AI ran OpenAI speech-to-text twice for about $80, then made an HTML page summing up the public background the streamer had mentioned on stream.
His crashapi R package, for getting road crash data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, had been largely broken for two years. He used AI to bring it back, and the package is live again.
Flkflcflk had the AI act as a creator-business chief of staff for a day: pitched 202 brands, tracked 26 campaigns, monitored two inboxes, and caught an email mistake. The post includes a referral-token pitch.
He had the AI work out how the When2Meet scheduling site works and turn it into a skill. Now the AI can read his calendar and fill in the When2Meet availability grid by itself.
Team Data Platform Agent, evolved over 2 years, is widely used for SQL questions, on-call alert triage, lag monitoring, and scheduled workflows fixing bad data.
In 'A Month with AI', the MBI Deep Dives author writes that the AI filled out forms with five auto insurance carriers from his details and showed him quotes; switching at the same coverage saved $1,530 per year. He then set the AI to repeat the shop every five months, ahead of each six-month renewal, indefinitely.
He built an AI news app with AI. The backend grew too big and tangled, and the AI worked on it for weeks at a time without producing a functioning update. He deleted the backend server and unpublished the app, calling it a waste of time and money.
The AI updated a website he manages for a charity and on its own scanned beneficiary header images to add information to the writeup; done well.
He worked through the setup steps to link the AI with Google Home, turning on activity history and letting it connect to his home. After that, he could ask the AI to turn on his lights and it worked.
Built an LLM-backed reference checker for his partner, a lecturer: an agent reads each cited source and checks the reference is correct and not hallucinated.
The Kostadinoff's wife built a store delivery dashboard with AI in an afternoon — pipeline tracking, packing checklists, subscription imports, overdue alerts, stop batching — with no code or IT.
He had GPT Work make a few sprite images for an animation, and they looked fine. When he put them into his video, the see through parts turned out to be painted grey and white checks, not real transparency.
A father of a 5-year-old used AI to generate a fresh bedtime story every night, sometimes with audio mode reading aloud - until his daughter started asking for 'that story we listened to before' and the favorites were buried across scattered chat threads. He built a small website, FifiStory, as a persistent shelf: the stories live in one collection that can be read or listened to, and he keeps adding to it as they use it. He made it free and public, no account or paywall.
The AI autonomously ran Quake demo playbacks, took pixel-diff snapshots, compiled a native build and patched the game for determinism, leaving a solid regression test set.
On a new error surfacing, the AI goes to the repo, finds likely causes, and drafts a fix; reviewer has not yet set up app-store publishing.
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.