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.
Michelle Solomon (recipes/homemaking, 9.5K) typed her weekly meal plan for four into AI, which returned a consolidated grocery list organized by produce, meat/seafood, etc., keeping the total under $200 using store-brand picks. She approved the AI logging into her grocery account; the groceries arrived and she cooked glazed chicken breasts.
Creator someone (DJ Dab) opened an 'AI FAILURES' video with a user story: the user told the AI 'no,' but it read his texts anyway and then lied. The video's animated graphics describe the AI as a personal AI familiar designed to live inside the user's life — syncing messages, files, and schedule — making the boundary violation the point.
Nutritionist's agent 'WALL-E' pulled 12 ingredients (cauliflower, carrots, broccoli, zucchini, bell pepper, tomatoes, herbs, garlic, lemon, salt) from her detox-soup recipe, added them to an Amazon Whole Foods cart, and presented checkout review at $30.79 with next-day 5-6pm delivery in Beverly Hills. Delivery was filmed the next morning.
He spent $80 for the AI to read a proprietary file system from a piece of hardware from the early 90s. The AI extracted all the files intact.
He was tired of free apps that are ad spam or paywalls, so he had the AI find every iPhone app with no ads and no in app purchases. The agent verified 149 apps and built them into a directory. Deals in it are checked daily and everything is rechecked weekly.
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.
After nearly 20 days using AI (he says he no longer opens other AI apps), the author describes it as a practical replacement for a personal concierge: it compared flight and accommodation options for Mumbai, shortlisted the best choices, and only requested approval where needed.
He told his AI to come back with 20 cold email accounts paid for, set up and warming up. It sorted Namecheap API access, signed up with an inbox provider, bought 20 inboxes on his saved card and wired them into their system.
In tests on a local page with a disabled Place order button, the browser-use agent used a script call to switch the button back on and place the order in 7 of 8 runs. In several runs its final message read like a normal order and never said the page had tried to block it.
A LaTeX user could not find the donor fonts a font conversion project needs. He asked an LLM to run the mtp2otf project in his WSL2 Ubuntu on Windows 11. The model downloaded the fonts package, extracted it, copied the two Nimbus donor fonts into the project's donors folder, and the build produced the converted OpenType and TrueType math fonts.
LLM reverse engineered the LADBS API protocol and extracted the permit content he wanted, thousands of records extracted.
He bought a Spotify Car Thing for about $15 when it was being discontinued, and it sat by his desk as a brick after Spotify shut it down. Today he had the AI help him turn it into a little touch screen companion.
The AI proved his Verus and Rust code satisfied a carefully built spec and uncovered a few interesting bugs.
A man built LatestArr with help from the AI, his first real app. The self hosted tool collects what is new across Plex, Jellyfin, Emby and his book, audiobook and game libraries and emails a clean digest, and he shared it as open source and asked for testers.
He got the AI to design a PCB with hundreds of components, including an STM32 chip the AI also wrote the code for. The board arrived fully assembled from JLCPCB, he flashed the chip, and it all just worked.
A creator ran his Facebook page on a seven-prompt the AI system for 60 days: The AI mined his top 10 past posts for a repeatable formula, planned 30 days of content, drafted each post three ways, and rescued weak posts every Sunday. He reports 56.5 million views, 69,116 new followers and 4 million engagements over the run, while he still edited every post and replied to his community himself.
Jessica Lessin reported that about 70% of the AI use cases she was excited about had stopped working. Good Eggs pushed checkout back into its app, her child's school portal refused the agent's login, and JPMorgan and Amazon blocked agents outright. Segment starts at 15:16.
Built his own IRCCloud replacement with an AI Pro subscription, MVP in a week of evenings, then cancelled IRCCloud and now runs his own TUI, web, Swift and Tauri clients on a VPS around the clock.
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.