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.
He built a home dashboard with AI that pulls a dozen sources into one wall screen for the whole family. It shows the shared calendar, weather warnings, solar and battery levels, car charge and bin days, and it only brings things up when they matter, like bins out tonight or a frost warning.
LLMs decompiled Civilization 1 into reconstructed C source that builds with the original toolchain and matches the original executable byte-for-byte except a four-byte patch correction (finished result report).
The MBI Deep Dives author writes that the AI tracks a set of data points he cares about and reports daily, including GPU prices, the App Store ratings race between the AI, the AI and the AI, and insider buy/sell transactions in stocks he owns. He describes using roughly 200 million tokens a week on a $20/month plan.
Gave the original Zelda NES game to Fable 5.1 in a single prompt; it changed the world map in about 15 minutes and the game is playable.
A Hyatt member built tools with AI that pull his account history and his old reservation emails into one view of nine years of stays. He uses it with the full list of Hyatt hotels to plan trips, hit new brands, and make better use of his points and free night certificates.
The maker of a small game viewer tool had the AI play the game with scripted commands and write playtest reports. One report, from a manifest file the game loaded, documented a crash on exit, a bad default window size, dead inputs, and several rendering bugs.
From a single message, the AI created a logo, a website and a podcast for the user's flower business.
He set the AI to export his liked songs from a streaming platform, track 365 artists, and send weekly concert notifications — commenters describe the Saturday roundup as a standing routine.
A 24 year old AI engineer at an elevator industry company in New York says he built agent workflows into the internal work system. The workflows make invoices on their own, send emails, and set off next steps in the work, with a person approving at set points.
An X user sent the AI a photo of their credit card and the bot completed the entire flight booking on a confusing airline website, returning a booking confirmation. Elon Musk replied publicly that SpaceX would make users whole if the AI ever made a purchase mistake or leaked card details.
The AI 3.8 Flash, via his own coding agent tool, upgraded his Markdown and SVG renderer tool to also render HTML; the upgraded tool is live.
His YouTube videos kept jumping back 20 seconds when a tab reloaded, so he connected GPT to his Chrome browser through the DevTools MCP and let it run tests and read the site code. It found the checkpoint time comes from YouTube's server already 20 seconds early, and he opened a bug report to YouTube with what he found.
The lead investigator wanted a latitude and longitude grid added to an earlier image for a telescope time proposal. The AI also enhanced the image, and the co-investigators who knew what Io looks like caught it before it was submitted.
A lawyer with no programming experience built his own blog with AI, using Hugo and GitHub, and got it online in a day, then spent about two weeks adjusting it. He also set up a flow that shares each new post to his Mastodon and Bluesky accounts on its own.
A landlord’s the AI rent desk matches incoming Venmo, Zelle, Cash App and Section 8 payments to his property sheet, reminds tenants before rent is due and escalates when a payment goes past due. Four payment rails reconciled against one ledger, with dunning built in.
An experienced traveller who hates planning had the AI plan his recent trip to China and book everything — flights, hotels, tickets and attractions — leaving him only the final pay button to click. Before travelling he ran the finished itinerary past a fresh session told to find errors, and it caught one: he was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
He had a Best Buy TV repair booked for the next day with a 12 hour window, 7 in the morning to 7 at night. The AI called with its business calling feature, the rep stayed on the line, and the AI got him a specific time slot.
In WIRED's two-week test (republished by Dataist, Sept 24), Instinct cancelled a badly delayed DoorDash order even though the tester had specified cancellation was allowed only if he received a refund — costing him $64. Instinct apologised in detail but, as the tester notes, offers no compensation for its own errors; the loss sits with the user.
The AI rewrote the touchpad stack on his ThinkPad T14 running Linux and Hyprland. Touch to cursor time went from about 33 ms to about 18 ms.
The reviewer gave the AI rules based on dates and locations and had it rename his Strava activities that carried generic names like 'Morning Run', adding who he was running with to each name, while the AI kept a log file of the changes in case he wants to review anything later.
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.