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 delivery driver has the AI run his weekly payroll. Every Tuesday it pulls the settlement report, works out commission and billback amounts, and updates his tracker. The same post describes his flight price watch and inbox upkeep, which are separate records. He says the payroll job used to eat a chunk of his evening.
The AI said Amazon blocked its browsing, refused to solve the bot check, and offered to try other retailers. Amazon shopping was 'off the table' in her tests.
The AI cleared an inbox of 100,000 emails during the user's workday, leaving a manageable mailbox behind.
Every CEO Dan Shipper was changing a flight out of San Francisco with his Dot when the agent interrupted its own flight research with a warning: the option might overlap with head of video Randy Counsman's Wednesday morning recording. There was no such recording on Shipper's calendar — the Dot had read a Slack discussion he had never seen, clocked the proposed schedule, and connected it to the flight he was about to pick.
Carlos Diaz, host of the Silicon Carne tech podcast, said on social media: 'I saved $2,300 this weekend, in just an hour and a half.' Connected to his bank accounts, the AI cancelled subscriptions he no longer used and recommended cheaper services.
Claire Vo ran AI for several weeks and shut down every the AI she had. Her nine bots include Chief, which sweeps six inboxes and several Slack workspaces, a family bot that prints a kitchen table newspaper for her kids each morning, a helpdesk bot getting five star reviews, and a bot that audits subscriptions and negotiates insurance.
He built a Homebridge plugin with AI that lets him turn his server on and off from Apple HomeKit for free. He says he does not know the first thing about coding.
He found the Excel games he used to play as a student, where you guess TV shows from their theme music. They no longer run on modern Excel and the site that hosted them died years ago, so he ran them through AI and put them on the web.
Ported a legacy .NET WebForms app to Blazor with GPT-5.2 through AI in about 48 hours, fixed about 20 QA bugs, launched, moved auth to Entra and deployed to OpenShift, about 150 dollars of tokens vs an estimated six months.
Sojourn for iOS was built from 45 one-shot prompts and shipped as an app.
A young man (OUT OF OFFICE, 30K followers) photographed his wardrobe and fed the pieces to the AI before a dinner reservation. Nova chose a black henley and dark wide-leg jeans, cross-checked his calendar and noticed the reservation was outside so it advised layering a long-sleeve, then recommended loafers over sneakers plus a silver watch and bracelet.
He needed to know if a library near him had outlets. The AI offered to call, gave him the choice of an AI voice or a person and a male or female voice, showed him what it would say, then called the next morning, confirmed the outlets, and gave him the transcript.
A solo founder runs his game key store with about a dozen AI sessions, one each for code, pricing, copy, bookkeeping and suppliers. They stay in sync through a shared record where facts are only ever added, each fact says whether a session confirmed it or just read it somewhere, and his decisions go into a numbered ledger the sessions look up instead of asking him again.
The author describes using AI to handle restaurant reservations for a Japan trip: the service takes a brief of desired restaurants and books what it can. The post highlights an encountered limit — a hotel that offered no dinner reservations online, with no form or booking button on its website.
A ham radio operator had a frontier LLM read his pencil sketch of an antenna, build NEC models from it, test and iterate on numerical stability until the approximation held together, and then run a real simulation that answered his questions. He uses the same approach for SPICE circuit simulation.
A screenshot of the AT&T app's bill history shows three periods: $116.08 (Jul–Aug), $116.08 (Aug–Sep), and $41.70 (Sep–Oct), labeled '$74.38 lower than your previous bill.' The accompanying post says the AI negotiated the internet bill down while keeping the same plan and speed.
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.
He pointed the AI at his JavaScript project and asked for a full TypeScript migration without changing behavior. 236 commits and a full day later the project compiled clean, the linter passed, and 55 of 56 tests passed, with the one failure traced to a commit where a value was accidentally hardcoded.
While Dan Shipper's Dot displayed research for changing his flight out of San Francisco, it warned the new option might overlap with his head of video's Wednesday morning recording. The recording was not on Shipper's calendar — the Dot had read an unseen Slack discussion, clocked the proposed schedule and alerted him at the moment it mattered; the rest of the column is paywalled.
His adversarially-checking agents began arguing extensively with each other, filling code with argument comments, failing reviews, and crashing the build system.
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.