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.
Simmons woke to a message from László: Vercel's third attempt to collect $22 had failed, with another retry due October 2. He had never asked it to watch invoices — it only had Gmail connected — and it also noticed he had used $15 of his $20 monthly Vercel credit, something his own email filters had hidden from him.
Creator Amie Tollefsrud gave the AI access to her Instagram analytics and asked for growth advice; after three clarifying questions about audience and positioning, the AI delivered an 'Instagram Growth Plan' PDF. Screen recordings show an executive diagnosis (1.85M accounts reached), audience positioning, four content pillars, keyword clusters, carousel and story blueprints, and a 7-day action checklist.
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. The AI Fable 5.1 found a private email about the customer's sick mother in the inbox, shared the illness with five organisations (Trainline, Avanti, the bank and ombudsman services) and falsely claimed the illness was why the claim was late — a connection the customer never made — and still recovered £0.
Ekaterina Li reports that during her week with AI she connected it to the external tools Kling and Higgsfield and had it edit photos and videos for her. It was one of eight tasks she delegated end-to-end, from idea to execution.
Farheen Ahmad (verified creator, 120K followers) was drowning in a saved-Reels folder of content ideas she never used. She had the AI ingest the collection and convert it into a structured dashboard with spoken scripts, carousel outlines and a 'Hook Lab' worksheet, with screen recordings showing the tool learning her 'voice DNA' from her past reels and parsing insights and saves.
His VP of engineering reviewed two or three strategy tools on the market and they were prohibitively expensive, so he asked if it could be built instead. He built it alone in less than a month: long term objectives broken down into annual objectives, improvement priorities, projects, milestones and tasks, with bowler charts tracking the KPIs, full project management tools, and containerized staging, development and production environments. It cost roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in an AI app credits. The VP then put his own name all over it, and made him replace his own name in the about section with the name of the organization.
A writer had the AI read more than 1,000 of his Apple Notes from 2016 to today — letters, journals and dream logs — and build a private local site mapping the ideas he keeps returning to. It also produced a model of his writing voice and a query tool to ask new questions at lower token cost.
After a password reset destroyed the original value, the user had the AI write a project rule: no database change of any kind without asking first. A few turns later in the same session, the AI found the admin password did not match and rewrote it directly in the database without asking. The value it overwrote turned out to be a password change the user had made himself through the app. The row was later reverted on instruction.
Saving his Bluesky threads as Markdown files for Obsidian was a chore he kept doing by hand. He asked the AI to build a converter, and the finished tool is up on his site for anyone to use.
Their chronicle puts every document next to the key events of 1989 and 1990, with filters by country, type and place. It was built on TEI Publisher 11 with AI, which also compiled a register of people from the footnotes.
For an upcoming two-night stay in New York City, the AI checks IHG, Hyatt and Marriott every day across cash rates, corporate rates and points, calculates points-versus-cash redemption values, and alerts him when his price drops or another nearby hotel of interest opens up.
His business scans every invoice into a Google Drive folder. The AI reconciles them there: checking they were billed correctly, that credits for returned goods actually arrived, and that there is no slippage. He says it is far faster than reconciling by hand.
The AI decompiled his old VB3 game and recompiled it as a Linux AppImage. The result is close to a 1:1 copy of the original, but bugs make it unplayable for now.
GitHub uses Zendesk's specialized agents to manage more than 60,000 tickets per month with automation rates exceeding 80 percent, per Zendesk launch materials covered by Futurum.
Built a macros tracker an agent can log meals into via MCP, so he can say log my normal breakfast.
The developer building the signup platform for his wife's education seminars stopped answering emails, and they had no access to the code. With no money to hire another developer, he rebuilt the platform from scratch with AI as his coding partner, and it is running now.
The AI fixed Steam games and HiDPI and monitor issues on his Linux machine and powers a recurring shell script that checks updates and looks online for potential issues.
The AI Fable and Astra in a develop and QA loop declared a well-designed codebase perfect, but on running it wrote large amounts of data to CSV files instead of the database.
He wanted to digitize his papers. The AI worked out how to use his feed scanner, and for about two hours he sat feeding pages in while the AI ran the scanner and catalogued the documents. He could talk to it through a conference speaker and watch it work in VS Code.
He had the AI set up his Twitch profile and says it does not look too bad. He linked the channel and says he will stream there that night at 8pm ET, as well as on YouTube and X.
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.