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 builder used AI in Google AI Studio and DeepSeek to build a 19 project .NET system over about 4 and a half hours. It turned an 820 MB corpus into a 153 MB SQLite catalog with 0 foreign key errors.
A local Qwen model on his home server pulls his RSS and social feeds, release notes and papers, scores each item against an interest profile he keeps by hand, and writes a one line summary. Nothing leaves the machine. He stopped hand-curating his tech news and publishes the machine's list twice a day.
He used the AI API to draft his articles automatically for a week. Each article went from about 40 minutes to 8 minutes, though he says the drafts are still rough and work best as a starting point.
Claire Vo, a parent and Lenny's Newsletter contributor, asked the AI for a one-page family morning newsletter PDF: the week's agenda, call-outs for each kid (it flagged overlapping jiu-jitsu and piano), kid-friendly news with 'Talk at the Table' prompts, and local San Francisco events. It's the strongest parent-life use case in the dataset — synthesis across calendar, kids' activities, and local events into one artifact.
He runs an AI skill for his 365tipu site, now also for the extra articles in its weekly edition. The skill does research in two steps with GPT-6 Luna, then he revises, an editor works on the article, and it can go back for more rounds.
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.
An AI user runs the agent on a headless home server with his DoorDash and email credentials stored in 1Password. The AI logs into DoorDash with a skill it built itself and chats with support reps, and the user says it now gets refunds issued with no issue where DoorDash had turned stingy with him.
He gets 215 GitHub notifications a day, so he built a bot to triage them.
Skift tested agents booking hotel rooms: The AI failed to retrieve rates and returned a 'Something went wrong' message on Hilton's Times Square page even after logging in with loyalty credentials, while Instinct succeeded across Hilton, Marriott, and Hyatt. Hilton says it isn't blocking agents — the failures read as technical.
Home Assistant sends a bin camera image to the Anthropic API, gets JSON for which bins are visible, notifies him which bins to put out or return, and lights a color LED Bindicator; the AI configured the automations via MCP.
Jruss707 tested the AI on a Nov 13–18 Yosemite/Sage Lodge trip: the agent browsed the Sage website and completed the hotel booking using a saved Link payment method, found a Southwest flight from Sacramento using reward points (after the author pointed to a preferred flight), and arranged an AWD/4WD rental car from Bozeman.
Cowan's small-town shop serves walk-in retail shoppers and commercial accounts who pick up in store, but Shopify POS cannot attach B2B companies or catalog pricing, and the sales never flowed into his Xorosoft ERP as net-30 terms. Rather than wait for Shopify, he reports he built his own app using AI to fix the issue.
The New York Times' own Daily podcast episode on Tan's two-week the AI test (Oct 6, 2026) summarizes: 'the AI, Meta's A.I. agent, helped a Times reporter with dental insurance, dinner reservations and more.' Dinner reservations were among the delegated real-world tasks in the review.
Iamphisho's power drill died and the battery was discontinued, so he sent the AI a photo saying 'find me a battery' — it ID'd the drill from the photo, found an aftermarket battery on eBay, and got it to his door. 'I never opened a single browser tab.'
A team used an AI 2.5 tool to go through large sets of public comments. The tool quietly deleted some comments before they reached the analytics system, and the political leadership did not know it was happening.
Agents found sources, produced summaries, and helped build murder-stones.org, a catalogue site for his own historical research.
Someone in the house heard a beep a little before 12:13 AM. He handed the question to an agent with access to the camera recorder. It came back with the sound, the source and a short list of reasons: a smoke alarm that sounded once, at 3417 Hz for 0.87 seconds, about two metres from one camera. It was not a fire, not carbon monoxide and not a dying battery.
The AI completed a CVS class-action claim from start to finish and returned the confirmation code as proof of filing.
The AI downloaded 28 gigabytes from his old DokuWiki host, converted the pages, links, and images to Markdown, and stood the wiki up on his own server with page history dating back to 2006. The job ran under light supervision while he was out.
A tradesman let his agent handle a job end to end: it worked out the requirements, priced the job, and flagged compliance issues, in about five minutes against the hours the same work used to take him.
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.