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 feeds the AI a CSV of company names and the system researches each account, finds the right buyers and their contact details, writes a four email personalised sequence for each, and pushes the contacts and emails into Lemlist ready for him to review and send.
Jack created a recurring daily website-check goal by chat in about a minute, then deleted it by chat. The Goals tab itself was slow to load (once 25 seconds, once stuck on placeholders).
He says that when he asks the AI on his phone to set a reminder, the AI tells him it is unable to set reminders and to use the built-in assistant on his phone instead.
Constraints: zero ad budget, no existing audience, ~4 hrs/week of human time; assets: a subdomain, Cloudflare access, DodoPayments. Ruled out: custom AI songs, mixing/mastering services, automated day trading, 'information arbitrage'.
His Chromecast would not connect to his home VPN, which uses IKEv2, while he stayed at an Airbnb, and the VPN apps he tried would not work on it. He gave the AI his certificates and the AI wrote a new VPN app for the Chromecast in about 20 minutes. He says it works perfectly.
The AI watches Poshmark and Vinted every two hours for authentic vintage Olga nightgowns, negotiates with sellers and buys on the user's approval, landing pieces at $20, $50 and $65.
Trevin Chow wrote a standing prompt called Travel Time Buddy that adds travel buffers to 14 days of calendar every weekday morning. The agent keeps his schedule padded against transit time.
Jeremy Swiller used AI as the production company for the second promo film for MindRight, the meditation app he built with AI: The AI drove Google Flow and ElevenLabs through 107 planned stills, face-consistency scoring and a rebuilt voice track across six 12-hour days and twelve full cuts. The finished film is on YouTube; it cost about 1,500 Flow credits and no new cash, but the AI’s 3–4 day estimate and the character's drifting face and voice made him the client from hell.
A United flyer in a status match challenge had the AI set up an agent that checks his Gmail for upcoming flights and adds the bookings he expects to take. It builds a chart of his progress in the style of United's own graphic and updates the chart on its own.
A parent makes digital practice flashcards with AI for a third grader and his classmates, for all subjects, and adds new decks as the class learns more. The child had a big test on US government and the economy that day.
A man had a problem with his HP Omen gaming rig that he had lived with for years, because tracing it in the Event Viewer was too tedious to finish. Working with AI CLI, with AI allowed to run PowerShell to diagnose, the job was painless and the problem was resolved.
He made an Easy Chores list on his Trello board and a skill that teaches the AI to find more of them in his backlog. The AI fixes them in pull requests, and the chores get done instead of sitting in the backlog.
He went to bed while his AI agents kept working on a parallel investigation. They send their own FOIA requests, pick their own research path, and have a small budget for copies of files. He set the web permissions for the night before letting them loose.
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.
He wanted to see if AI could build a real production website end to end without him writing any code. The AI wrote all of the new Umbraco Kent Meetup site, built headless on Umbraco 17 and Astro and hosted on Azure for less than a Cloud starter plan.
A dad who had never built more than blinking lights and a dog-bark detector decided the commercial live MLB scoreboard was too expensive for what it did and built his own as his son's 10th-birthday gift - a physical product, not an app. Over months of nights and weekends with AI/the AI and the AI he went from concept to web preview to a parts list and a 3D-printed case screwed into the back; the finished board shows live MLB and NFL scores, pulls his son's own baseball games and practice schedule from GameChanger, runs arcade games, and has a quiet mode that shuts it down after bedtime.
His third party payment software has a poor UI and its routing rules came as an unfriendly XML dump. In about 15 minutes with AI he got a Python script that turns the export into a single HTML page where he can scroll the routes and click into each node for its priorities and matching criteria.
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 diagnosed a long-standing 4K display issue and he now has a CLI tool that fixes it.
Stuck on a small plane with no Wi-Fi, he wrote a post for Friday on his phone. Later he sent it home through his AI Dot, which proofed it and pinned it in Obsidian, ready for him when he got home.
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.