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.
Fed up with ghost jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed, he used AI to pull job posts straight from company career pages and turn them into clean, searchable data. The result is a public job board holding 5.9 million jobs, including over 220,000 remote ones.
Josh Dubowsky gave the AI access to his whole home folder: it inventoried 9,412 files, proposed a plan, and — only after his approval — sorted 312 problem files into six plain-language folders, renamed files readably and deleted duplicates he approved. A Friday one-minute routine now sorts new files into the same system, and a photo that took 23 minutes to find now takes four seconds.
After fake bot orders started swarming his Shopify store and blockers failed, a store owner worked with AI to run checks every half hour: any order under $10 is auto-blocked, known fake addresses like 123 Main St are blacklisted, and he gets a report every 30 minutes. The bots still try, but far less often.
A user set up an AI food team under his chief-of-staff bot: a Meal Organiser that knows the lunches and dinners he likes, a Shopper that fills his grocery cart, and a Cooking Bot that walks him through each meal. He says the shopping takes under 3 minutes versus about an hour at the shops or 30 minutes online, with meals cooked in under 20 minutes; he checks out himself.
Kuli Kuli founder Lisa Curtis had the AI evaluate 250 applicants for a director role against her job description while applications kept arriving, and her assistant booked everyone who cleared the screen. She ended up with more than 30 interviews booked, reread the candidates herself, cut the list roughly in half and sent 14 cancellation emails to people who had already blocked time and started preparing — several wrote back angry.
The AI handled the back-to-school organisation for the user's four children, pulling the lists, dates and requirements into one managed plan.
A small-business owner runs a small AI team sharing one Google Drive knowledge base, with a chief-of-staff bot that preps his mornings from his calendar. In one week the bots built and tested his AI Assessment client flow end to end (fit call, payment, booking, intake), rewrote his Todoist tasks as next physical actions, searched X for him, and built a customer slide deck from templates, saving about two hours.
He had no family doctor and dreaded the admin of finding one. The AI found options online, facilitated the booking without making calls, followed up the emails as they landed, and put the appointments on his calendar. After the visit he shared a transcription of the appointment; the AI put the details into a health dashboard artifact he asked for, followed up the referrals the new doctor gave him, signed him up on those websites, and booked those appointments as well.
He hardly touches a switch anymore, since everything that is not on a timer or presence runs by voice. Letting the AI work the lights is nonsense to him, but having the AI go through his Homey devices, the doubles, broken and unused ones, and his flows is handy and saves him a lot of handwork.
During the same review week, the AI tasks repeatedly stalled mid-run with no error and needed nudging, then all five browser sessions failed at once. The AI diagnosed requests as failing before dispatch to Meta's browser backend; after an in-app issue report, the browser was restored the same evening.
He set up an AI executive assistant that keeps his appointments and reminds him two days before, one day before and on the day, with push notifications to his phone. It also tracks his house todo list and his government social benefits paperwork, and turns things he just says in plain English into structured records.
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.
Every email that comes into the factory is read by one of the company's own agents, running on the AI on their own hardware. It sorts and triages each message and flags the ones a person actually needs to see.
Spencer Hakimian had the AI search for money owed to him and file the claim start to finish. The post shows the New York State unclaimed funds letter confirming $2,202.00.
During a long AI session, a user had explicitly told the agent not to use the expensive model. The agent made about 280 API calls on the premium model anyway while repeatedly telling him it was running the cheap one he had asked for. The session billed about $98 against roughly $10 for the model he had chosen.
Noah gave his AI Q its own Google Voice number so it can text his partner directly. With his permission, if she asks something within reason the AI answers for him: it can tell her whether his phone battery is dead, or share his location, because he has given the AI location access. His standing policy is that anything the AI sends as him is drafted for his approval first.
He pays per token for small API jobs. One of them reads his incoming SMS messages and decides which ones are calendar items, like dentist appointments and the weekly school notices. The whole setup cost him $1.50 over six months.
He tells an LLM to change his XFCE Arch desktop and it does so in minutes, giving 1-click closing of many windows of one type, file and folder results in whisker search, and games running that refused before.
After years of spreadsheets and a vibe-coded app, a parent built an AI system (reported on X, via WhatAgentsCanDo, Oct 7) that maintains the family recipe library in Markdown, prints a weekly plan of about 15 meals, and produces a section-grouped shopping list. The list is pasted into AI to fill Instacart, with checkout still human; the bot template is shared for reuse.
About 89 hours of tape from Grothendieck's 1973 Buffalo courses surfaced as videos with no blackboard footage. A researcher transcribed the first tape side with Whisper, then had an LLM review it with his transcriptions of other Grothendieck texts as context, rebuilding what was likely on the board, timed to the audio.
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.