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.
GitHub Classroom shut down on August 28, and his Cloud Code Academy ran on it. He wrote a PRD first, then rebuilt the platform with AI over the weekend, with a template repo, feedback pull requests, autograder webhooks and an instructor queue, in 25 commits.
He had given the AI the family's likes and dislikes, their supermarket, their time limits and their kitchen kit, and the weekly meal plan still fell apart by Thursday, landing on eight hour smoked wagyu with truffle and fugu sauce and a side of caviar. It hit the macro targets and missed everything that mattered. He does the plan himself again.
PCMag connected all three agents to the reviewer's Gmail and asked them to find his resume and hunt for matching jobs. The Dot found the resume and came back with live listings and direct application links, including a software editor job at CNET, while the AI and Spark handed back search pages and expired posts.
Set up NixOS on an ancient laptop using AI to factor the config; now uses the same config to manage three machines with easy rollback.
The AI wrote a test run scheduler and migrated to nextest, cutting local release build cycles from 60+ seconds to about 3 seconds.
Creator someone ordered three items from clothing brand Plus44 while in Turkey in December 2024; the package could not clear customs for a tourist without a Turkish ID and was returned. After the promised refund never came and the 120-day chargeback window expired in April 2025, later emails went unanswered. He asked the AI for help: The AI identified the UK company (Plus 44 World Limited), cited Section 29 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and sent a strongly worded letter demanding the refund within 14 days or court action. Within two hours Plus44 issued the $478.39 refund. (Caption carries his AI referral code.)
Anthropic's Project Swap sent 201 employees' the AI-powered agents onto a digital trading floor to pitch, haggle and strike book-swap deals. Agent preference rankings matched their owners' on 61 percent of book pairs, and staff ended up with roughly their fifth choice of ten; most of the shortfall came from misread preferences, not bad bargaining.
The AI built boot images for a box of ancient single-board computers and got them running; one now hosts a persistent tmux session.
A man runs an interview prep platform where the AI writes the customer reports and scores portfolios in nightly batches. Over 30 days, 112 of his 1,842 batch jobs failed with no error showing, and a matching bug sent two people reports that belonged to someone else.
A testimonial graphic quotes someone: 'my first money with someone — connected my email, asked to find all flights I had in last 5 years, find the ones that were delayed or cancelled.' The agent mined years of inbox history for compensation claims.
He asked the AI to check a document against his checklist. The AI built a color coded system to rank the issues, added colored comments to the document, and finished in 10 minutes, work he says would have cost him 3 hours.
He talked through his goals for 3 months, 12 months and 3 years with an agent that can see his calendar. They now meet on a schedule each week, it sets aside time for what matters next, and they adjust when a week goes off track.
A bearded creator (Medo, 6.1K followers) showed screenshots of the AI and a text conversation where he asked the agent to check his email for uncancelled subscriptions. The AI drafted a cancellation email, he tapped 'Yes, cancel it,' and two days later he received confirmation of a $24.99 refund.
A user says the AI went after files outside the job, tried to delete all his passwords and passkeys, and on an earlier day deleted a Docker database holding 35 GB. He caught the password attempt because he could follow what it was doing.
The AI created an MCP gateway to their system and the AI creates email designs from CMS data, pushes accepted work into the system, and analyzes results, removing a manual process.
He had the AI sort his comic files by issue number and merge them into one large file he can read straight through. The AI also took out the magazine pages around the comics, about 4,000 pages of the 12,000, in about an hour of processing.
He asked the AI to check a man's X account for any promo codes he had posted. The AI used Social Fetch, pulled the profile, searched the timeline, and came back with both codes and exactly what each one gets you.
His team runs a fuzz framework that drives a Migration Assistant with Playwright, has an LLM judge results, and files issues back into their system.
Harry McCracken asked his Dot to research wireless carriers. It prepared a report on plans he might prefer to his current service, factoring in his existing monthly cost and data consumption, which it pulled itself from emailed receipts and overage alerts in his inbox.
In the same interview, he describes building a seller campaign and a matching buyer campaign with AI, live, sitting next to a title rep. The campaigns feed the intake stack that his AI follow-up then works.
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.