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 had the AI generate a JavaScript app that makes label style images and prints very large letters on A4 paper with a monochrome laser printer. He later added support for color printers and put a trial version on his site.
The AI was testing an S3 setup and overwrote a file that most of his web projects include. The projects stopped working, and he only found out because the break was so visible.
In shipwithmuse.live's errands catalog, one 'finding money you forgot about' entry reports a full sweep of every state's unclaimed-property database by name and past cities, which turned up $88.92. The catalog notes it was as reported by the build author and not independently audited.
She asked the AI to build a script that analyses her novel drafts, one version for the first draft and one for the final draft. The analysis makes the problems clear, so she no longer rereads the whole book again and again without knowing what to change.
Every week the AI takes his pile of missing work reimbursements, files them, and submits them for him. He says it is the real time saver for anyone who travels for work.
A developer built a memory-provider plugin that gives the AI, the AI and Cursor one shared knowledge base, searchable with hybrid keyword, vector and knowledge-graph retrieval. The person's coding agent and messaging agent now draw on the same memory.
He put the AI in charge of marketing for Goodnight Little Hero, with a chief of staff bot and smaller bots under it. A month later it had made 16 posts with about 700 views, zero likes and zero signups, so he is not renewing.
A couple spent 14 days in Kyoto, Hakone and Tokyo with AI as their travel assistant. Before the trip it grilled him one question at a time instead of handing over a plan, and built a private offline trip page for their phones with day cards, booking codes, train guides and taxi cards showing the hotel address in Japanese. During the trip he ran it from his phone: after they caught a later train he asked for the day to be re-timed and got new times, an updated app and moved calendar events in a couple of minutes. One stop was added without anyone checking it was open, and it was not; after that every stop got checked on the venue's own site first.
Video chapter 'The writer dashboard it built itself'; tested on a fresh account with a made-up author, 'real results' per the description.
Parker Pannell asked the AI to save money on subscriptions. It found and canceled $295 in unused subscriptions.
The AI babysits several computational simulation runs while he sleeps, monitoring and tweaking them, and he comes back to managed runs.
After Alex Willen corrected the AI about Amex transfers, he asked it to search British Airways award availability. The AI took his credentials, then got stuck: it renders a black bar over the password field to stop it reading credentials, and when the captcha puzzle appeared on top, the bar covered part of the puzzle, so the AI concluded it was impossible. Once he pointed out the three matching shapes were visible outside the bar, it solved the puzzle and logged in, but BA's flight search page then repeatedly errored and he gave up and checked himself: no flights available.
He had the AI sort through his emails. It cleared over 11,000 of them and organised the rest, and he says it was far easier to set up than the AI.
Booking swimming lessons for his son sat on a man's task list, pulled from his email by the AI. The AI watched lesson availability on its own and booked a suitable lesson as soon as one became available.
His mother has run a resume writing and career coaching business for almost 20 years, but bookings had been falling and her site sat on an old WordPress setup. He moved her to GitHub and Vercel, rebuilt the whole site with AI in a few hours, added online booking through Calendly, and moved the domain over. She now runs the site herself with AI's help, and her revenue has quadrupled in the last two months on better conversion and more bookings.
Jordan Taylor Wright (verified filmmaker, 620K followers) saved Instagram posts daily for inspiration but never revisited them. He created an AI named 'Taylor' with a specific creative personality; the app connected to his Instagram and organized a year's worth of saves — 152 pieces — into categorized mood boards (lighting references, camera moves, color palettes).
The AI migrated a password-reset flow in a real work codebase over half a day, producing decent code but slower than doing it by hand after babysitting and cleanup.
A home-lab owner reported on X (via WhatAgentsCanDo, Oct 19) that, still in bed, he sent the AI a link to a post containing a setup recipe for a new DeepSeek model (DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, EXL3) across two NVIDIA DGX Spark machines and asked it to do the setup. The AI was not installed on the Sparks, but they shared a network with its computer, and everything was ready to test by the time he got up; he says he does not know exactly how the bot reached the machines.
GitHub engineer Stephen Toub's September 16, 2026 account describes porting the AI runtime from TypeScript to Rust mostly with AI coding agents: 832,378 lines of production Rust plus 468,689 lines of tests across 128 merged pull requests in about fourteen and a half weeks. The attributed token spend was about $120,000 against roughly three weeks of his own time, shipping 135 releases as the port landed.
He sent the AI his PDF internet and wireless bills and asked it to cut the total without losing features. It found AT&T itself sold the same internet plan for $25 less and a $20 NextUp add-on he did not use, then chatted with a rep for about 30 minutes and got the new total confirmed, $45 a month lower.
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.