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 man runs a word game site where the AI invents a new word game mechanic every day and publishes it with an example. He says he does nothing; the daily game appears on its own.
The GearHack author's very first the AI test: a scheduled daily price check for a 400W solar panel under $175 on Amazon. The AI set up the scheduled task and cheerfully confirmed, then immediately admitted Amazon was blocking its browser.
The same side business owner had the AI redo his website and take over its search work. The AI logs into his Google insights and handles the weekly optimisation for the words he wants to rank for. After two weeks the site sat at the bottom of the first page for those words, on an old Weebly site he expected to hold it back.
Answering a what do you use it for thread, he says he had the AI take his grocery list and check the deals at his two stores. It worked through the trade offs: Kroger had a sale on ice cream but Sam's Club was far cheaper in bulk, while Kroger carried many more flavors. He had told it his rules on name brands versus generics, size variations, and coupons that stack with the sales. Result a few minutes before he posted: it saved a third of what the order would have cost at Kroger.
Forked go-mermaid and had an LLM add a live Mermaid and SVG demo using his terminal and WASM widgets, published online.
After measuring 17 kitchen drawers by hand and still cutting one insert wrong, he built a free tool with AI. You snap photos of a drawer, enter five measurements, and it checks 46 Rev-A-Shelf insert sizes, picks the top three fits, and gives the exact cut sizes.
Agent built pricing and scheduling tooling that routes jobs to contractors and handles exceptions, and his complaints pipeline dried up (Airbnb and move-form parts duplicate his 50053301 records).
A Gizmodo author tried travel booking — a flagship the AI use case. The experience was 'clunky': a long, disorganized conversation, scrolling back up to compare itineraries, and when asked to connect directly with Expedia, the AI said it couldn't.
He runs a five level system where the AI Design makes his Instagram carousels, from a basic prompt up to a full design system with AI generated images and a looping video cover. The first carousel made this way reached 4,500 views with 89 saves.
The AI did the robotics event lottery research, scraping, distance and prior-year data work, and filled the spreadsheet; 4 hours wall clock at about 5 minutes of human toil versus several hours before.
GPT helped him fix his Bitcoin miner. He also created his own improved, branded user interface and firmware for it.
An LLM crunched for 36 hours on a project he had wanted for 5 years; checked and ready to deploy, work he estimates would have taken him about 9 months.
A writer had the AI read more than 1,000 of his Apple Notes from 2016 to today — letters, journals and dream logs — and build a private local site mapping the ideas he keeps returning to. It also produced a model of his writing voice and a query tool to ask new questions at lower token cost.
Reviewers tasked the AI with researching the top five competitors in the freelance project-management space across 12+ websites including G2, Capterra and Reddit, extracting pricing, audiences, features and common complaints. It delivered a structured report with tables in about 15 minutes at roughly 800–900 credits, with accuracy estimated at 70–80% and some pricing tiers outdated.
With five days' notice, her AI Romy reviewed 51 saved 'Costa rica' reels, built a 5-day itinerary (Bajos del Toro, La Fortuna, Monteverde), found and held Miami-San Jose flights without purchasing, and searched for a dry bag pending her approval; the reel ends with footage from the trip itself.
The AI built him a Gopher browser for Classic Macintosh systems, published on GitHub to replace the clunky TurboGopher he used before.
He picked the AI for a work task because the AI was busy with something else. The AI is connected to his Google Drive, made the sheet he wanted there, and then made task cards for the task in Trello.
He used AI 4 Argon in Antigravity CLI to run his network and system administration. It bought the domain and set up the full infrastructure, with hosting for a landing page, email, DNS, SSL certificates and hardening.
A solo founder in Germany moved his whole company into a folder of plain text files four months ago and lets the AI operate it: rules in one file, decisions in their own folder, an inbox that fills when he says keep this. Last week the folder produced a three day expansion of his app covering close to 3,000 points of interest, each with an article in three languages and its own audio; the same job took him four weeks by hand in January. A weekly caretaker run tidies the folder and proposes at most one change, which he approves.
He set the AI to work on the 860 page American Alpine Journal master index, covering 1929 to 2024. It read 35,125 entries and 94,081 page references and mapped each one to a mountain region.
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.