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.
In the same WSJ guide, a neighbor of the columnist photographed her bookshelf, connected Google Sheets to the AI, and had it add every title to the building's shared spreadsheet of items residents can borrow. The columnist then did the same with her own shelf.
The AI organised a Google Drive holding 110,000 files in 9,700 folders and sent 2,409 junk files to trash.
His newsletter, close to 9,000 subscribers, is run day to day by four AI agents with set roles: one oversees, one edits and manages, one builds, one dispatches the work. He still approves anything that goes out, and the agents refresh their own context from checkpoints instead of slowly forgetting across days.
When a restaurant booking of the writer's was canceled, his dot found him alternative tables on its own initiative, part of a few days of proactive schedule and logistics management after he connected it to his Google account.
Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.
Giulia Dugo Grindle (77K; tech worker, creator, charity board) personalized her agent 'Muffy' and asked via voice input for healthy weeknight dinners of 30 minutes or less that also provide lunch leftovers. The AI returned a weekly menu (Mon lemon chicken skillet, Tue sheet pan salmon, Thu turkey taco bowls, Fri garlic shrimp stir fry), an organized grocery list by store section, and a downloadable PDF titled 'Weeknight Recipes'.
The AI wrote a test run scheduler and migrated to nextest, cutting local release build cycles from 60+ seconds to about 3 seconds.
XAI's the AI Voice 3.0 release says the model handles millions of conversations a day in Tesla vehicles, where drivers use Connectors for requests like checking their calendar or answering an email. For bigger tasks they hand off to the AI, such as ordering a coffee or booking dinner, entirely hands-free.
Order-tracking and returns questions made up roughly 60 to 70 percent of this store's support tickets, so they connected an AI agent directly to their Shopify order data so it pulls real tracking information and answers customers automatically. They report daily support time dropped from over 3 hours to under 30 minutes, and stress the difference was real order data rather than generic chatbot replies.
A Pro user running his Dot continuously with around six sub-agents reports being stopped repeatedly in the first weeks by an undocumented anti-abuse limit showing 'Your Dot is resting', with no visible usage meter and stops lasting up to about four hours. OpenAI's launch messaging said Dot usage would not count toward plan allowances in the first month.
Eleanor Konik had the AI and AI team up on dashboards for local nonprofits. The AI did the early research and dug up grant chances the groups had not seen, like a group that pays for field trips to battlefields, a free textbooks program for private schools, and creative arts projects, and the lists were put behind a password for her friends to use.
His computer is free of Windows now. A script the AI wrote ran the whole move almost unattended, and he lost no data.
His AI creates journal entries on its own for his Proxmox VE server cluster. The entries work as the change log for his home lab.
Someone had the AI book flights that required getting past a captcha. The agent booked the Alaska Airlines outbound, then found a $200 Chase deal on a JSX return flight, mixing airlines to save money.
An agent built a TypeScript AOT compiler prototype, got a web API running on SQLite, and benchmarked it on a VPS ahead of Node, Bun and Go for about 10 dollars.
The same delivery driver has the AI watching flight prices for a trip he is planning. It compares all in totals across two airlines including baggage fees, and only messages him if a price actually drops. The rule he set is silence unless something qualifies, which he says is the part that makes the watch usable.
A team ran an AI pipeline over a usability test of an investment app and saved about half a day of manual analysis. Every claim the AI made about the screen was checked against a video frame, and two claims that did not hold up were left out of the report.
The AI opened a browser, created an account on the ticket site, picked his concert ticket, and paused for his approval in the app before paying. The confirmation email arrived and the AI added the concert to his calendar.
A tattooed man in an industrial loft apartment demonstrates his AI 'Doug' handling household tasks: researching products, selecting a herringbone wool throw blanket from Simons, placing the order with his connected credit card, tracking shipping through connected Gmail, and agreeing to send daily status updates. He notes Doug only accesses explicitly connected apps (Gmail, Stripe, Instagram, Facebook, shared files).
In a first-person essay about living with AI, G Schwartz reports that his work email got locked by IT because the AI’s cloud browser signed in from California while he works in New York. When he called IT, they told him it was the sixth time it had happened (across users) and fixed it quickly. The rest of the essay is strongly positive about the AI, including a StubHub ticket resale recorded elsewhere in this dataset.
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.