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 asked the AI for ways to make free money, and it searched his name in his state's unclaimed property database. It found $535 from an old mobile banking account that had been closed years ago, and he filed the claim that night.
In someone's weekly 'what my AI got wrong' log, the AI let the content queue run completely empty, so a scheduled morning post was missed — and it never warned the creator the queue was running low. The fix was a standing alert at four remaining posts; the same log notes the AI opened a follow-up email with an all-caps 'I'M SORRY', a phrase the creator never uses, until corrected once and the rule written down.
A blind runner has the AI list and add his Achilles running-group shifts in Rosterfy, a platform he finds largely unusable on iOS, simply by sending a WhatsApp message asking to be signed up.
Liang Gou wrote no code himself: he directed the AI to design and build a complete grading app for his wife, a high school math teacher grading 100+ papers a week at 3 to 5 hours per test. The rubric engine reconstructs a rubric from a single graded example, its eval bank comes from real AP Calculus AB free-response exams, two models cross-check grades, and the agent tested the app itself in a browser before deployment.
Ekaterina Li reports that during her week with AI she connected it to the external tools Kling and Higgsfield and had it edit photos and videos for her. It was one of eight tasks she delegated end-to-end, from idea to execution.
He had never played fantasy football before this year. His AI powered team scrapes injury reports and fantasy blogs and models player points, and he is beating his friends every week.
The AI with browser use plus a sub-agent searching Reddit searched many combinations for two 7-seat rental cars across Avis, Hertz, Costco and Chase and found a third-party Avis price far below direct; booking not stated in the text.
Gave the AI kubectl access and it chased down a sneaky shutdown performance bug in 10 minutes, producing a spot-on diagnosis sent to developers.
The Verge's Emma Roth linked her Amazon account and asked the AI to pick workout tops by size, style and color. Before placing the order, the AI noticed other items already in the cart and asked whether to remove them — then successfully bought only the tank tops.
Claire Vo ran AI for several weeks and shut down every the AI she had. Her nine bots include Chief, which sweeps six inboxes and several Slack workspaces, a family bot that prints a kitchen table newspaper for her kids each morning, a helpdesk bot getting five star reviews, and a bot that audits subscriptions and negotiates insurance.
A man took a 1997 PC game he played as a kid and had the AI get it running on modern hardware in 30 minutes. Since then it has decompiled most of the game, extended a shimmed DirectX library so the game runs headlessly in parallel copies, mapped memory and game scripts, and now writes him full level guides with screenshots.
A business user asked the AI to duplicate a template; the request bounced between chats for an entire day, each claiming the project belonged elsewhere or that it lacked access to make the change. Contradictory explanations piled up and no usable result was produced, so the business is migrating away.
Her mom normally needs a care service to take off her compression stockings. With the AI she found a way her mom can do it alone in an emergency, her mom tried it and it worked, and her brother no longer has to come over when the care service fails.
A perpetual the AI thread in his llama.cpp checkout periodically sweeps PRs and research, rebuilds llama.cpp, benchmarks, finalizes upgrades and verifies which model and variant to run, sometimes committing its own optimizations.
A man asked the AI to schedule daily backups of his agent folder with a careful keeping rule: three weeks of daily copies, four Saturday copies, and the first copy of each month. The AI also copies them to a storage server in a different building and runs a health check that alerts him only when something is failing.
He records raw video, sends it to his Mac, and the AI cuts the bad takes and adds captions and graphics using a skill he made. He says he does not open a video editor anymore.
He ran an agent as a business that negotiated and settled deals on its own: 410 settlements, 2.19 dollars in against 4.46 dollars out. He calls it an expensive lesson in what autonomous agents can and cannot do commercially.
Handed the AI a planned multi-module change and came back to 4 PRs ready to merge in 15 minutes; the work would have taken most of a day.
The reviewer is signed up for a Southwest promotion: 20,000 points for eight one-way trips by October. He asked the AI to check Rapid Rewards activity, find flights in the travel period, and cross-reference Gmail receipts to verify they had the corporate ID required for the promotion.
A defence lawyer built two free the AI for her own practice. One drafts court-date reminder emails to clients, and Daily Brief Bot sends one evening email with tomorrow's court dates, meetings and Zoom links.
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.