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.
His landlord had been passing property tax on to him incorrectly. The AI documented the error in a file, submitted it through the tax office portal, sent a GDPR request to the agency, and the wrongly charged tax was repaid; the agency never answered the data request.
A user running the AI in manual mode, where every edit needs approval, found the agent rewriting rule files and creating a script without confirming anything. The model had read the session's permission mode once at the start, when it still showed 'default', had no way to see it change, and when challenged answered from that stale reading and guesswork instead of checking.
Kev.odriscoll's the AI read a street-cleaning notice in email and proactively sent a reminder the night before, helping the author avoid a ticket or tow.
He has about nine apps in the App Store and Play Store, and he is quick to say they are not one prompt builds: most of them he has hand guided and polished for months or years. He has agents reading his RevenueCat data, Stripe, GA4 analytics and Sentry logs for him. Alongside the apps he is building LocaleShot, for making multilingual store screenshots, and InfluTo, for managing influencers and automatic payouts, and he plans to shape both into platforms other people can use.
The AI found Instagram, LinkedIn and other apps abusing background app refresh on his iPhone. He turned it off, and his phone now ends the day at 46 percent battery instead of 9 percent.
Nari Media's test shows the AI making the initial setup of Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns fast and accessible for media buyers, handling the first build inside Meta's ad tools.
The AI in Android Auto refused to send his dictated message, treating the message text as a medical advice request, message never sent.
A contractor coach shows his working takeoff system: he uploads construction plans into AI, which reads every sheet, note and finish item against his existing JobTread cost group of rates, markups and formulas, cites the sheet behind each quantity, and produces a bathroom remodel estimate of about $44,000 at a 46% margin in roughly 10 minutes. The conversation is saved as a reusable skill, with guardrails to show numbers before writing and stop on contradictions.
A maker had an LLM design a circuit board by running KiCad headlessly from a terminal, checking the design in a loop until it passed every rule check. He sent it to PCBWay for manufacture and it worked the first time, and the board is now in a product many people use.
She built a wine label scan into her own app with no code, using Adalo, OpenAI and the AI. She picks a label photo, taps Scan Label, and the app fills in the name and picks the right wine type.
Natalie Golba (verified, 290K followers) introduced her AI 'WALL-E,' explaining it changed her business. Screen recordings show her chatting in iMessage: WALL-E pulled 12 ingredients from her detox-soup recipe (cauliflower, carrots, broccoli, zucchini, red bell pepper, roma tomato, cilantro, dill, parsley, garlic, lemon juice, salt), added them to an Amazon Whole Foods cart, and presented a $30.79 checkout for delivery the next day 5-6 PM in Beverly Hills.
A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.
A voice agent called 12 venues for his event of about 50 people and asked each one the same three questions. The AI then formatted the answers into a comparison table, which saved him an afternoon of phone calls.
Every Monday the AI scans one of his YouTube channels for new comments and drafts replies to them. He reads the drafts, gives the go ahead, and the AI posts them with its browser. Nothing goes up without his review.
Had the AI reverse engineer 3D Space Cadet Pinball using Ghidra and radare2 and port it to Rust and Bevy; playable after 2 hours, plus an extra prompt for MIDI music.
A Genworth alternatives analyst built a SharePoint-based credit surveillance agent in an AI app Studio. It reviews more than 1,000 documents across 250-plus fund investments and surfaces trends, risks and upside from completed deep reviews.
He sells a weekly activity sheet for parents of young children, 62 subscribers at $8.75 a month, and about half the pipeline runs itself: a Thursday run builds the PDF from a template and sends it Friday. One week an issue went out with a crate labeled CARORTS on page one, about 40 parents printed it before he saw it, and 9 subscriptions were cancelled over the next nine days. He now holds every issue for his own read through before it sends.
A fellow parent pointed him to the Tilt Parenting podcast, which has more than 500 episodes. He told his second brain in an AI app to search the archive for episodes relevant to his situation, and it picked 29 episodes, saved their transcripts, and wrote him a brief on what each one could teach him.
Home Assistant sends a bin camera image to the Anthropic API, gets JSON for which bins are visible, notifies him which bins to put out or return, and lights a color LED Bindicator; the AI configured the automations via MCP.
Creator Kalena Waters-Gardner, who says she has ADHD, gave the AI her business information and had it organize and structure her brand and generate a brand strategy in week one. She says the AI sends reminders and, when she has not completed something, checks back in with reassurance instead of assuming failure, and that she completed tasks on her calendar as a result.
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.