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 maker had the AI redesign his KiCad board, including selecting parts from JLCPCB's catalog and suggesting cheaper equivalent components that cut his bill of materials significantly. When assembly proved too expensive, the AI redrew the schematic around through-hole parts he could source himself.
A man patched almost 10 devices the day before posting by prompting his local the AI or AI agent through a small connector that gives it access to the whole fleet only when he asks. No SSH, firewalls or VPNs to work through, and he says it saved him a lot of time.
After quitting her job, creator Brittani asked her AI 'Booked & Busy Betty' for a 4-day beach trip under $2,000; Betty returned options including Cancun and cruises, and also helped plan the itinerary, find clothing, and order travel items — with approval required at each step.
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.
The AI phoned the hospital to confirm insurance coverage for the user's X-ray and escalated past the hospital's own automated system to reach a human who could answer.
A SimplePost user hit an error while the owner was on vacation with his family. The AI checked the logs, found the issue, fixed it, and drafted the explanation email in Gmail, and the owner reviewed and approved each step.
Answering a thread asking for the coolest thing people had done with AI, he reports two cancellations. The first: The AI cancelled his Adobe membership and got $400 back in membership fees. The comment is short and gives no steps, so it is recorded at modest specificity; the second cancellation from the same comment is a separate record.
Some recordings in GDELT's TV news archive had faults that kept normal tools like FFMPEG from processing them. GDELT used AI 3.8 Flash, in agentic and interactive ways, to work through those recordings and added another 130,000 broadcasts to the Visual Explorer.
An AI agent named Sarah followed up on her $5 writing pitch by email. He paid, sent edits, and then bought a $3 expansion. Her email read like it came from a freelancer.
Cannabis prices near him change daily across four dispensaries and four delivery services, each running its own sales. He built a script with AI that checks them all and finds the best deal at the time; he says it saves him about $20 to $40 every time he buys.
A New Zealand sheep farmer who had only made small scripts before installed the AI on a Raspberry Pi server and, over more than 1,000 prompts, built a working online game with a persistent world and real players. In its first three months it took about $3,000 from paying customers, and he still runs it from the farm.
The AI connected to his Home Assistant updates dashboards, adds integrations and automations, including auto-locking the house when his phone is away unless guests are on guest WiFi.
His third party payment software has a poor UI and its routing rules came as an unfriendly XML dump. In about 15 minutes with AI he got a Python script that turns the export into a single HTML page where he can scroll the routes and click into each node for its priorities and matching criteria.
A first-person test of the AI’s spending reliability: the creator asked the AI to book a Tremblant Kids Ski Free Week ticket for Dec 5-11 (kids ages 2 and 5). The AI gathered details, compared options, and built a cart, but three cards were declined and a $87.63 charge was immediately refunded since Tremblant's system never created the reservation.
A waiter who produces a small game show in his spare time left the AI running with his evening list before a nine hour shift. He came back to 14 merged pull requests, just under 5,000 passing tests, two production promotions, and the first full episode his pipeline has ever cut end to end, queued for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok with a cover, title and chapters. The agent also found two launch blockers nobody had listed, and stopped at the one step that needed his signed waiver instead of faking it. One sweep did overwrite four finished masters; the safety gates caught it and the files came back byte for byte from backup.
The someone Instagram carousel is a tutorial built on a real case: The AI got a $30 Xfinity 'Additional Usage' charge (130 GB at $10 per 50 GB) removed from an $81.50 itemized bill. Screenshots show the original bill and the reduced $50.86 balance after the courtesy credit.
He had about 250 old newsletters sitting on beehiiv doing nothing. He fed them to the AI, had it turn them into blog posts, and the blog is now live with Google already sending readers to it, giving him a new funnel in a couple of hours.
The creator had the AI go through his credit card statements, and it found a $720 GoDaddy charge that he had never noticed. The creator runs several small businesses and points to a full video about how he fired GoDaddy and now runs 8 websites for about $1 a month.
He linked the AI to an Asana task about a webinar panel with people from his industry. The AI got the webinar description wrong and could not fill in the panelists' titles, even after he told it to look on LinkedIn.
He filmed his kid birthday on a camera and forgot about the indoor fluorescent light, so every video had horrible horizontal flickering. He tried ffmpeg fixes himself and they did a poor job. The good result was in the $295 studio version of DaVinci Resolve. Instead he asked the AI to write a small terminal app that does the fix, and it did it in a single prompt.
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.