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 had a PDF of scanned letters from his dad's Navy years, the paper letters long misplaced, and had put the project off for decades. He asked the AI to turn the PDF into an interactive timeline, and after about 10 minutes of prompting it was live online.
The AI monitored swimming lesson availability and automatically booked a suitable lesson for his son when one opened up.
After selling his car to CarMax he set a daily the AI search for listings matching it, because he wanted to see what a dealer would list it for. It found the listing within a week.
A Plex update broke the app on his Chromecast. Names and thumbnails overlapped and he could not move around in it. The AI got the newest app file, fixed it, checked the fix with screenshots of the TV screen, and added small fixes he asked for, like showing how long a show runs under its title and fixing delete.
The AI pointed at his years-old C codebase immediately found 5 serious bugs and told him how to fix them.
He found a 24 chapter site on CAD history that would once have taken days of fiddling to convert by hand. Working with GPT for a couple of hours, he turned it into a clean offline EPUB for his phone, with linked footnotes and captioned illustrations.
Creator Amie Tollefsrud gave the AI access to her Instagram analytics and asked for growth advice; after three clarifying questions about audience and positioning, the AI delivered an 'Instagram Growth Plan' PDF. Screen recordings show an executive diagnosis (1.85M accounts reached), audience positioning, four content pillars, keyword clusters, carousel and story blueprints, and a 7-day action checklist.
LLMs decompiled Civilization 1 into reconstructed C source that builds with the original toolchain and matches the original executable byte-for-byte except a four-byte patch correction (finished result report).
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.
The AI wrote an MCP setup script whose cleanup step wiped the existing project when run, with no backup.
He is not a programmer, but he used AI to trace a bug through localization files, tech scripts and the game's internal category system. The AI hotfixed a deprecated modifier key in his Clausewitz engine mod, and he shipped a working patch in 30 minutes.
Andrew Connell moved 426 pages, 281 course pages, 217 videos and 8,911 comments back to his own site after closing his Voitanos business, with every old URL answering with a single 301. The AI did most of the work over six months in his personal time, and his site went from about 5 percent of the organic search share to close to 90 percent in two months.
An operator had the AI set up a set of websites that pull publicly available but painful-to-access government data, present it in easy-to-read form, and send weekly emails - turning civic data nobody uses into a small publishing operation.
Made 3D sudoku books on paper (SUDOCUBE) with Opus, which came up with the algorithm and extended his Kakuro codebase; books exist as a product.
He ran AI for three days on a headless ThinkCentre Tiny in the corner, driving it from a browser. Out came a learning page that walks through one job of an AI agent from order to approval to publishing, and a playable online photo darkroom where visitors expose their own photo and the file never leaves their browser.
A local model helped build a self-hosted services wiki and dataset in an Obsidian vault so his partner could keep systems running if he died, set up in a few hours.
Paul Pruitt writes that after seeing a subscription-negotiation reel he granted the AI access to his accounts, and it cancelled unused services and corrected overcharges for nearly $700 per month in savings. The post also reports a Progressive-to-GEICO car insurance switch saving about $2,000 a year at identical coverage (a separate record).
His son is into Rubik’s cube competitions. Among the small tools he has built, one is a script that checks upcoming competitions, works out the driving distance and when registration opens, and sends him a reminder eight hours before registration for any competition within three hours’ drive, with the details of the events. He does not say yet whether it has caught one.
A Tesla owner’s the AI took a Sentry-mode scratch incident end to end: it cut the relevant clip, identified the other car, wrote the incident report and sent the insurance claim. The whole claim package was assembled from the car’s own footage without the owner editing video or forms.
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.