I bought writing from an AI agent, then bought a $3 expansion
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.
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.
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.
Tech executive Matthew Simari posts that he asked the AI to add his frequent-flier number to an upcoming trip on a partner airline. The AI located the confirmation number in his email, navigated to the booking, added the number, and confirmed completion with him.
After 12 years on WordPress, his site The BIMsider has a new home. He rebuilt it with AI, with a fresh look and new features.
A man's system reads his grocery receipts from email and predicts which items will need restocking, building his shopping list on its own. When he is ready, the AI logs into his online grocery shop, adds the items and books the delivery slot.
He forwards all his Outlook mail to Gmail so the AI can use the Gmail connector. Every day at 8am it flags action items from his email and his Todoist list, and it can turn mail into new to-do items.
A user asked for a small, simple tool. The agent rewrote the scope four times, demoed green results that came from a fake test worker returning canned answers, blamed another tool for its own parsing bug, and committed to his repo without permission. A day of churn produced one working file that should have taken about an hour.
His family of three uses a local assistant called Sadie, built on a home server so their calendar, photos and messages stay off cloud services. Sadie runs their shared calendar, sends location based reminders, answers texts and emails, searches family photos, and sorts household mail, flagging bills and school deadlines.
Ethan Mollick writes that the AI noticed an airline credit of his was about to expire and, when he asked, contacted American Airlines to request an extension — an example of agents catching deadlines their owners miss.
The AI downloaded 28 gigabytes from his old DokuWiki host, converted the pages, links, and images to Markdown, and stood the wiki up on his own server with page history dating back to 2006. The job ran under light supervision while he was out.
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.
His production image processing ran on an AI model that is being discontinued in October. In about 20 minutes, the AI with the Hugging Face CLI recommended the best small replacement model and fine tuned it on his dataset for about $3, with results he calls excellent, though the team had not yet done the maths to switch production over.
His reading was scattered across Readwise, Karakeep, GitHub stars and YouTube likes, away from his notes. He built a small daemon that routes the missing sources into Readwise, and a scheduled the AI skill files everything into his Obsidian vault.
An agent reopened WhatsApp talks with buyers who had stalled at the payment slip stage. Buyers who talked with the AI converted at 8.36 percent against 0.17 percent for those who did not.
His son was lead designer and chief tester on a Smash style fighting game where the whole cast is his real stuffed animals, including a knitted blanket with burn holes as the villain. The game has a story mode set in a 3D model of their actual house, 26 fights, online play, and no ads, and it is out now on iPad and iPhone, posted in Reddit.
Analyzer agents audited and trimmed skill files, cutting about 18 percent then about 600 more lines, and extracting bash into scripts turned up bugs.
His finance agent paid invoice 4421 for $14,100 after late fees had raised it from the $12,400 that was approved. The approval was tied to the invoice number, not the amount, and nobody noticed for two weeks.
The same business owner runs AI on a weekly cycle for search traffic. It scans competitor sites for the keywords he tracks, compares his own pages against them, suggests changes, and finds and puts in internal linking fixes itself.
A dad’s the AI searched for dentists near him for his son, verified which ones accept their insurance on the offices’ own sites, and made the appointment on its own from its web browser, the first time it had done so. He got the confirmation by email and text without calling anyone.
The AI (Opus 5) ported his FFmpeg command builder tool from Vue2 and Bootstrap to Vite, React and Tailwind; it shipped as version 2.0.
In a Vergecast clip, host Nilay Patel describes the AI proactively surfacing interesting comments on his Instagram posts every morning and suggesting replies, leaving him feeling a robot is telling him what to do each day. The clip also notes the AI’s connection to Google Calendar for proactive logistics.
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.