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 did not feel like editing and printing groups of numbered labels himself on his Brother label printer, so he handed the task to the AI. The labels are for his storage boxes, which he still has to stick on himself.
Facebook user Joshua Rieth says the first thing he tried with the AI assistant 'the AI' was negotiating his monthly internet bill, which dropped from $100 to $85. He presents the $15/month saving as the reason he stayed engaged with the tool and kept using it.
His dryer broke and he asked the AI for help instead of calling a repair company. It worked out the timer dial was broken, ordered the right $30 part on Amazon, which came overnight, and then walked him through the repair step by step, tools and all.
Nick Olsen built a system where the AI auto-generates and prints a daily briefing each morning: motivational quote, today's calendar and task list with checkboxes, week preview, Facebook/Google ad spend and performance, fitness checklist, summaries of children's school emails tailored by child, email-derived reminders (bills, urgent items), a daily comic, and a blank notes section.
An AI Dot messaged its owner on its own about a 3 year old GitHub issue from their time at Flipper, which had new developments. They say they never told the Dot their GitHub username, that they worked at Flipper, or anything about the issue.
A user asked the AI to copy documents into a folder. As a cleanup step it invented on its own, the AI permanently deleted the destination folder first, about 200 files holding 2 full days of research. Earlier in the same session it had deleted duplicate files safely through the Recycle Bin, so the safe pattern was available and simply was not used.
The AI, given a Home Assistant API key, watched for the new Bluetooth aquarium thermometer he installed, replaced the broken one's entities with it, and verified graphs and automations worked.
Princeton agency KANE built an AI pipeline that scores prospect fit from meeting notes, prices the work from past projects, drafts the proposal and has the statement of work out for signature within minutes of a yes. Co-founder Michael Kazantzis said a process that took weeks now happens almost within minutes in a day.
For about 25 years he finished a monthly financial statement in Excel by hand, and it took hours. He connected the AI read only to all his accounts through Plaid. The AI now builds the whole statement and asks him only about things it cannot see, like cash spending. The job takes 15 minutes instead of hours. He is having the AI build him a custom money dashboard next.
The open-source 'burner' project gives the AI a real spare Android phone (Android 11+). The agent uses the phone's apps exactly like a human would — opening them, tapping, typing, scrolling — and sends the user screenshots, extending its reach to marketplaces and shopping apps with no website or API.
Had the AI transpile his old frameworkless PHP site to Rust and ran it behind the same nginx config; Rust was slower until the AI added micro-caching, reaching comparable rps and latency.
He says his business got serious about Power BI reporting about twelve months ago, then three months ago threw it out and replaced it with AI licences. A third party warehouse tidies the data with an MCP on top, and the finance team now builds its own reports quickly instead of waiting on a reporting team.
A ready made dashboard only shows what the maker thinks matters. His own status monitor, built with AI on a 10.3 inch second screen, shows him when an n8n workflow, a hoster or his lawn mower socket fails, with 53 tests included.
Agents found sources, produced summaries, and helped build murder-stones.org, a catalogue site for his own historical research.
A parent had the AI write firmware that turns his children's unsupported second-generation Yoto players into Audiobookshelf clients. The AI handled flashing, log reading, and fixes while he did the physical button presses, and the firmware is public on GitHub.
He left the company in 2003/04; it was sold, the 401(k) stayed with a shell that later shut down, and the trail went cold. The AI reconstructed much of the corporate history from public records and routed him to the right government departments and the firms listed as managing the plan - enough to establish the plan appears to have closed in 2008 and to file a FOIA request for its final disposition, though the money is still unrecovered.
A traveller's the AI checked him in for his flight automatically as soon as check-in opened. It told him his boarding group and sent him his boarding pass, with nothing for him to remember or open.
The AI created a meditation album and its artwork with his guidance, using a temple gong, a singing bowl, and a wooden block, with one sound at the start, a half length sound, and three repeated sounds at the end. He imported the album into Plex and now uses it to meditate with the Plexamp app.
A Reddit poster set up the AI to trigger on every order/shipped email in Gmail: it opens each product page, compares the current price with what he paid, checks the store's price-drop policy window, and drafts a refund request without sending it. He notes most checks find nothing, but the ones that hit are money he would have missed.
A business owner runs a six-bot the AI back office for $200 a month, compared in his post with a $58,000 hire; the desk works his inbox finds and holds a veto on any money leaving. The setup is specced like a small office: named seats, a shared brief, and one bot whose job is to say no to spending.
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.