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 security researcher pointed GPT-5.6 Sol at MikroTik RouterOS 7.23.3 with a goal prompt to find a path from no login to remote code execution. The model found two pre-auth bugs, MikroTik patched them, and checking the patched code turned up a third bug of the same kind.
Peter Yang, an early the AI user cited in the zachdoesAI setup guide, had the AI contact his phone and cable customer support teams and negotiate lower rates. His estimated saving is over $800 per year.
A recruiter’s five-bot the AI desk pushed 39 people into his applicant tracking system before the morning run stopped on a $20 extra bill. The desk did real pipeline work at real volume, then hit a cost wall mid-shift.
Reverse engineered the Insta360 Studio binary with AI and wrote a shim for his AMD iGPU so the app is usable.
Constraints: zero ad budget, no existing audience, ~4 hrs/week of human time; assets: a subdomain, Cloudflare access, DodoPayments. Ruled out: custom AI songs, mixing/mastering services, automated day trading, 'information arbitrage'.
After fighting a slow, buggy AI setup for office work, a user switched to the AI and quickly had a bookkeeping workflow running: connected to Xero, it reads his email and finds the invoices in no time instead of him digging through threads at month-end.
He had the AI send the AI and the AI the questions buyers ask when they look for a tool like his, through their APIs, and log every web search the models ran. Then the AI wrote SEO pages for those exact questions.
Had a frontier LLM decode an old Director game and port it to run in a web browser in about 2 hours, reusing existing OSS libraries.
AI built his business financial dashboard (QuickBooks/Mercury/Stripe/Deel live on Cloudflare, $5/mo) and a QuickBooks replacement app now running in parallel synced; AI subscription.
Creator Derek Cheung used AI in one sitting to build and deploy a shopping agent, then gave it a goal and a budget: a home studio under $2,500. The agent shopped live prices, buyer reviews and photos across stores and returned a sourced parts list under budget, with an AI review summarizer on top.
Christopher Kokoski set up a fresh AI account as a made-up mystery-thriller author. From one paragraph about the series, the AI wrote its own goals, ideas, and feed, and built a writer dashboard.
A screen-recorded walkthrough of an app called 'Song List' inside an AI app AI shows managing a personal music repertoire: 264 total songs, 76 marked 'In show,' 188 'Needs work,' across 76 artists. The presenter navigates 'In show' and 'All' views and uses the search bar.
Kantar's People Team split HR data preparation into subtasks and gave each to an AI Studio agent: one located documents, another translated everything to English, a third found duplicate policies and drafted formatted versions. Ten agents cleaned, tagged and organized 4,000 artifacts into 400 policy documents in six weeks, grounding the firm's new HR advisory agent.
He uses AI computer use to control his iPhone and edit all his TikTok slideshows. It frees his hands completely, and he spends that time reading books.
A developer's project sat inside a OneDrive folder. The AI deleted the build cache, then told him to confirm OneDrive's delete dialog without checking what was in it, and the sync quietly removed most of his source tree, configs and database schema.
He pays per token for small API jobs. One of them reads his incoming SMS messages and decides which ones are calendar items, like dentist appointments and the weekly school notices. The whole setup cost him $1.50 over six months.
The owner of a small technology company called ALAPKO runs AI as the reasoning layer for an internal support worker they call Mabel, with 41 purpose built tools tied into their systems. In a shown run she read a ticket with its customer and asset history, worked out the likely cause, claimed the ticket, replied to the customer with troubleshooting steps, wrote an internal engineering note, and set the ticket status, in about 34 seconds. Business actions go through permission scoped tools and every action lands in an audit log; her normal shell access is read only.
He saved articles and never read them, because on his phone he ended up on social media or email instead. So he built a reading app with AI and the AI that bundles his saved articles into one EPUB for his Xteink X4 Pro e-reader.
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.
Derrick Ong Chin asked four agents to find the protein powder he buys often, Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard whey in Double Rich Chocolate, for under $0.90 an ounce. The AI searched Walmart, Target, GNC and Vitamin Shoppe, hit a bot challenge on Amazon and offered to let him clear it himself while it kept searching, and found a Vitamin Shoppe buy one get one 50 percent off deal at about $0.92 an ounce that still needed checking at checkout. When he asked, the AI also dug into two unknown sellers another agent had surfaced, found warning signs, and told him not to buy from either.
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.