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.
Josh Pigford started FirstIndex, a service that gets companies found on Google and in an AI app answers, at $1,000 a month. Within a month it was at about $570,000 a year in recurring revenue with about 30 clients, and the AI does most of the delivery work.
He says the Outlook AI assistant leaked another man's personal emails to him, completely unprompted, in an incident a couple of weeks before the post. He calls tools like this leaky and untrustworthy.
The AI helped flash his router with OpenWrt, including running an exploit itself and instructing the UART steps to load the binary permanently.
Host Alex reported that his AI designed and ordered the wristbands for the show's AI Engineer sauna meetup. The design-to-purchase loop was completed by the agent alongside his other travel tasks.
A builder created a skill that converts a user's Instagram saved collection into a private, searchable personal library. Every saved post is deep-read by vision AI, and everything runs on the user's own machine.
His kid's transcript was not going through, so as a last try he asked the AI to make a cleaner version of it. The cleaned version uploaded fine.
He was working through a 1.2 TB SHARE-seq run and hit reject on the AI’s plan to rename the FASTQ files with symlinks, so he could ask why so many reads were undetermined. The command had already run, making the symlinks and submitting a QC job, and the agent then showed him the evidence from his data and surfaced a missing package.
He made a pocket money app for his children. Parents post chores with a payout, the kids get them on their phones, and the quickest to tap accept wins the job. The child adds photo evidence, the parents approve it, and the app totals the week's money on a leaderboard, paid in cash on Friday.
He built Tidehook with GPT-6 Astra and generated art. Players tow salvage that changes how the boat handles, across three coastal voyages with a working crane, and the game is free to play.
The AI checked a ResMed purchase against the maker's price guarantee three times a day, filed when the price dropped, and secured a $121 refund; a second claim for $81.40 is pending.
He had an email with stage times and used AI to tidy it into a Stage, Day, Time, Artist list. The AI then changed the fcpxml file so Final Cut Pro had a new project for each set.
The author lost house keys and asked the AI to find locksmiths. One responded with a cal.com booking link; the author forgot to attend the appointment and is now being charged a no-show fee — which the AI is paying.
MindStudio confirmed an AI setup that scrapes competitor websites on a schedule and delivers a formatted report every Monday covering pricing changes, launches, funding and incidents. The watchlist is frozen once in chat and the job then runs untouched.
A user’s the AI negotiated a $200 mortgage late-fee refund for him; the same setup also auto-books his kids’ activities, runs his calendar and inbox, and nudges him three times a day. The refund came from the bot arguing his case with the lender.
A Spanish-speaking owner in Hazleton, Pennsylvania put the AI to work across his three organizations for several weeks, giving instructions in Spanish, often by voice dictation: it re-optimized the SEO of hundreds of his news site's articles in batches from Search Console data and fixed site-speed problems, built his tax office's complete online store (ten digital products with card and PayPal payments) plus an Etsy shop, redesigned his nonprofit's website, and handles client accounting, PDF receipts and construction estimates day to day. Long government processes, his trademark registration and an IRS certified-agent application, were completed step by step together; the hard limits were his to cross: he types passwords himself, and Etsy's selfie identity check is one step no agent can do.
Andrew asked the AI for the cheapest price on a new iPhone and AirPods, the best trade in value for his old phone, and whether a new model was about to drop. The AI found Amazon beat Apple by about $50 on the AirPods and a trade in worth about $200 more, and he bought on Amazon himself in the end.
He does not write code himself. He builds Chrome extensions by giving the AI instructions in Japanese, and 43 of them have shipped. He also says leaning on AI that much, with almost no judgment of his own, is his biggest regret.
A father of two walked his house photographing his belongings, including model and serial numbers where he could, and dropped the photos into a folder for the AI. In 20 to 30 minutes it produced a spreadsheet cataloguing the items with descriptions and current replacement values, each with a confidence rating, grouped by room, plus a tab for things needing a second look. He can add photos later and ask for the list to be updated.
The AI ran a protein-design pipeline at home on a 5090, chose similar tooling, and generated about 100 trajectories running 24 hours.
At family retailer Bambi Baby, COO Josh Weiss, who is not a developer, used AI to build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture tool and its follow-up. Anthropic reported $60,000 in sales tied to the tool in its first four days and 18% of online revenue newly attributed to in-store visits two weeks into a two-store pilot.
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.