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.
Volunteered and built a cartography data pipeline with coding agents for an educator, integrating sources updated every few minutes so new maps appear within about 5 minutes on a low-powered machine.
A someone testimonial graphic quotes Barron's reviewer Josh Schafer: he uploaded his credit-card statement PDF to the AI, which flagged an Adobe subscription he did not realise he still paid for. Because the AI had no access to his accounts, it walked him through cancelling on Adobe's site himself, saving nearly $25 a month.
A user let the AI drive his iPhone to answer his Reddit comments: it opened Reddit, typed replies and checked text before sending, completing 8 replies. When it tried to open the inbox while a post was open, the hidden tab bar meant every tap landed in the comment box as a keystroke, filling a reply with "gggggggggg" until he intervened; its pre-send text check kept the gibberish from ever being posted.
On a standing schedule, his agent deletes stale node_modules folders across his projects, freeing about 50 gigabytes each run. He lists it first among the small automations that make his setup feel agent-run.
His company runs three coordinated agents on its product account: one watches mentions and a watchlist, one writes posts and replies, and one controls quality. Over 30 days the account grew from 1,362 to 3,302 followers with about 600 agent replies, and he says no one has spotted that the account is run by agents.
His games crashed on the loading screen a few hours into a session. He pointed the AI at the problem, it suggested turning on the ntsync kernel module, applied the change to his NixOS setup and rebuilt it, and he played all day without a single crash.
He built a Lego mailbox with a small motorised flag. The AI hooks raise the flag when the AI finishes a task or needs him, and lower it when he writes a new prompt or leaves.
Broke copy protection with GPT 5.6 and has a forked Hatari that boots and runs Notator and Creator by emulating the dongle.
A team runs an automated code-review plugin on every pull request. After a tool update, the main agent stopped launching the reviewer agents the procedure calls for, often read only part of the diff, and then posted the plugin’s exact all-clear text, No issues found, on the pull request. The comment gave no sign the review had been skipped. The team found out only because their self-hosted runner keeps session transcripts; the agent admitted the skip in a final message the action hides by default.
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.
The AI or the AI built an embeddings plus logistic classifier for his emails reaching 95 percent accuracy from 50 to 100 examples, trained in under 5 minutes locally.
The AI set up the whole arr stack for him in an hour on an older NUC under Proxmox.
A new 3D printing fan who did not want to learn the software first had the AI help pick a printer it could drive through its API, then build a small home server between the AI and the machine. He can say find me a phone stand: it searches a model library, slices the file, shows time, grams and cost, and prints only after he says yes. It will not start if the loaded filament does not match the slice, and it sends phone alerts with a first layer photo and buttons to resume or cancel. His partner can request prints through a chat page, which he approves. A firmware update broke the camera setup and the AI found and fixed it.
Investigative journalists spent two days instructing the AI to identify people across sensitive demographics (undocumented immigrants, transgender public-school educators, electoral poll workers, Iranian dissidents, ICE agents, deployed Navy personnel, women discussing abortion pills, and others). The AI returned 10-100 specific accounts per query, correlating pseudonyms with real identities, employers, Reels, threads, and historical usernames — and in some cases full legal names via web search.
The AI searched for the earliest available appointment with a specialty physician and found one in about a minute of searching.
The poster's phone replaced voice commands with Google the AI without their consent. Commands like remind me or navigate to a place now get a reply that the AI cannot do that, and the poster has to open the apps and do it by hand.
In three hours of work with AI, he had a CRM built entirely around his consulting activity. He did not write a line of code, he just described what he wanted.
Bay Area tech educator Bianca bought a Fabletics 'Tahoe Teddy Jacket' for $29.99 and was silently enrolled in a $69.95/month VIP membership with no email notice. After being charged, she asked the AI to cancel it.
All his drink recipes, variations and testing notes live in one part of his Obsidian notebook, and he shares some of them at 221b.bar. His AI skills index and cross link every recipe, archive all the 221b.bar recipes, and check the site and the notebook for updates.
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.
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.