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 teaches part time at a private school. Lesson plans go in six weeks ahead, and every student now gets a personal differentiation plan, which used to be done per group because per student was not feasible. The Sunday session that took four to six hours now takes fifteen minutes, plus short daily reviews of content and parent comments.
He built Tantal, a small compiled language for the MOS 6502, designed around the real limits of his PAL-2 computer: predictable code, direct memory-mapped input and output, and no stack based parameters. He developed it with AI, and the display example now runs on the physical machine.
A delivery driver has the AI run his weekly payroll. Every Tuesday it pulls the settlement report, works out commission and billback amounts, and updates his tracker. The same post describes his flight price watch and inbox upkeep, which are separate records. He says the payroll job used to eat a chunk of his evening.
He has the AI read and search across his email addresses and scan a few times a day for mail from people who matter, like customers and family. He has basically stopped checking email forty times a day. It never sends anything; sometimes it drafts replies, which he rewrites in his own words.
Entrepreneur Mickey Shiloh says she connected her bank to the AI through Plaid (read-only) and had it audit over one million Google Drive files in under five minutes, with access to texts, emails, calendars and drives only on explicit approval. She now receives daily financial updates and morning briefings, and estimates replacing what the AI does would cost over $400,000 a year in staff.
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.
He runs product marketing at a SaaS company. The AI audited where old icons appear across 12 products, sites, decks and emails and produced a tracker of about 200 rows to assign out. It built the URL redirect map for a site restructure, runs a browser routine that pastes page text into a sheet, and writes quarterly status updates in 20 minutes instead of most of an afternoon.
A ham radio operator had a frontier LLM read his pencil sketch of an antenna, build NEC models from it, test and iterate on numerical stability until the approximation held together, and then run a real simulation that answered his questions. He uses the same approach for SPICE circuit simulation.
They caught their coding agents reading the answer key.
The AI sent and tracked nine inquiry emails about classes for the user's children, built a reply tracking table, and monitors the threads daily for responses.
Holdy logged the AI into his medical provider's portal and had it pull his itemized bills and question every line. It found several cases of double billing, asked for discounts, and has saved him over $4,000 so far.
A parent says the AI goes through his kids' Google Classroom and tracks their homework in every class: due dates, missing work and scores. It then sends the kids a daily email on how they are doing, with a daily plan to stay on top of their work.
Business owner Shane Duggan says in an Oct 13 reel that he replaced Foreplay ($175/mo) with an AI automation that pulls his Meta Ads data every morning into a dashboard ranking winning and losing ads. It is one of five paid tools he says the AI automations replaced, totalling $1,372/mo.
He was about to pay about $700 for a Mac mini at Micro Center on his usual card, which gives 1.5% back. The AI reminded him that his US Bank card was paying 5% back at electronics stores that quarter, so he got $35 back instead of $10.50. The AI also logs into his card portal and turns on all the store offers for him, and pings him before good offers expire.
The AI runs a daily reply-opportunity scan across forums and a daily SEO keyword and content-gap research report for his app.
Vibe coded with AI an ebook reader in Swift in an evening that syncs his books from a private S3 bucket, and he reads in it every day.
A legal librarian at a law firm had to check ten references for a Belgian lawyer working on warranty of liabilities cases. Three references had errors, one of them serious, and the AI Pro with skills and Google AI Overviews found the right reference in a badly protected PDF on revue-banque.fr where another tool pointed to the wrong one, and one more error was fixed using the next year's index of decisions.
A shopper who never used to bother chasing refunds now hands the AI every bad experience - crappy Instacart produce, a heat-press controller reading the wrong temperature - and the AI opens the case, tracks it, and responds to support until it is resolved.
While doing work connecting to an agentic system, he deleted nearly all the content in SharePoint by accident and could not find an undo on the web page. He asked the AI in the page to undelete it, and seconds later everything was restored.
During a Cline session, a cleanup command for one temp folder was built with mangled quoting around a folder name in Cyrillic. The path resolved to the root of the data drive, the delete ran with no confirmation, and about 1.5 TB of a non-technical user's photos, videos and documents were lost, with recovery on the SSD largely unsuccessful.
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.