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 wanted playlists made from the notes in his music file tags, like folk rock and cool, and his old bash script was not enough. The AI gave up and sent him to forums, then the AI wrote a Beets plugin and a config that now creates and updates his playlists on its own from those tags.
He runs Nostr relays for clients. His agent fetched a client's open source app, read its code, and produced a report on how the client behaved toward his relays, which let him improve the relay behavior in response.
The last of four cryptograms on a famous unsolved list had resisted everyone since 1950; the first three fell in 1948, 1996 and 2019. Working with AI and OpenAI, the poster cracked it: Opus 5.5 wrote the search code and picked out the books to use for the key phrase, another model verified the result, and the list keeper has confirmed the solution.
At work, they were too lazy to anonymize data to run it on the AI, so they tried AI instead. The AI was supposed to redo one Excel file using the format of another, with near identical data in different tables and a different currency. Two hours were lost.
Another user describes the AI’s phone work. It called AT&T and argued for a discount because his service is poor where he lives, staying on the phone with real people across multiple transfers and departments for 98 minutes, and got the discount. The amount is not stated. His other two cases from the same comment are recorded separately where they stand on their own.
He released version 0.6.0 of his software, and his agent fleet built most of it. A pre-launch check caught a routing bug where one agent was being sent another agent's model id. Now every routing path runs as a canary before a release.
A Korean the AI guide recounts a Sept 23, 2026 video by investing YouTuber Kim Dante (channel 'Tomorrow's Investment King Kim Dante'), who joined the AI through a US VPN and asked it to list every subscription he pays for, rank them by how little he uses them, and draft a cancellation message for each. Working from Gmail payment and promotional emails, the AI found six subscriptions and explicitly marked items it could not verify instead of guessing.
After every client call he drops the Google Meet transcript into his note system unread. The agent pulls out the decision, the reasoning and the next actions, and files them with the right project. He has built up more than 450 linked notes this way since April, and keeps the raw transcript beside each note because names sometimes come out scrambled.
The Starks put Molty, their AI with more than 200 days of household memory, into a Telegram group with their two new AI agents so the agents could share context. Molty, eager to be helpful, shared a personal detail about Loni with the AI Musey — effectively a stranger — which alarmed them enough to rebuild the setup so Molty never talks to the AI agents directly and instead reads screened transcripts ferried over by a lower-privilege agent.
He updated kim-olsen.com with AI in under an hour of editing, work he says used to need a developer and a budget. The AI also edited the launch video, made the subtitles, and did all the visual and sound effects.
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.
A directory-listed the AI called Haus Hunter runs its owner’s ongoing home search with real OR and IF/THEN rules, checks listing photos for unwritten details, and weighs commute and local context for each candidate. It investigates homes the way a good buyer’s agent would, continuously.
Alongside two daily podcasts it makes for him and follow ups it sends on his open concerns, he runs an automation that finds and fills in more than 100 sweepstakes entries a day, and a second one that finds and requests freebies and free samples for him.
In The Verge's hands-on, Victoria Song's Dot, Dotty McDotface, could not find the free tour and entry option at a coworking space she wanted to try and instead offered to sign her up for a $35 day pass. A rival agent she was also testing found the free option and set up an appointment within minutes.
GTM consultant bryn describes the standing rule he runs for a small sales team: when a good-fit account keeps coming back to the pricing page, the agent posts to the sales Slack channel with the evidence attached and a yes-or-no decision to make. The point is that reading and assembling evidence is the agent's job, not the rep's.
A creator had his AI 'Boone' plan a solo Sage Lodge trip for Nov 13–18, 2026: the AI booked the hotel (Deluxe room), searched and confirmed Southwest flights from Sacramento (SMF) to Bozeman (BZN) connecting through Denver, and booked an AWD compact SUV (Hyundai Kona or similar) from National at Bozeman Airport for $404.08. He notes the process took ~47 minutes because he was learning the tool.
Marco Madonna spent three days in October having the AI turn the Excel workbook he and his partner use to run their house into a phone dashboard backed by the same Google Sheet, which was never replaced. The AI first mapped the workbook and flagged a total that didn't add up, the app now writes expenses and budgets back into the sheet, monthly broker reports are imported only if every check passes, and a verification script matched 50 checks against the sources with zero unexplained differences — plus it spotted a kids' savings payment likely credited to the wrong contract.
Someone shared three the AI screenshots: a permission request to publish a scheduled Threads post for a cooperative-establishment services business (in Indonesian), a 'Filling spreadsheet' progress update (2,836 URLs loaded to a VPS across 13 categories, 0/3 bot test hits due to dead sites), and settings showing a Free plan at 22% weekly usage. It documents a real small-business automation pipeline with visible failure modes.
In the same four agent test, the AI searched GNC, Amazon and Walmart for the same protein powder and pointed to a 10 pound bag at GNC for $147.99, about $0.92 an ounce. The link it gave led to a page not found error. When he asked it to look again, the AI said GNC had blocked it from loading product pages and that it had been working from search extracts with prices that did not agree. It also said it could not check Costco, Target or Bodybuilding.com.
Andrew Connell moved 426 pages, 281 course pages, 217 videos and 8,911 comments back to his own site after closing his Voitanos business, with every old URL answering with a single 301. The AI did most of the work over six months in his personal time, and his site went from about 5 percent of the organic search share to close to 90 percent in two months.
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.