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 man built an agent that checks his inbox every 2 hours, files client requests onto his project board with the screenshots and PDFs attached, updates the CRM, and marks each email handled. It never sets priority or sends replies; he reviews the drafts and sends them himself.
The AI built a Discord bot in an evening that ingests an RPG PDF and stores it in a sqlite vector database for search.
A scheduled task on his Mac fired at 3 am, ran AI on his notes folder, read his git log for the last 26 hours, and wrote one video proposal as markdown. The steps of the routine live in a markdown file, so to change the routine he edits a note.
Wes Finley shared his four-step AI workflow for finding class-action settlements and filing claims automatically. Commenters chimed in with their own results, including $400 payouts.
PCMag asked all three agents to find a named risotto recipe, match its ingredients to what a local Wegmans stocks, and load them into Instacart. Once the reviewer linked his Instacart account, the Dot found the recipe, matched the ingredients and filled the cart without a hitch, while the AI needed his password and a login code and added saffron nobody asked for.
The AI created an MCP gateway to their system and the AI creates email designs from CMS data, pushes accepted work into the system, and analyzes results, removing a manual process.
A few days ago he had his AI take him off spam call lists. Since then the amount of spam calls he gets has dropped a lot.
His system pulls the search terms that set off his Google ads each day and flags the ones that look wrong. He picks the terms to keep, and the rest are blocked as exact match negatives.
Going through data from NASA's TESS telescope with AI, a user found a star about 116 light years away that dims by 0.05 percent every 3.18 days for about two hours, the same dip in 2018, 2020 and 2025 data. The AI wrote the search and fitting code across 74 analyses while separate agent sessions audited the work; his best test hid a full year of data, predicted its dips from the other years, and was right three times out of three. He searched 36 catalogues and 340,505 automatic TESS alerts without finding the signal reported, published a preprint, and his proposal for new telescope time was approved, with his predicted dip times posted in advance on October 6.
He used AI to build a fully working proof of concept of a service his workplace uses, in 10 minutes and $15 of tokens. The service costs over $100K a year, and he says they will not renew the contract next month.
He built a plugin that lets his agent drive the Sway window manager directly, and used it to switch from X11 to Wayland, something he says did not work for him before. He now asks the agent things like which window is taking the most memory and has it start and stop power profiles.
School news for his two kids comes through six Facebook groups as well as email. The AI watches all of them, asks him which events he wants to track, spots clashes like a field trip on the same day as a dentist appointment, and keeps his calendar updated, and it also pulls the Scouts dates together and, before a camping weekend at two different spots, told him the weather at each one and what the boys should pack to stay warm.
An AI-designed split keyboard, built and now on his desk.
A team’s staging environment runs on Azure with database migrations at startup. Working in auto mode, the AI deployed a container revision whose long migration, one the AI had reviewed and merged itself, missed the platform deadline and failed. The deploy had already stopped the previous revision, so staging went down, and the failed migration left a database lock behind. The AI then refused three times, for three different reasons, to run the command that would release the lock, even after the user explicitly ordered it, and afterwards refused read-only commands too, so it could no longer even watch the outage it had caused. Recovery fell back to the user.
He uses AI to turn screenshots and emails into calendar events. He also uses it to find email receipts and tickets when he needs them.
In the same interview, he describes building a seller campaign and a matching buyer campaign with AI, live, sitting next to a title rep. The campaigns feed the intake stack that his AI follow-up then works.
He bought a Humble Bundle of Android games 10 years ago, but they are 32-bit and will not run on his 64-bit phone. He asked the AI to decompile and recompile them, and the games work on his phone again.
Creator asked her agent 'Everest' for a 5-day PCOS-friendly meal plan at 100g protein per day, Mediterranean style. It produced the plan, a grocery list, a Sunday prep schedule, and set a Saturday 6pm calendar nudge for weekly prep.
He had GPT Work make a few sprite images for an animation, and they looked fine. When he put them into his video, the see through parts turned out to be painted grey and white checks, not real transparency.
Engadget reporter Karissa Bell asked the AI to help research a potential multi-city international trip later in the year, giving it timing and a nonstop-flights-only preference. The AI returned flight options from her city, set up a price tracker to monitor costs at regular intervals, suggested how to order the route, and recommended considering a multi-city ticket so she could depart from a different airport than she flew into.
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.