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.
The AI goes through their shared work inbox, makes a list of every email, and sends three spreadsheets out to the departments with their tasks on them. The poster says it has basically changed their life at work.
Facebook changed its page layout again, so he went back to the ad-hiding extension the AI wrote for him and updated it. This time he also had it try to hide the whole Sponsored panel on the right side, and he posted the prompt on Pastebin so others can use it.
A worked example in metaflow.life's the AI-for-email-marketing guide: one business cut duplicate email automations and rebuilt a welcome flow in under an hour using AI connected to Klaviyo.
On a free year of the AI he has built and scheduled a stack of personal skills: a calendar manager, an expense tracker fed only by emailed invoices with his full history backfilled, a monthly utility cost comparer, and shopping re-up tracking that watches how fast he uses things like coffee beans and toilet paper and schedules the next buy. A weekly skills manager rates all the others and suggests improvements.
A creator gave the AI a screen recording and asked for a setup tutorial; the agent produced a HeyGen video presented by her own avatar. It kept her preferences in memory for follow-up video work.
The AI fixes his Flatpak and Nvidia driver sync after updates, and caught a crashed update that left a wrong kernel for his GPU drivers before he rebooted.
Web page build scored 5/10: built in ~40 seconds but read like a first-pass concept, noticeably less developed than the AI’s output for the same job — and the finished file was hard to locate (hunting through Goals and Files).
The AI compared 25 breast pump models from six brands against the user's insurance coverage, narrowing the choice to pumps that would actually be covered.
A backend developer built a voice agent after work that dials out for his friend's collections call center, which makes 8,000 outbound calls a month, most of them dead air. The agent greets the person, works out if they are interested, not interested or want a callback, and hands live prospects to a human with context. After a free trial the owner signed at $5,000 a month.
Dan Zhao posted a dark-mode screenshot recommending the AI for auto-insurance shopping, claiming over $1,000/year in savings. The comparison shows six-month premiums: Progressive $1,556 as the new leader vs Costco Connect $2,142.75 and current GEICO $2,324.63.
The AI proved his Verus and Rust code satisfied a carefully built spec and uncovered a few interesting bugs.
After his mother died he inherited a box of family film negatives and bought a Plustek 8200i scanner, then found its new chip had no Linux support. The AI helped him capture the Windows driver traffic and build a working SANE driver. Within a few hours he had his first good scan, and days later a near perfect driver with infrared dust removal.
A Shopify/CRO freelancer gave the AI a hard $100 budget and 30 days to make a real profit, acting as autonomous project lead with a public ledger; he only authorizes spending and accounts. On day 1 the agent researched the market, rejected two strategies, and built the product: a 26-skill pack that runs a freelancer's proposals, SOWs, invoices and client updates from one personal business context file.
His stock trading agent, given SSH access to a VM, moved itself to run on the server so he no longer has to keep his laptop open.
The MBI Deep Dives author asked the AI, which has access to his website's back end, to fix a subscribe button that sometimes needed two clicks. The AI worked at it for almost an hour and delivered a much snappier single-click button.
The AI given shell command access on his mom's laptop fixed a Bluetooth speaker that would not unpair after normal troubleshooting failed.
The AI release skill monitors canary rollouts, updates the ticket with status, and flags incidents and weird failures during multi-hour releases.
His SSD had become very slow at writing. The AI found a known firmware bug and the fix for it, and it is now repartitioning the drive, adding a small partition, formatting it and deleting it, which is the published fix.
Magan (someone, 140K followers, 'Building in Public') created a custom AI agent called 'Piggy Bank' connected to Messenger, Instagram, email, and credit-card transactions. It scans sources to find all subscriptions (which she can cancel), reads Instagram DM chat history to track brand-deal payments, and generates a ledger showing how much she's owed, plus spending insights and payment reminders.
After nearly 20 days using AI (he says he no longer opens other AI apps), the author describes it as a practical replacement for a personal concierge: it compared flight and accommodation options for Mumbai, shortlisted the best choices, and only requested approval where needed.
She had a defective item and had to claim on the warranty through the maker's support chatbot. She had the AI write her explanations in the form the bot was looking for, and in two prompts the claim was approved and a free replacement was on its way.
He spent about a tenth of his AI 6.1 SOL use having it sort all his chat threads into a few main projects and clean out the empty ones. It used the Chrome browser and finished the job with no mistakes.
Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.
Engadget reporter Karissa Bell spent a few days testing the AI (naming her agent 'boo') after connecting it to her Meta accounts. As one of her first tasks she had it mine her large backlog of saved Instagram and Facebook posts for recipe videos and posts, returning an organized list grouped by type with ingredients, steps, and links back to each original post — a searchable personal recipe book.
His quit vaping app Puff Counter passed 10,000 downloads with a 4.1 star rating after he built it in 2024 and never advertised it. Last week the AI rebuilt the app's whole website in one day.
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.
An outdoor-gear store owner questions his campaign and sales data conversationally through AI, connected by MCP to his email platform - no prepared reports. Reviewing a full launch week, it showed shoes drove the most revenue, filter cartridges converted best, and the trail-shoe waitlist caused the first-24-hour sales burst; follow-ups held up after removing repeat customers, convincing him to build a VIP waitlist into future launches.
The AI listed the user's house on Facebook Marketplace, answered renter inquiries, scheduled viewings, and the home rented in 14 days at the full asking rent.
Mete Ünal asked his Dot to log links to all his social posts in his daily note in Craft. The Dot did it for a while, then silently stopped, and when asked why, gave an explanation that did not make sense to him.
For an upcoming two-night stay in New York City, the AI checks IHG, Hyatt and Marriott every day across cash rates, corporate rates and points, calculates points-versus-cash redemption values, and alerts him when his price drops or another nearby hotel of interest opens up.
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.