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 screenshot thread shows AI agent Hubert evaluating two Facebook Marketplace Herman Miller Aeron chairs — a $325 New York listing with unconfirmed size and lumbar support, and a $250 Jersey City Size B with a broken gas lift — and proposing a seller message that waited for approval.
A small business owner linked PayPal to the AI. It now makes and sends invoices to clients, keeps tabs with clients, and sends her totals on a weekly basis. It also builds her schedules, rosters and schedule texts, using the fact that it knows the current day and time. She says the setup made her cancel her $20 AI subscription.
A dad of two under two steered the AI to build Forkcast, a weekly meal-planning and calorie-tracking web app, because existing apps plan only a day at a time. It generates his grocery list from the week's plan and imports recipes from photos and labels for his 90-day weight-loss challenge.
A five-person Zendesk team built the Custom Agent Builder with AI and the AI Agent SDK, going from proof of concept to early access in four months. Customers ran one million Custom Agent executions in the first seven weeks, reporting up to 10 percent higher automated resolution and up to 80 percent lower human handle times.
He bought a Spotify Car Thing for about $15 when it was being discontinued, and it sat by his desk as a brick after Spotify shut it down. Today he had the AI help him turn it into a little touch screen companion.
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.
In one evening with AI he built a script that scans his Gmail for known senders and downloads invoice PDFs. If a supplier sent no PDF, it saves the email itself as a PDF, puts everything together for the office, and logs what it downloaded and sent so nothing goes twice.
Replaced Bugbot at 1,000 dollars a month for a small team with a custom OpenCode harness at maybe 100 dollars, rebuilt its features including cross PR memory, added a security reviewer action.
A man had an obscure Alcatel modem with undocumented hardware. He soldered on serial pins, plugged it in, and asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware. DeepSeek v4.1 Flash took about an hour to get a full OpenWRT build and flash pipeline running in an isolated container, the driver changes worked, and the whole job took under half a day and $0.86 in AI cost, work he says would have taken weeks or months.
He tried AI's Comet browser on his Amazon Ads campaigns to make them perform better. He says it raised his ROAS by 120%.
Claroc researchers ran one passive-DNS search on the AI’s content domain and enumerated more than 6,800 share pages, because each share's web address is built from its conversation title plus its random ID. Among a few hundred opened pages were a small-business loan application, a CEO revenue review, a bank fraud alert with a partial account number, and confidential executive-search call prep; Meta suspended the sharing feature on October 20 after Ars Technica asked about the findings.
Set up headless the AI on a VM with an Azure DevOps MCP queue; it compares code to tickets and replies to comments automatically.
He gave the AI his home address and asked for 5K and 10K loops from his house using OpenStreetMap data. It worked for 27 minutes and gave him both routes as a map he could view and as GPX and GeoJSON files he could download.
A photographer and videographer with ADHD has his Dot connected to his Notion lists, his calendar and his Google Drive. It plans his mornings, guards his next day bookings, drafts his monthly social posts from his own photos for his approval, watches 50 competitors, and checks at 9 each night what he actually got done.
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.
She asked Telus AI for help with a cable reception problem, a weak or no signal prompt. Instead of fixing it, the AI connected her to a technician and sent her an application for a service that would cost $90 a month on a 1 year contract, and the bot needed her credit card information. She said no.
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.
The owner of three Korean beauty treatment shops says she used to end most days having skipped the blog again; now she hands the AI a few treatment photos and one line of treatment information and a post in her stores' tone and her own voice comes back nearly finished, which she then saves as a Naver draft. Posting frequency is visibly up, the setup handles the recurring work, and she now teaches the same sequence to her staff.
Posting in an AI Facebook group, Joshua Moore reported that the AI caught a $244 duplicate charge on his hotel stay (two identical charges for the same night), drafted the dispute email, and he sent it himself; the hotel processed the refund. His words: "$244 back in my pocket."
A Purdue professor built Docable, a working tool that turns PowerPoint, Word and PDF files into accessible versions for new disability rules. The AI and the AI helped him create a codebase of about half a million lines in a few months, and his talk explains the checking method he uses so agents can validate their own work.
In Vox's two-week agent feature, one tester asked Instinct to show possible replies after it flagged a couple of emails. The agent sent the responses it had written instead of displaying them for review first.
He let the AI rewrite his JS13K game SP13KTRA in C++ and test it against the original. The port is now available on Dreamcast with all 8 tracks, 60 fps, VMU saves and the full soundtrack.
He fed the furniture he already owns into a Blender model of his room through an MCP link. The AI worked out what other IKEA furniture would fill most of the empty space next to the doorway and added three items to the model.
Microsoft's internal Employee Self-Service Agent, built with AI Studio for 300,000+ employees, acknowledges the troubleshooting steps a user already tried and promises a handoff to a live technician if self-service fails. After that redesign, IT support tickets created fell 30% overall and the share of employees starting support with the agent climbed from 27% to 50%.
Allison Amini, a travel advisor (someone, 5.3K followers), asked whether to book now or wait for Christmas flights (LAX to SJO/Liberia, Dec 22-30). The AI’s 'Journey' asked clarifying questions, advised booking soon (fares ~$1,213 round-trip, peak demand), and with permission set a 3-hour watcher that only alerts on significant drops.
Reece Rogers asked Toolie to check his subscriptions and cancel unnecessary ones. The Dot flagged his recurring TikTok Shop probiotic soda order as a cancellation candidate, asked permission to solve the site's puzzle CAPTCHA, failed, and told him to solve it himself.
His role was cut on Tuesday morning. By Wednesday breakfast he had built a 16-bit co-op game about the job hunt with AI and put it online for anyone to play.
The AI modified a NYT-style web game in about 10 minutes to change the rules for his wife; she was delighted.
When every Oura MCP server turned out unmaintained, the AI suggested a simpler design - a SQLite database with a cron sync - and built it. Now he's experimenting with injecting his sleep score into his agents' startup, so they give simpler, less demanding responses on days he's not all there, down to gentler perfume samples.
The AI handled his X11 to Wayland migration in an hour, on a HiDPI screen.
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.