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.
MindStudio tested an AI monitor that watches Autotrader listings and flags cars priced well under market. Scheduled checks deliver deal alerts to Telegram, and a continuity setting stops it re-alerting on the same listing.
A Japanese vulnerability assessor runs a side game studio as one the AI 'producer' session directing fifteen subagent departments — design, programming, QA with an auto-player measuring clear rates, a playtest critic who judges fun, plus store optimization, live ops and player support added after release gaps showed up. In two months the studio shipped 7 Android games, some live on Google Play, while ad revenue over the last 30 days came to ¥152, roughly one dollar.
The AI prepared and filed Australian visitor visas for a couple travelling to Brisbane, and caught a placeholder birthdate in the details before submission, confirming the correction over WhatsApp.
Built and maintains a photography workflow tool with an AI coding harness and discontinued his Adobe subscription.
A wrongful assessment of his company structure could have cost him well over $100K, and lawyers quoted high fees with no promise of winning. He worked with AI to write an objection letter of more than 100 pages, answering every point under the region’s corporate law. A few months later the approval letter arrived and the assessment was overturned.
The AI plus Jev built a browser extension in about 10 minutes that ranks HN comments for sloppiness, which he uses to view HN.
A man had a poor quality home plan from the previous owner. For about $1 of his usage quota, the AI converted the drawing into 3D, changed the room he wanted to redo, made a few visual options, built a shopping list from his local store with budgets, and put it all on a local web page. He says the same job done the normal way would take a package of apps, trained people and at least $10,000.
An addon he wrote takes notes while he plays World of Warcraft. Each morning an AI turns the notes into a story told by a weathered chronicler, and the AI turns the story into a narrated podcast episode with voices, music and sound effects, one narrator per character. He reads every post and listens before anything goes up.
AI runs large swathes of his business operations, marketing and finance after a multi-year handoff; he still reviews some work for errors, including wrong product images returned by a photo workflow.
Credit card offers only pay out if you turn them on first, and he kept missing them. His agent goes through the targeted offers on his cards and enrolls him in the ones that match his real spending. He calls it free money he was leaving on the table.
The AI hacked a headless runner for a 30 year old game and ran parallel instances in the background to playtest it.
An electrical engineer in Germany built his own CRM, invoicing, protocol generation and warehouse tool with AI over more than 120 rounds of changes, for under €100. He says the same build would have cost six figures a decade ago, plus €5,000 to €8,000 a year to use, and the tool now runs the way he wants on his own computer.
Mom Kam Williams demonstrated hands-free the AI use via voice commands while multitasking: a Portland weekend itinerary (Powell Butte, Wildwood Trail, Rose Test Garden, Japanese Garden, waterfalls), categorized packing lists (City Days, Hikes & Falls, Wedding Look), a drafted email to her housekeeper, and a coffee order.
His team is replacing a client's 15 year old system. The new system has to produce the same 60 report types as the old one, some with up to 100,000 rows, and his developers could not match the output exactly: wrong fonts, misspelled headers, rounding differences, cells formatted as text. He gave Fable 5.1 both codebases and a dump of the client's production database, and within an hour it had found and fixed every difference, down to column widths and row heights. Matching the reports by hand would have taken weeks.
He opened his site dashboard and found a plugin he never installed. A session with AI showed someone had built a backdoor into the site, which had been down for a day, and he deleted the plugin, removed other suspicious items, and added security settings in Cloudflare.
He set the AI Tasks up to look up Berkeley housing updates on its own and match what it finds against his own tracker. He called it scary, but useful.
Fully rolled out a custom PR review running on GLM-5.3-Flash for his devs last week.
Josh Dubowsky gave the AI access to his whole home folder: it inventoried 9,412 files, proposed a plan, and — only after his approval — sorted 312 problem files into six plain-language folders, renamed files readably and deleted duplicates he approved. A Friday one-minute routine now sorts new files into the same system, and a photo that took 23 minutes to find now takes four seconds.
A man looking for a new cooker has an AI running on a virtual machine keeping an eye on prices for him. The agent created its own scheduled job that runs the price checks and messages him if anything interesting has happened since the last check.
Creator Lyndsey King says she used AI to create a single $37 PDF in 47 minutes: eight buyers brought in $296 the first night, and she reports total sales approaching $40,000, a shift from the $500–$600 courses she used to sell.
Last spring he gave an agent an API key with no cap on it. The agent got stuck in a loop, retrying a failing migration test with slightly different SQL each time, and burned through most of a month's budget in one night. Nothing malicious, just a loop with no exit. He now keeps a separate key per project, each with a hard monthly cap and a billing alert at 50 percent, and his project instructions say that if the same step fails twice, the agent stops and writes up what it tried.
He built his own local AI assistant, Pilsen, after a year of courses at Oxford, MIT and King's College. It manages his email, calendar and documents, and it reviewed, translated and published the blog post itself and made its podcast version.
He directs academic tech at a university. Every semester some instructors never set up their courses, so students walk into empty course pages. A day after signing up, he had the AI build a CSV of upcoming courses with no content, or where the instructor has never entered the course. The list also told him one course was already open to students when courses should not be open yet, so he closed it.
During a week-long, move-in agent test, the journalist's the AI (Mark) logged into her Facebook, scoured Marketplace for couches, lamps and rugs, drafted and sent seller messages with her approval, and managed the replies. The hunt ended with a real purchase: an AI-sourced dining table.
A call center replaced its press a number menu with a system that listens to what the caller says in the first 10 seconds and routes the call. Wrong transfers fell by almost 40%.
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.
Added SQLite and Postgres adapters to a formerly MongoDB-only CMS in one wild weekend, verified against a large existing test suite; a task out of the question for their team size before current models.
Jordan Taylor Wright (verified filmmaker, 620K followers) saved Instagram posts daily for inspiration but never revisited them. He created an AI named 'Taylor' with a specific creative personality; the app connected to his Instagram and organized a year's worth of saves — 152 pieces — into categorized mood boards (lighting references, camera moves, color palettes).
A parent had the AI write firmware that turns his children's unsupported second-generation Yoto players into Audiobookshelf clients. The AI handled flashing, log reading, and fixes while he did the physical button presses, and the firmware is public on GitHub.
He asked the AI to make a modern version of Rescue Raiders, an old game he loved as a kid, with new graphics, goals and tech trees. The AI went back and forth with critic and art agents until it was done, and the finished game is live for anyone to play.
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.