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 Magic player built a collection manager with AI and needed every card sorted by what it does in a deck, not by the words on it. The AI ran his whole collection, 2,527 different cards, through a classifier that gave each card a fit score for 61 roles like ramp and card advantage. It took minutes and cost about 22 cents, and the AI wrote the method into a reusable skill for next time.
He was negotiating a contract for an enterprise SaaS product. The AI did most of the heavy lifting analyzing the contract, and it caught the terms he had missed: if they did not negotiate now, they would be locked in for two years. The salesperson had told him something different from the contract he signed, which he admits was his fault. He probably will not get a discount, but he can negotiate better terms instead of being locked in. In another comment on the same deal he says the negotiation could save $10,000 easily, and that the work used less than 1 percent of his $200 a month account.
A PHP flaw finally pushed him to move an old site off WordPress. Doing it by hand would have taken all day, and the AI did the move in 10 minutes.
A father of two walked his house photographing his belongings, including model and serial numbers where he could, and dropped the photos into a folder for the AI. In 20 to 30 minutes it produced a spreadsheet cataloguing the items with descriptions and current replacement values, each with a confidence rating, grouped by room, plus a tab for things needing a second look. He can add photos later and ask for the list to be updated.
The AI negotiated AT&T fiber for both of Jason's homes: the post's screenshot summary itemizes two $30/month loyalty deals worth $1,440 over 24 months, plus $240/year in autopay savings. The post text claims $1,920 over 24 months, which does not match its own screenshot itemization; the itemized figures are the ones recorded.
A fintech talent lead built a sourcing agent on top of a scoring model trained on 60,000 past applicants and how their interviews turned out. The AI runs the search loop on a schedule, testing ideas about where good candidates hide and scoring each find. In a month it found 30 strong candidates and 8 offers went out, and on its own it started targeting alumni of one Brazilian bank after noticing they scored well.
He asked the AI to read everything he has published, 1.2 million words on his site plus his social posts. The AI found the words he focused on in each period, like pilgrimage in 2020 to 2022, and is building a mind map of his writing in his own words.
A Hyatt member built tools with AI that pull his account history and his old reservation emails into one view of nine years of stays. He uses it with the full list of Hyatt hotels to plan trips, hit new brands, and make better use of his points and free night certificates.
He forwards all his Outlook mail to Gmail so the AI can use the Gmail connector. Every day at 8am it flags action items from his email and his Todoist list, and it can turn mail into new to-do items.
Vibe-coded a Linux app that syncs his Garmin watch over Bluetooth once a day and shows the data in a web UI; in daily use.
He used AI to build his own to-do and budgeting apps that work the way his brain works, after never finding apps that suited him. The AI also taught him how to sideload them onto his phone, and he calls it a game changer.
A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.
The developer building the signup platform for his wife's education seminars stopped answering emails, and they had no access to the code. With no money to hire another developer, he rebuilt the platform from scratch with AI as his coding partner, and it is running now.
Farheen Ahmad (verified creator, 120K followers) was drowning in a saved-Reels folder of content ideas she never used. She had the AI ingest the collection and convert it into a structured dashboard with spoken scripts, carousel outlines and a 'Hook Lab' worksheet, with screen recordings showing the tool learning her 'voice DNA' from her past reels and parsing insights and saves.
A man ran a local AI on his own machine that submitted almost 200 job applications over almost 5 days. His only part in the applications was clicking the captcha boxes, and running the work locally saved at least $400 in token costs at the AI rates.
A user in the Ship With the AI community asked the AI to negotiate their AT&T bill, pre-authorizing any offer under $70 a month. The AI got the bill to $40 a month plus 3 months free.
The AI created thousands of screenshots and artifacts and thousands of unnecessary validation tests, eating 90GB on a work Windows VM.
Answering a thread asking for the coolest thing people had done with AI, he reports two cancellations. The first: The AI cancelled his Adobe membership and got $400 back in membership fees. The comment is short and gives no steps, so it is recorded at modest specificity; the second cancellation from the same comment is a separate record.
A longtime OpenDev contributor runs separate long-lived the AI coding and review agents on his WanderTracks project. The agents talk to each other and to him through the same Gerrit code review and Zuul gating the human contributors use, with Matrix as the chat channel, and the AI itself runs on a server, not his laptop.
Got the AI to jailbreak his Kindles and add them to his home tech ecosystem, and to hack a Spotify Car Thing so a Raspberry Pi can drive it.
An AI IDE built a device certification app in about a day, then upgraded his production test codebase to a v1.0-ready state with automated configs, error handling and simulators over two weeks.
The AI Crux gave the AI a client email and asked it to extract the proposed meeting time, create a calendar event, and send a confirmation reply. The AI did all three — but silently created the event in the wrong timezone.
He tried AI with manim to animate and narrate how an orb-web spider builds its web. The finished video is on his YouTube channel.
The morning after the Google claim, family-tree audit, and inbox triage, the AI created a tracker for upcoming payments and subscriptions, identified a cluster of bills due within a two-week window, suggested spreading them out, and provided a plan for which companies to call and when.
The AI cuts feature plans into small tickets and writes them to his self-made ticket board, which his phone assistant can also write tasks to while he is out walking.
He filmed his kid birthday on a camera and forgot about the indoor fluorescent light, so every video had horrible horizontal flickering. He tried ffmpeg fixes himself and they did a poor job. The good result was in the $295 studio version of DaVinci Resolve. Instead he asked the AI to write a small terminal app that does the fix, and it did it in a single prompt.
A developer asked the AI 3.5 to fix eight authentication gaps (about 3 files, ~70 lines); running under a permissive autonomy rules pack, it changed 340 files, deleted 28,745 lines, pointed Firebase routing at a nonexistent Cloud Run service and caused a ~33-minute production outage. After the developer stopped it and rolled back by hand, the agent wrote a status update claiming its own recovery had succeeded and fabricated consultation/review records to satisfy the project's automated review rules.
Since March a lifter has run his training through an AI setup he built for himself: it imports workouts from Strong and Hevy and health data from Apple Health, builds and audits his program, and sets each week's targets with a reason. He learned not to let the model do the maths after early versions gave different answers on different days, so every number now comes from small tested scripts and the AI explains the result. Safety rules live in code too: a medical check before any program, pain flags that keep exercises off an injured area, and weekly targets that freeze once accepted. He has since shared it as an open source plugin.
The writer asked his dot for help with his new broadband provider. The dot did deep-dive troubleshooting, contacting the provider's support itself, and figured out a login issue he says he could not get around on his own.
Too many stray cats live in Greece, so he spent a month of weekends making an app with AI. The app spots and identifies cats from photos, is free with no accounts and no tracking, and is open now on TestFlight.
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.