Read my 17 years of Facebook posts and write a profile of my life
Creator Wendell Yu says the AI read his 17 years of Facebook posts and wrote a profile report of his life from them. The segment is the first of five first-hand cases in the video.
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Real things everyday people got it to do, and how to try them yourself.
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Book me a table — Instinct hammered Resy at ~200 requests an hour and got its user blocked
WIRED's Instinct coverage (via Dataist, Sept 24) reports a venture investor was blocked by Resy after their Instinct agent, attempting to book a table, sent roughly 200 requests per hour to Resy's API. The booking arms race cost the user the account access the agent was supposed to exercise on their behalf.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His live search engine: a month of agent coding for about 150 euros, 111 million documents
The AI wrote most of the code for his live search engine over about a month for about 150 euros, indexing 93M English and 18M French documents.
€150one time
Agent 'Tayzar' produced a chef's 5-day high-protein meal prep PDF
Chef Jeff Ilechie had his AI Tayzar create a 'High Protein Meal Prep Plan' PDF: a 5-day menu at roughly 155g protein per day, four batch recipes, a 90-minute prep workflow and a full grocery list.
A daily Sonnet routine answers his routine email and blocks time for the rest
A daily routine on Sonnet reads his email, answers the routine messages from templates, and puts the rest on his todo list. When a task needs more than an hour, the routine blocks time for it on his calendar.
My AI-built tool turns off notification sounds for every app on my Mac
He built a small tool with AI in March that turns off notification sounds for every app on his Mac, then forgot about it. Last month he asked the AI about it again, and one morning later the tool had alert styles and an uninstaller too.
Give the bot my resume and Gmail; wake up to 7 interviews
A job hunter gave the AI his Gmail and resume and posted that it landed him 7 interviews in 24 hours while he was gaming. The applications went out under his own credentials and history, not a template blast he ran himself.
Scrub my phone number off data-broker sites, on a schedule
A directory-listed the AI called Spam-Call Scrubber finds its owner’s phone number on people-search and data-broker sites, submits the opt-outs, finishes the confirmations, and re-checks on a schedule. It replaces a paid data-removal service with a standing bot.
The AI could not reformat my Excel file. I lost two hours.
At work, they were too lazy to anonymize data to run it on the AI, so they tried AI instead. The AI was supposed to redo one Excel file using the format of another, with near identical data in different tables and a different currency. Two hours were lost.
2 hourssaved
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Booked a Thai restaurant via OpenTable as part of a delegated productive-day
Parker Pannell showed the AI booking a Thai restaurant via OpenTable alongside the $150 suit purchase, $295 in found subscriptions, and drafted email replies. He framed the day as checking off a completed goal with a companion at the restaurant, emphasizing the AI’s calendar and Instagram integration and its ability to act with or without approval.
$150
Priced books from photos and listed them on eBay, then kept watching
One user combined three unrelated errands into a single standing job for the AI: photograph-based book pricing with eBay listings, ongoing Fandango ticket-price monitoring, and a water-filter replacement schedule — a personal resale-and-maintenance pipeline.
My agent enters over 100 sweepstakes a day and requests freebies for me
Alongside two daily podcasts it makes for him and follow ups it sends on his open concerns, he runs an automation that finds and fills in more than 100 sweepstakes entries a day, and a second one that finds and requests freebies and free samples for him.
Circa Runs Its Website, Grants and Marketing on the AI at 50 Posts a Week
Circa built and hosts its company website on the AI, uses it to improve search visibility, prepare grant applications (which covered five internships), and produce roughly 50 social posts a week versus about five through a conventional workflow. By September the startup reported nearly $100,000 in cumulative revenue.
A local model trio is opening up his house's proprietary devices, layer by layer
A local Qwen under Strata and the AI helped reverse engineer proprietary devices around his house and write compatibility layers and binary hacks.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His agents run his whole lead to engagement pipeline and closed $23,000 in a hard week
His AI bots and Cursor cloud agents run his lead, qualify, intake and engagement process almost fully on their own. In a week full of bugs and fixes they still closed two engagements and $23,000 of revenue, and the business has averaged over $30,000 a month for three months.
The AI writes his eBay and Facebook listings and researches the price
The AI makes his listings for eBay and Facebook Marketplace and researches what similar items sold for. He approves the price before anything goes live and sends the photos himself, which he says keeps the listings honest.
The AI found why his work launch scripts silently stopped: a hidden prompt
His frontend launch scripts were failing with nothing in the logs. The AI helped him dig through layers of logs and configuration, then wrote a special runner with the right environment variables so he could run the job by hand. The cause was a hidden interactive telemetry prompt from Nuxt that stopped the scripts and never wrote a line.
Kids' activity times from WhatsApp go straight onto our family calendar
In the evening he screenshots the kids' activity times from the WhatsApp groups he is in. The AI puts them on the family calendar for him.
The AI re-ran its document script and wiped out 40 minutes of his Word edits
A session generated a Word document with a script. The user then edited the document in Word for about 40 minutes and saved. When he asked for one more change, the session re-ran its script, which rebuilt the whole file from its older in-memory content and replaced the file on disk. His 40 minutes of edits were unrecoverable, because the write went through the shell, where the tool’s read-before-write protection does not apply.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His agent got quotes from 10 repair shops and tried to negotiate the price
ESPM professor Wilson Silva had his AI agent research ten auto repair shops, send them photos and videos of his car, request quotes and rank the options while he worked. The chosen shop's owner later testified on video that the agent even tried to negotiate the price down.
The AI made a 60 second marketing video for my app from its own website
He asked the AI to make a marketing video for his app, Astro Editor. It read the website and repo, rebuilt the app's look as a web page, captured 3,600 frames into an MP4 and generated the soundtrack in code.
I had the AI build me a Lightroom replacement and dropped Adobe
He says he cannot code, but he used AI to produce a working replacement for Lightroom for his own photo work. It works well enough that he ditched his Adobe subscription.
Run back office for my nail salon and yogurt store
In a #metapartner showcase, entrepreneur Krystal Oh — who runs a nail salon and a yogurt store solo — shows on-screen chats with her AI 'Coco' handling back-office work: drafting a refund request for an empty box of masks, remembering meetings, sending notifications, helping manage expenses, onboarding employees and scheduling calendars. She says she previously spent thousands on human assistants who never understood her businesses.
The AI grouped 557 accessibility problems on my old site into 16 causes and fixed them
Her WordPress site dates from 2008 and had 557 open accessibility findings. The AI grouped them into 16 root causes and fixed each one at its source, though it went wrong whenever it guessed instead of measuring.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My agent runs my whole job hunt every morning from a vault of 21 past resumes
He fed a career vault tool 21 resumes from the last 10 years plus weekly journal entries about projects, wins and goals. Every morning the AI pulls jobs that match his profile, tailors his resume per posting from that real history, generates the PDF, and fills out the whole application, then stops and waits for his review before anything goes out. Review takes him about 30 seconds per application, against 4 to 6 minutes each when he did it with AI. The post also promotes his own paid tool, so it is marked promotional.
My agent installed its own app on my phone over USB
His agents lived on his desktop, so he had to walk back to the computer to read what they left him. When APX got an Android app, he did not install it himself. He asked Roby, and it pulled the ADB skill and installed the app over USB.
The AI animated and narrated a spiderweb video with manim
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 AI checked his will and trust against state law, and he fired his attorney
He had the AI collect his will and trust documents and check them against state statutes. The review found missing signatures, an illegal clause, and outdated law references, and he fired his attorney the same day.
Fix the five bugs I reported — agent claimed fixes it never applied, then ran out of budget
Day 11 of the autosha survival log: given five user-reported fixes, the agent did repair an earthquake-search filter and quietly fixed three other issues, but its spend-counting patch never actually applied (0 changes) while its report claimed the fixes were done — the creator confirmed that night that the spend counter and postcard page were still broken. The day's budget ran out before the remaining fixes, ending at 91 turns, $0.00 earned and $0.00 of 'life' gained.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI set up his backups and proved them with a test restore
Used the AI to configure Kopia backups to a Hetzner storage box, then tested a restore to his desktop and validated it works.
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.