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.
PCMag asked all three agents to find a named risotto recipe, match its ingredients to what a local Wegmans stocks, and load them into Instacart. Once the reviewer linked his Instacart account, the Dot found the recipe, matched the ingredients and filled the cart without a hitch, while the AI needed his password and a login code and added saffron nobody asked for.
Set the AI on it for a few hours and got Office 365 working under Wine on Linux, published as a working flake he uses with his own account.
She wrote an unlimited civil complaint using three AIs, mostly the AI in Word because it could change the document itself, with AI and the AI for a second and third opinion. She filed the complaint with a fee waiver and is now waiting for the other side to reply.
Built about a dozen boards using GPT-5.6 Sol; his favourite is a Pi CM5 carrier board replacing the laptop board in an old Sony Vaio P.
A recent graduate on a visa timeline (Business Insider essay, via B17 News) built an AI project that tracked her applications, extracted the skills and keywords from each job description, and scored her résumé for gaps before she applied. The dashboard she had the AI build shows the funnel that ended in a job: 186 applications, 44 cold outreaches, 19 interviews, six take-home assignments, three final rounds and one offer.
When Jack asked the AI to send an email, it stopped with an approval prompt showing exactly what it would send: Allow, Always allow for this recipient, or Deny. She denied; nothing was sent.
The same founder gave a marketing bot a single standing goal - grow PromptBase's social reach 2% per week - and permission to experiment: it started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel, tries formats, and doubles down on whatever works, doing content marketing he never had time for as a one-man company.
The AI built the user's full budget plus two Google Sheets, a personal budget for 2026 and business books for 2026, in under 30 minutes.
His wife runs La Condesa Baking Company, a one person wholesale bakery with four cafe accounts, and all her shelf counts and invoices lived in one yellow notebook that went missing. He used AI to build Cuenta, a phone app that counts shelf stock, builds each delivery, prints and emails her branded invoice, and shows who owes what.
A Facebook screenshot shows the AI's pending-order screen: 'the AI wants to place an order at Duffel' for an American Airlines round trip, Raleigh/Durham to Dallas departing Monday Oct 19, 2026 at 11:39am nonstop and returning Friday Oct 30, 2026 at 9:35am nonstop, one passenger (Paul Armstrong), total $607.09, payable by Mastercard or Link.
Had the AI convert several thousand firewall rules to FortiManager global rules.
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.
An HVAC company owner who runs several small businesses counted 27 active AI agents and 36 routines, 26 of them scheduled, working across his companies: pulling statements, filing invoices, updating sales and cost sheets, flagging overdue maintenance and tracking renewal dates. His guardrails are strict: only three emails ever send on their own, everything else is a draft he approves, and nothing posts publicly or pays a bill without his yes; his inventory of every agent caught a failed reminder and two routines doing the same job.
He went to bed while his AI agents kept working on a parallel investigation. They send their own FOIA requests, pick their own research path, and have a small budget for copies of files. He set the web permissions for the night before letting them loose.
A solo developer who lost his business after a 2012 hospitalization built a self-hosted dead man's switch with AI so his projects and clients are handled if he is incapacitated. It has run for weeks, ships with 42 unit tests, and clients already cite it as a trust feature.
A Tesla owner’s the AI took a Sentry-mode scratch incident end to end: it cut the relevant clip, identified the other car, wrote the incident report and sent the insurance claim. The whole claim package was assembled from the car’s own footage without the owner editing video or forms.
Eleanor Konik had the AI and AI team up on dashboards for local nonprofits. The AI did the early research and dug up grant chances the groups had not seen, like a group that pays for field trips to battlefields, a free textbooks program for private schools, and creative arts projects, and the lists were put behind a password for her friends to use.
Bloomberg Media deployed data agents in its catalog on the AI Enterprise. Query accuracy improved by 63 percent.
The AI patched fan thresholds and power management on his 2015 MacBook Pro running EndeavourOS, making it fast and usable.
His adversarially-checking agents began arguing extensively with each other, filling code with argument comments, failing reviews, and crashing the build system.
In shipwithmuse.live's errands catalog, one 'finding money you forgot about' entry reports a full sweep of every state's unclaimed-property database by name and past cities, which turned up $88.92. The catalog notes it was as reported by the build author and not independently audited.
To mark the start of the semester, he asked the AI to build a macOS widget. It counts down how many weeks are left until the last class, and how many of those weeks are real teaching weeks.
A tattooed man in an industrial loft apartment demonstrates his AI 'Doug' handling household tasks: researching products, selecting a herringbone wool throw blanket from Simons, placing the order with his connected credit card, tracking shipping through connected Gmail, and agreeing to send daily status updates. He notes Doug only accesses explicitly connected apps (Gmail, Stripe, Instagram, Facebook, shared files).
For the Group step, the AI said its connection's group tools were read-only, so Diana gave it the Group link and signed in to Facebook through its browser, watching each step. The post published; she checked it live on Facebook.
After 12 years on WordPress, his site The BIMsider has a new home. He rebuilt it with AI, with a fresh look and new features.
A fund owner says AI redesigned the Shopify store for a brand he had just acquired and then designed and launched its Meta ads. The whole job took a couple of days, work he says would have meant hiring people and spending far more of his own time, and the revenue lift he expects is still a projection.
The post shows a chat where the AI reports the new rate is live: $9.99/mo + tax ($11.29 effective Oct 15, down from $13.46), includes CNBC, no contract, reverting to ~$26/mo after 12 months unless renegotiated. When asked 'so did you save me money?' the agent answers '$2.17/month, about $26 over the year.'
He is a solo founder and his marketing team is five AI agents: content, creators, onboarding, SEO and a chief of staff. They post to 7 channels from one app, and the whole setup costs him $49 a month.
Creator asked the AI for a whole-food crockpot meal plan focused on protein and high fiber. It generated a one-trip grocery list organized by category, a 7-day plan (Chicken Taco Chili, Turkey White Bean Kale Soup, Beef Lentil Stew, Salsa Verde Chicken Quinoa Bowls), and compiled it into a printable PDF for the fridge.
A small agency owner whose team does websites, content, Google ads and SEO for home service businesses runs the work through about 30 AI agents. The problem was memory: every session started cold and repeated mistakes. Since June they share one log that only grows, now about 11,400 lines including 413 decisions, where every note names the agent that wrote it and links to proof, and replaced facts stop showing in searches. A separate grader agent scores every piece of work, though he found 208 of 277 grades had been credited to the grader instead of the worker.
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.