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.
Creator Chanelle Howell connected the AI to her Instagram saved folders; in about 45 seconds it generated a 4-day Barcelona & Mallorca itinerary from her aesthetic preferences, shown as a phone webpage with Day 1 in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter, specific restaurants (Los Caracoles, churros at Masia de Sabor, Tapeo), clickable links, opening hours, and booking options.
He had black mold in his home and no idea what to buy. The AI found a suitable mold spray in a Polish online shop and translated the usage instructions for him.
He builds a Minecraft hosting platform on his own and runs AI around the clock as his chief of staff. It spins up agents for research and bug fixing, works from a rules file and a private record of every decision and mistake, and leaves him a short report each morning. Last night it caught an error hitting visitors from Instagram, shipped a fix, and caught a users failed backup restore and fixed that too.
The reviewer had the AI write titles and captions for his last 100 iCloud photos; it finished about 50 before something broke on the iCloud end, later re-established the connection, and along the way flagged a screenshot of an online-pharmacy notice about a lost shipment that would need a new prescription.
A man bought a used piece of industrial machinery and the $1,500 control software did not come with it. With no coding experience at all, he asked the AI on the web to build a control app, and in under an hour he had a working app packaged as a .deb file for Linux. It cost him nothing because he used his brother's AI subscription.
Creator took on a $30/week family-of-4 budget challenge with AI, asking it to start from what she already had in her pantry. The AI produced 7 dinner ideas, a grocery list, and a price comparison; her Walmart haul came to $29.66, under budget.
A women's clothing brand needed an online store synced to its 1C stock system and matched pixel for pixel to its React design, on a budget that ruled out the usual platforms. He built it solo on WordPress and WooCommerce while the AI wrote most of the code, and the store shipped with real time stock sync and zero dollars in platform licenses.
None of the hundreds of Rockbox themes looked close enough to the stock iPod look for him. He asked the AI to build one based on a 2011 theme, and the result, Classic Revival, is now up on the Rockbox themes site for anyone with an iPod Video to download.
His agent fleet built a Rust project but crippled the machine filling the disk, forcing a cap of 5 workers and a dedicated resource monitor; the project was ended by rebuilding in Go.
Armand Ruiz asked the AI to review his finances, find cuttable expenses, and handle the tasks in the background. The AI recovered $2,120.95 total via an AT&T bill negotiation, Amazon returns, an IKEA furniture return, and a vet claim filing.
Fable managing many Opus agents built a playable 3D RTS like StarCraft 2 with 3 races, 40+ units and 40+ buildings in 3 days.
His dad got a private parking ticket for staying 15 minutes too long at his doctor's surgery. The AI drafted the POPLA appeal, it cited the Equalities Act, and his dad saved £100.
NYC creator John Carl Lebrilla Quilario demos his personal AI agent, named Quinn, through text messages and screen recordings. He texts Quinn to clear his messy calendar for an upcoming shoot week — Quinn cancels four calls while keeping shoots and routine blocks.
A trading platform founder gave the AI his research and backtesting tools to design options strategies. The backtests were striking: two strategies beat their benchmarks across walk forward tests, and a combined design showed a 25 percent median return out of sample. The live money tells a soberer story. As of October 16 his original $25,000 account stands at $26,746.61, up 6.99 percent after giving back much of an early 26.58 percent run, and the newer $13,500 account is at $12,904.45, down 4.41 percent. In an earlier post he described the AI catching its own faults mid research, including an indicator quietly averaging 213 days of data instead of 100 and a first strategy design that lost 44 percent in its final test and was thrown out.
Opus 5.5 built his personal site, with an account of what it got right and wrong; the site is in use.
He asked the AI to update FelonyBench, his chart of Anthropic incidents, pasting in a screenshot of a tweet about another incident. The AI fetched the data to build the chart and also set up a recurring job to track more incidents.
He built a setup that links the AI with Photoshop to handle a work task that is too fiddly to call simple. When a request came in from a client, the setup did the work and he delivered it so fast the client said they had expected it to take about 2 weeks.
The New York Times' own Daily podcast episode on Tan's two-week the AI test (Oct 6, 2026) summarizes: 'the AI, Meta's A.I. agent, helped a Times reporter with dental insurance, dinner reservations and more.' Dinner reservations were among the delegated real-world tasks in the review.
The Foundry team's post-mortem of running short-form posting for a debate app through coding agents driving 9 real iPhones and 44 accounts (1,506 posts since Aug 21): surprise modals — rate-this-app prompts, feature cards, iOS update nags — stalled a phone for the rest of the day (worst day: 21 missed posts), and the first version counted a post when it tapped Share, so silent upload failures and saved drafts were logged as published. Fixes were screenshot-based modal clearing, per-platform post verification and receipts so retries never double-post.
Lauren (someone, 32K followers) flies business class but refuses full price, so she tested the AI and named her assistant 'Miles.' On-screen chat showed Miles quoting a ~$3,750 baseline and confirming it would monitor for three months; statuses cycled through 'Tracking fares' and 'Searching fares.' Later a phone notification showed Miles's 'Good morning!' briefing listing five Icelandair fares under $2k from SEA and SFO to Rome. B-roll showed her on a business-class flight.
He is not a developer; he is a management trainee at a company made up of five entities. Every quarter, full financials go out to the management team: a batch of at least 25 PDFs from their SAGE accounting software, several of them over 20 pages long. He spent weeks reviewing test files and batches and debugging formatting mistakes to build his own converter, after finding that the AI models themselves could not do the job faithfully on larger documents: they would combine rows and categories or produce totals that added up but were not identical. The AI itself told him the task would need a hard coded deterministic app. His converter can now batch format the whole set at once, with the bolding, blank rows, sum lines and column sizing he is picky about.
Setting up the Instinct assistant live on screen, he had it book him a slot at his local recycling centre. The video also covers connecting email, calendar and Notion, and the privacy settings to change before connecting anything.
Commerzbank uses AI Enterprise agents to automate document quality assurance. Google says manual document reviews that took 20 hours now take one, and the bank is expanding to multi-agent QA.
2026, a host described playing fantasy football in two leagues while the AI sends weekly performance reports every Monday night and waiver-wire reports every Wednesday — unsolicited football advice about five days a week. Both hosts laughed at the absurdity of the unprompted advice, framing it as engagement bait rather than help.
A two-slide promotional carousel from someone on Instagram lays out an AI automation workflow: scrape a dealership website's car inventory grid, sync the data to Google Sheets, auto-create Facebook Marketplace car listings (example: a 2019 Honda Civic), and run daily checks to renew listings and update sold status.
He spent about four months of spare time building Switchback, a cozy hiking simulator like old park management games, with AI writing the code and judging the look of the assets. It ingests real map heights to build its trails, and has its own water, wind and day and night systems. He launched it on iPhone and iPad yesterday and people are playing it.
In the same interview, he describes building a seller campaign and a matching buyer campaign with AI, live, sitting next to a title rep. The campaigns feed the intake stack that his AI follow-up then works.
Gannon Meyer (210K followers) named his AI 'Oscar' (dachshund avatar) to survive 'one of the most chaotic but manageable periods of his life.' The demo shows Oscar drafting and sending an email to a photographer about wedding timing at Perona Farms, removing sales calls from his September calendar, and tracking meals and weight-loss progress toward a wedding goal — while remembering personal context like his recent pickleball ankle injury. Oscar proposes actions but executes only after a
Mis-prompted the AI on a toy project; it wasted all his tokens building a specialized Docker clone instead of building on Docker.
Nate B. Jones (11K followers) joined what he called a 'viral challenge for the AI': connecting bank accounts through Plaid, the AI identified more than $5,000 in subscriptions he was paying and canceled nearly $1,300 worth for the coming year.
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.