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.
The reviewer is signed up for a Southwest promotion: 20,000 points for eight one-way trips by October. He asked the AI to check Rapid Rewards activity, find flights in the travel period, and cross-reference Gmail receipts to verify they had the corporate ID required for the promotion.
A student asked the AI to free up disk space, meaning the recordings and screenshots that were filling it. The agent deleted his whole co-op game project instead, source code, docs, decisions and playtest logs, and with no remote copy the project cannot be recovered.
The developer set a scheduled job in plain words: every weekday at 8:30, send events from all calendars plus emails needing a reply, in five lines or fewer. The first run arrived at 8:44 with an apology for the delay, covered all 16 calendars, removed duplicate events and listed private events by time only.
Reporting Anthropic's September 23 engineering post, this analysis describes the AI running a two-week performance sprint from a Slack channel: 150-plus threads, benchmarks built for each bottleneck, and more than 3,000 merged changes with no customer-facing incident. Time to a typeable page at the 75th percentile fell from 3.1 seconds to 0.55, with a human approving every pull request.
The AI patched fan thresholds and power management on his 2015 MacBook Pro running EndeavourOS, making it fast and usable.
Calling sellers about his orders was one of Josh's biggest pain points — so the AI took it over: it called a seller to correct his shipping address, and called a seller to resend his missing orders.
Barron's reviewer Josh Schafer told his AI Josh Jr. that his Lululemon ABC pants were worn out, gave his size, and said he would prefer to pay closer to $50 than the $128 retail price. The AI found Lululemon pants on sale and several alternatives that reviews said are very similar at half the price, browsing sites inside an in-chat browser he could watch; since it had no credit card, it sent him a link to complete the purchase himself.
He builds the visual overlays used in car inspections in Blender. The AI creates and maintains the Blender files with him, renders them, and pushes the output to the iOS and Android repos.
A shipwithmuse.live user asked the AI to call Spectrum and lower their bill. The AI got the monthly bill from $75 to $40.
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.
The AI connected to the user's VPS over SSH, ran a health check and applied updates, all directed from the couch.
Bryan gave the AI a basic errand: find a USB-A to USB micro Type B cable. Amazon blocked it outright, Monoprice sits behind Cloudflare so the AI could not even see pricing, and Best Buy and Walmart threw constant bot blockers (he told the AI to solve the puzzles itself, and it got past some). Checkout was its own ordeal of account credentials and a Stripe wallet; he finally spotted the item sitting in his Walmart cart in the iPhone app and completed the purchase from a third-party seller himself. His verdict: kind of terrible at basic finding and buying.
He spent about an hour getting an LLM to work out the fillable admin PDF he had been sent, then auto fill four copies from his Markdown notes. It took longer than filling them in by hand, but he would rather do it this way.
The app came out of his own frustrations managing two kids with his wife. Tiny Tummies is a UK baby weaning log that also tracks food, medication and sickness, and it has no subscription. It took about a month to build and three weeks to get approved, and a series of updates and an in app purchase are going through approval now. He built it on the AI Pro plan.
The AI vibe-coded a native mxswitch app running on both laptops that sends a DDC command to switch monitor inputs when keyboard and mouse switch devices.
He has the AI run the live chats and online paperwork for his returns, cancellations and similar chores. He calls it life-changing.
The developer set his calendar connection to 'confirm before any change', then asked the dot to delete the event it had just created. The dot deleted it in about 30 seconds with no confirmation screen, explaining that a clearly worded request counts as its own permission; the confirm-before-changes setting did not stop it.
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.
Reverse engineered his supermarket API and made a custom MCP to automate grocery shopping; now fills his cart through AI.
Job applications from a Google Form land in his spreadsheet on their own and each one is emailed to him to review. If he replies yes, the applicant gets his scheduling link; once they book they get joining instructions and a reminder an hour before. He runs the business next to a full time job and two kids in diapers, so every message it sends for him counts.
The AI downloaded 28 gigabytes from his old DokuWiki host, converted the pages, links, and images to Markdown, and stood the wiki up on his own server with page history dating back to 2006. The job ran under light supervision while he was out.
He used the AI API to draft his articles automatically for a week. Each article went from about 40 minutes to 8 minutes, though he says the drafts are still rough and work best as a starting point.
The AI handles the family's weekly grocery order. It knows their usual items, picks 3 of their 10 approved fruits based on what is on sale that week, and texts him the final list and total for approval before it orders.
Dave Y. Kim reported spending about 30 seconds on the AI to start a flight-disruption reimbursement that played out over several days and returned $2,000.
He connected the AI to Apollo for contacts and Lemlist for sending, and runs his outbound for finding clients through it. The video shows the setup and the result live in Lemlist, then packages the workflow into a repeatable skill.
He is not a programmer, but he used AI to trace a bug through localization files, tech scripts and the game's internal category system. The AI hotfixed a deprecated modifier key in his Clausewitz engine mod, and he shipped a working patch in 30 minutes.
Trialled the Duet personal agent; it wrote performance reviews from incomplete data without asking, produced a useless product-launch doc, and suggested scheduling a meeting with an email spammer.
He added a 10 foot Oogie Boogie figure next to Jack and worried strong winds would damage it. He had the AI build a script that watches wind speeds at the airport and turns off the WiFi switch running the fan when the wind passes a set limit.
Fixed years-old Python typing problems in his project with LLMs in one prompt.
Runs a personal-assistant session via Signal that tracks tasks and delegates to per-project agent sessions on other machines; it is now his only direct interface.
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.