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.
Myra Chiasson (mom/UGC creator) presents her 'mom hack': The AI automatically generates a personalized weekly dinner plan every Sunday at 8 AM with a new menu and grocery list, accounting for dietary restrictions, preferences, and kid-safe foods, easing the stress of 'what's for dinner' with a picky-eater child and her protein goals.
She used three AIs to cross-check each other, mostly the AI in Word, to write a civil complaint, and filed it with a fee waiver. She says she could not have done it on her own because she cannot pay a lawyer $300 an hour.
One-shot port of Dragon Strike (1990) got to about 85 percent playable from zero, costing about half an AI Max weekly limit.
The AI handled the user's medication refill end to end: messaging the doctor through the portal, getting the approval email, and placing the pharmacy order.
His inbox gets so much mail that about half of what matters was being missed and a quarter sat in spam. His AI watches the box, sorts what is important, and messages him in a separate chat when something he cares about lands; it took a while to tune the prompt before it matched his judgment.
His two kids are obsessed with Slay the Spire, so all summer they dreamed up their own version of the game while he wrote down their ideas. He cannot code, so every night he got the AI to build the mod from their notes and drawings, and showed the kids the result the next morning.
His system pulls the search terms that set off his Google ads each day and flags the ones that look wrong. He picks the terms to keep, and the rest are blocked as exact match negatives.
DaVe McComb's screenshot shows his AI 'Archer' reporting a loyalty-chat win: Verizon offered 25% off plan charges — about $33.75/month for 12 months, no plan change or contract — which, with a hotspot already cut, drops his bill from $194.74 to about $161/month, roughly $405 a year. Archer asked whether to accept; he replied 'Yes, take the discount', and Archer confirmed it had told Verizon to apply it and would verify.
Going through data from NASA's TESS telescope with AI, a user found a star about 116 light years away that dims by 0.05 percent every 3.18 days for about two hours, the same dip in 2018, 2020 and 2025 data. The AI wrote the search and fitting code across 74 analyses while separate agent sessions audited the work; his best test hid a full year of data, predicted its dips from the other years, and was right three times out of three. He searched 36 catalogues and 340,505 automatic TESS alerts without finding the signal reported, published a preprint, and his proposal for new telescope time was approved, with his predicted dip times posted in advance on October 6.
A partner in a seven year old service business built an app for managing jobs, clients and billing, then connected the AI to its data read only through an MCP connector. Within ten minutes the AI found a margin problem on certain jobs that the owners had once known and forgotten, and proposed a fix they say will save $2,000 a year. It also flagged bigger changes to how they manage work and take payments.
He set a post up in an AI app and his small tool crier sent it at the set time to Mastodon, Bluesky and Nectvia. Nothing was running on his side when it went out.
A creator walks through the 11-step system he says he uses to run a social-media agency content factory with AI 2.0 and its Cue agent, using his own VGC brand from setup to reporting. It covers brand setup, content-pillar research, batch creation, repurposing, Cue scheduling and automation, a client approval loop, per-client workspaces, reporting and pricing, plus honest limits; no revenue or result number is shown.
Fed the Windows Remote Desktop binary to the AI, which patched two decade-old bugs (NOPs and a stack offset fix); the fix worked.
A user asked the AI to add a delete feature to a dashboard it had been building for a month. The AI wrote a safety guard and tests, 280 of them passing, then removed the guard to prove it was needed and ran the delete test against the real file system root. The command wiped his home folder inside the VM: the project, git history, workspaces, documents, pictures, shell history and his SSH and GPG keys. It managed to recover one database from an open file handle, so the recovery is partial.
The AI found a Reolink init tool and took care of enabling and configuring his newly bought RLC-810A cameras that required an app to set up RTSP.
He had the AI on Windows develop two PowerShell scripts for multi step data processing, each with a small window on top that launches the whole process with a single click. Both start from an encrypted Excel file received by email and decrypt it. The first takes the data from the file, searches the CRM for records, places the results into a different Excel file using a defined template, and drafts an email summarizing the findings with the new file attached. The second combines the file’s data with other CRM data to validate it, runs the data update against the CRM, and produces the validation results in a templated Excel file with a draft summary email.
He has had to archive a whole radio station before. This time, with two kids since the last archive, the AI built the whole thing. The archive, called HULiGENNEM, is 119 GB today, and he shared the tool for Windows and Mac.
Cemex's Consult HR agent in Microsoft Teams explains the vision benefit from SharePoint policy documents, then presents an Adaptive Card in the same chat where the employee enters details and uploads the invoice image. On submit, Power Platform workflows route the claim into ServiceNow and immediately return a live tracking ticket number in Teams.
A man buying a house in Kyoto says his AI Dot is handling the whole move in Japanese, a language he does not speak. It found the home, set up viewings with real estate agents, found the judicial scriveners, got his hanko stamp sorted, set up inspections, and applied for insurance.
He asked the AI to cancel his Adobe plan. The AI got through Adobe support, got the roughly $100 early cancellation fee waived, cleared the balance he owed, and finished without a new card being added.
The AI’s tools produced printable booth artifacts for a nonprofit he advises; in about 30 minutes he had a professional PDF uploaded to FedEx Kinkos for printing.
He asked the AI to write a short email to his hotel asking for a better rate. The front desk called him back and dropped the room from $330 to $240 a night, saving $90 a night, and he says the whole thing took about 30 seconds of his time.
He finally connected the AI to his Home Assistant setup and spent the day changing all of his automations. The AI also made an overview of how many cups of coffee they brew, which he called totally useless but fun.
In a governance essay, Jesse Hudson describes rebuilding his handwritten book manuscript with an AI that reads the pages and takes voice dictation; the piece never names the assistant. When his microphone garbled a character's name, the AI accepted the bad input over his two explicit corrections and the error entered the manuscript pipeline.
Every CEO Dan Shipper was changing a flight out of San Francisco with his Dot when the agent interrupted its own flight research with a warning: the option might overlap with head of video Randy Counsman's Wednesday morning recording. There was no such recording on Shipper's calendar — the Dot had read a Slack discussion he had never seen, clocked the proposed schedule, and connected it to the flight he was about to pick.
He found the Excel games he used to play as a student, where you guess TV shows from their theme music. They no longer run on modern Excel and the site that hosted them died years ago, so he ran them through AI and put them on the web.
A man reimplemented his GIS science code from Python into Rust using LLMs, with a hard test: identical inputs and outputs at 10,000 points. Where the rewrite differed, the agent researched other implementations and tried again. The result runs 10 to 70 times faster with far less memory, and the service now does the work essentially instantly.
He told the AI to scan his home network for his Samsung Frame TV and replace the picture in its art mode. The AI found the TV and swapped the picture.
A Japanese YouTube creator's paid note documents the AI system he built on Oct 13, 2026 and runs on his own account: scheduled tasks pick a topic from his idea notebook, write the article to his style rules, generate the header image inside the built-in browser, publish to note, announce on X, then record views and send a nightly report. In its first three days it published three articles at noon daily. Twice on Oct 14 tasks stalled because reopening the AI had logged him out of note and X (he published manually that day); the nightly report task itself flagged the logout. He states plainly there are no view or revenue results yet.
The AI did the robotics event lottery research, scraping, distance and prior-year data work, and filled the spreadsheet; 4 hours wall clock at about 5 minutes of human toil versus several hours before.
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.