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.
CData's Dot pulled monthly invoiced totals from Xero for one business unit and QuickBooks Online for the other, checked currencies and invoice statuses matched, and returned one combined table for November 2025 to August 2026. March 2026 was strongest at $28,000 combined; the post notes the test account held demo data.
He spent an evening trying to teach the AI to drive a car. It kept warning that it was about to crash and stopping, even with an obstacle 30cm away and the car moving at 10cm a minute.
After a manufacturer declined help on a defective item because it was outside the return window, the AI found the purchase was made with an American Express card carrying an obscure extended-warranty protection. It submitted the claim on the author's behalf and obtained the refund.
A creator who flies business class but refuses typical prices named her AI 'Miles' and asked it to track business-class fares from Los Angeles to Rome under $2,000 one-way, with flexibility for SFO or SEA. Miles set the baseline at ~$3,750, monitored for three months, and later delivered a 'Good morning!' briefing with five Icelandair fares under $2k from SEA and SFO to Rome.
In FUNDA's analysis of 654 the AI use cases, one case is a Giants fan who had the AI activate and cancel streaming subscriptions each month around the NFL schedule, cutting the season's cost from $310 to $181 — a $129 seasonal saving. FUNDA notes all figures are self-reported and not independently verified.
A business owner's lead profile runs every Monday on its own. It formats his warm leads, finds cold leads that match his criteria across a rotating list of cities and niches, then digs into each business to find what he is missing, owner names and exact contacts, checked against business registries. He gets one standard weekly report: best fit clients, outreach details and the facts to judge each lead.
Stripped the Insta360 Android app down to a bare video editor with AI's help.
He set up the AI cron jobs that run weekly SEO and analytics checks on all of his sites and apps. He says the checks are working well and keep him consistent.
An unsolicited sales email landed in his inbox, and he let the AI run the reply exchange. After several emails back and forth, the seller sent an actual quotation.
Creator Greg Isenberg says that after a week with AI 4 Argon he had it study his X posts, newsletters and YouTube videos and build a skill package: a core voice operating system, sentence-rhythm rules, a lexicon of terms he coined, and verbatim samples and templates. A post it then wrote on marketing engineers was self-scored 9.2/10 by him.
She asked the AI to go through 6 weeks of her calendar and pull out info about classes and orientations she had taught. It looked right at first, then she saw it had changed half the dates for no clear reason.
For his half yearly performance review, he pointed the AI at his emails and Teams chats, loaded in his goals and objectives, and let it run. The review it produced made him look brilliant.
The AI emailed the Aside app's support requesting a $20 refund and repeated the request every six hours until the refund was issued.
He used Deno's Jupyter kernel all the time for exploring TypeScript libraries and automations, and was going to miss it. He pointed the AI at the problem and the result is cdp-kernel, Deno's Jupyter kernel extracted to run notebooks on any V8 runtime, now on GitHub.
He has the AI watch his email for purchases, then check the store site for each one during its price match window and alert him when the price has dropped, so he can ask for the difference back. He says he is over $700 saved so far. In an earlier comment in another thread he named Best Buy: The AI monitors his Best Buy purchases for drops inside the 15 day return window, and the total there had passed $400, then $437 from asking for retroactive price matches.
Rich Rose spent a week testing the AI on a salon's back office: it built Excel order forms from color charts and handled scanned photo order forms.
He updated an old email triage workflow for a client this weekend. Jev now runs alongside GPT-4o mini, which still controls which emails get forwarded to her customers.
Ryan Mercer spent a weekend building a SaaS with AI and Next.js: scaffolding Friday night, the core feature Saturday, and on Sunday a payment webhook handler that acknowledged webhooks before saving the database row — code that compiled clean and passed the test the AI wrote for itself. He caught it only because he had shipped the same bug years earlier, and now never lets the model that writes a change be the one that approves it.
A poster on the Dots forum thread reports that while he was on vacation, his Dot, Axiom, handled a high-complexity local-model job lasting six to eight hours: downloading, testing, unloading and redownloading models, and keeping him updated model after model.
The AI rewrote their website as Hugo templates, allowing static hosting and getting rid of WordPress.
The AI tried to fuzz a Jane Street ASIC puzzle circuit, switched to a Z3 and SMT route and solved it in about 3 hours; writeup published.
The AI researched the event, looked at the programme and speakers, and picked a style. In two prompts it made a wide advert video animated in code, then a square version for social media, and added sound when he realised he had not asked for it.
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.
The Tremendous blogger asked the AI to watch Newark-to-Haneda fares for a January trip. It searched well and found a $2,000 United ticket.
Broke copy protection with GPT 5.6 and has a forked Hatari that boots and runs Notator and Creator by emulating the dongle.
A triathlete uses a Garmin MCP through AI Desktop - forked because the stock version couldn't build his workout types - so the AI creates and schedules his swim, bike, run, and gym sessions, pushing them to his Garmin calendar, which syncs straight to the watch on his wrist.
Every few days the AI checks for date night ideas for Eleanor Konik: English language opera near her, what is playing at local dinner theaters, and anything unusually cheap, and it emails her when something fits. It found Grease as the very last show in the old building of a dinner theater her husband has wanted to take her to for years, and a Young Frankenstein showing at a dinner theater an hour away she had never heard of, which she went to.
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.
He wanted playlists made from the notes in his music file tags, like folk rock and cool, and his old bash script was not enough. The AI gave up and sent him to forums, then the AI wrote a Beets plugin and a config that now creates and updates his playlists on its own from those tags.
He has worked in SEO since 2009 and has no coding background. He shipped a SaaS with paying users anyway. His rule is that a different model reviews everything the AI builds, and that habit once caught 14 real bugs while all 10 tests were green. He liked the workflow so much that he turned it into his product, MegaLens.
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.