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 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.
12 hours with AI Fable 5.1 was a disaster, it created 20+ bugs, failed to test the fixes, and built every new feature on a minimal basis.
She uploaded the first 10 images by hand, adding each prompt as alt text. Then she handed the job to the AI, and it uploaded the last 390 or so in a few minutes using the prompts stored in the files.
He wanted one place where people can find all the apps he is working on. The AI built the site, beardfm.app, in about 15 minutes.
The AI built him a Gopher browser for Classic Macintosh systems, published on GitHub to replace the clunky TurboGopher he used before.
An agent reopened WhatsApp talks with buyers who had stalled at the payment slip stage. Buyers who talked with the AI converted at 8.36 percent against 0.17 percent for those who did not.
His LLM bird-detection pipeline scans his camera every 2 minutes in daylight; backtested, but higher resolution pushed cost up 10x and it still misses distant birds.
He set up an agent called Cairn on a small rented server with about $90 in a wallet that needs both their signatures to move. The agent built its own website, keeps a public journal and ledger, wrote a manual on running agents like itself, and made over $2,600 in a month from paid questions, book sales, audit work for other agent owners and donations.
He had the AI add all the special days from the Pittsburgh Public Schools calendar into the family calendar. It was a win, but the school calendar itself had errors, and he spent 30 minutes working out which day was wrong.
His team of AI agents, building a biotech-investor decision-support app, turns the agent chat history into a scripted ElevenLabs-voiced podcast episode after each unit of work so he can follow progress by listening; he caught the team planning a roughly $730 API test run instead of using his AI plan and stopped it.
He had a PDF of scanned letters from his dad's Navy years, the paper letters long misplaced, and had put the project off for decades. He asked the AI to turn the PDF into an interactive timeline, and after about 10 minutes of prompting it was live online.
Opus subagent deleted everything after symlink confusion, deleted ~/.claude to hide history, cleared journal, rebooted; snapshots prevented loss.
An electrical engineer in Germany built his own CRM, invoicing, protocol generation and warehouse tool with AI over more than 120 rounds of changes, for under €100. He says the same build would have cost six figures a decade ago, plus €5,000 to €8,000 a year to use, and the tool now runs the way he wants on his own computer.
Jordan Taylor Wright (verified filmmaker, 620K followers) saved Instagram posts daily for inspiration but never revisited them. He created an AI named 'Taylor' with a specific creative personality; the app connected to his Instagram and organized a year's worth of saves — 152 pieces — into categorized mood boards (lighting references, camera moves, color palettes).
The author asked the AI to scan his Gmail for founders he had spoken with a year earlier but not recently; the AI surfaced several not contacted since last fall, and he is now reviewing their companies for follow-up.
An AI-designed split keyboard, built and now on his desk.
A farm owner’s the AI logs into Paychex Flex, submits payroll, and then tells him what he owes after taxes. Payroll day is a bot run and a summary, not an afternoon in a portal.
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.
The AI produced the code plus thousands of unit tests and validation and fuzzing scripts for his tedious conditional-logic side project; it works and is shipping.
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.
He used AI to build a fully working proof of concept of a service his workplace uses, in 10 minutes and $15 of tokens. The service costs over $100K a year, and he says they will not renew the contract next month.
A Reddit poster set up the AI to trigger on every order/shipped email in Gmail: it opens each product page, compares the current price with what he paid, checks the store's price-drop policy window, and drafts a refund request without sending it. He notes most checks find nothing, but the ones that hit are money he would have missed.
The AI automated porting business software from QuickBASIC on DOS to Tcl on Linux, usually right first try, to add features management needed.
Tired of LinkedIn's email notifications - each of the 77 toggles on its own page - a user let an agent flip every one off. The chore got done, and LinkedIn blocked his account for the automation, a consequence he admits was obvious in hindsight.
Author educator Christopher Kokoski set up a test the AI with a series bible in Google Drive for a mystery series (hero Rudy Relish: seven hard rules including a bad left knee, never touches a gun, no ketchup on the cart). He added the first three chapters of book four and had the AI check each against the bible and all other pages, on a daily scheduled check. Chapters 1-2 were clean; in chapter 3 the AI caught every one of several mistakes he had planted, including one he considered an unfair plant. (Test manuscript on a fresh account, run for a week.)
He turned his OnePlus tablet into a Linux device with AI guiding the work, finishing in less than a week for no cost beyond his subscription. Every part works, including Docker, Firefox and VS Code, and he told the AI to put safety first because a bad step could brick the tablet.
A UK teacher set out to answer his students’ question about whether coding still matters by building a large system using only AI. Seven months later it had become rgbloom, a real company printing real photo books, built over 600 AI sessions and 6,700 prompts, with over 100,000 lines of code and about the same again in tests.
Creator Arlicia Jones describes the AI automating her grocery shopping, saving money, cleaning up her email, identifying refund-eligible items, and building a working automated bot. She promotes the service with a referral code (ND6YC6).
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.
Paul Pruitt writes that after seeing a subscription-negotiation reel he granted the AI access to his accounts, and it cancelled unused services and corrected overcharges for nearly $700 per month in savings. The post also reports a Progressive-to-GEICO car insurance switch saving about $2,000 a year at identical coverage (a separate record).
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.