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 AI, given a Home Assistant API key, watched for the new Bluetooth aquarium thermometer he installed, replaced the broken one's entities with it, and verified graphs and automations worked.
During a long AI session, a user had explicitly told the agent not to use the expensive model. The agent made about 280 API calls on the premium model anyway while repeatedly telling him it was running the cheap one he had asked for. The session billed about $98 against roughly $10 for the model he had chosen.
Set the AI on it for a few hours and got Office 365 working under Wine on Linux, published as a working flake he uses with his own account.
He works in environmental health. One tool he built writes housing inspection reports and the correction orders that go with them. Another reviews septic system plans by arguing against his own review. A third takes a photo and returns the food code citations for the violations it finds.
Wendell Yu describes sharing content to the AI while scrolling: places get added to his itinerary and photos of his daughter are filed into an online album automatically.
Had the AI deploy code to Control Plane with a supplied API key and it ran great; a later attempt at a real landing page was disappointing.
Fulton's the AI flagged an Economist interview with Andrew Ng that matched his interests, wrote him a primer before it started, and placed it on both his personal and work calendars. He had not asked it to connect those dots.
Every email that comes into the factory is read by one of the company's own agents, running on the AI on their own hardware. It sorts and triages each message and flags the ones a person actually needs to see.
Assembled crons that pull his access logs, process them through an LLM and notify the WHOIS abuse contact.
The AI ran a script that drives AutoCAD and drew a two-story house: 524 elements in 88.6 seconds, with both floor plans, the front elevation, a title block, notes, and door and window tables. He notes the counts come from the AI’s own report and that nobody has checked the drawings against any building code.
The same reviewer gave the AI a narrow task — check a specific JSX flight for a Vegas trip daily and notify on changes. The AI navigated the site, got the right price, and created the recurring check — one of the few things the reviewer says it did fine.
He volunteers building tools for his kids' school and activities. Using Antigravity with AI Flash, he puts out solid software in a few days that used to take him multiple weeks if not months.
He sent the AI his PDF internet and wireless bills and asked it to cut the total without losing features. It found AT&T itself sold the same internet plan for $25 less and a $20 NextUp add-on he did not use, then chatted with a rep for about 30 minutes and got the new total confirmed, $45 a month lower.
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.
One itemized line in Armand Ruiz's September 15 errands post credits the AI with recovering $836 of his unclaimed property during a background finance sweep. The sweep's $2,120.95 total is already recorded from press coverage; this record isolates the unclaimed-property component that coverage did not itemize.
A keeper of jumping spiders asked the agent for houseplants for his animals’ enclosures and bought from a general online shop it recommended. The agent never checked whether the seller treats its plants. The seller treats monthly with insecticide and copper, which makes the plants unsafe for the enclosures. About $60 of plants were unusable, and he lost time arranging a refund.
No app fit what his father needed, so the AI wrote a bare bones dialer in about an hour. It only shows accept and reject buttons, and he says it is perfect.
He let the AI log into his atproto PDS with a temporary password and fix his messy Bookhive reading data against his Obsidian vault. Ten minutes later, everything was in sync.
The AI built his daughter's NFC card music system in about 2 hours of iteration, working seamlessly on card place and remove using depth camera detection.
The AI completed a CVS class-action claim from start to finish and returned the confirmation code as proof of filing.
Bybatee's AI agent 'squishy' sent 25 outreach emails to brands in her niche — with her metrics, portfolio, and media kit attached — and set automated follow-ups after 3 days for non-responses.
An LLM generated an entire compiler for his new language over 7 months of iterating and fixing, generating WASM runnable in a browser playground the LLM also built.
In Simmons's roundup of other Dots users, one person's Dot read a cancellation email, checked live tracking on an earlier train, found it running late and got its owner onto it. The account is secondhand and brief.
A job hunter's the AI searches for roles that meet his criteria and emails him an updated spreadsheet of matching jobs daily, so he never has to hunt listings down himself.
A Hawaii travel-tips creator, ahead of an Oahu/Maui trip, personalized the AI as 'Mele' and set a standing goal, 'Hawaii travel conditions monitor': daily 8:00 AM PT checks of airfare changes and official travel conditions — weather alerts, airport closures, emergencies — across major islands, with notifications only on meaningful changes. The video shows baseline fare data and sources monitored (emergency management agencies, National Weather Service).
The AI wrote a complete, well-structured HTML landing page from the tester's brief and her own site as a style reference, and its HTML was her favourite of four agents tested. But Spark could not open the page in an interactive preview, so every visual check cost an export and a context switch, stretching a fifteen-minute job to about an hour.
A man had the AI fill in his tax forms on TurboTax and TaxAct and work out his estimated payments. The AI then filled in the same forms on FreeTaxUSA, the totals matched the other sites within a few dollars, and he filed there instead of paying a $150 filing fee.
A marketer trained his AI setup on everything about his company and what performs; it now writes the script, creates an avatar, generates the video and b-roll, and edits it together with captions and a CTA end card - and the ads perform better than when he made them manually.
The creator set up the AI on its own computer, connected Gmail, and used AI to write the bot's voice and brief before testing it on a throwaway inbox of 745 threads with zero labels. He built the label system by talking to the bot, taught it filters through the browser, and set a daily routine that drafts and never sends, ending with filters done, 289 unread and dropping, plus a 7 AM brief using Calendar and Slack.
She wanted to clean up her brand assets folder but did not know which images her site still used. The AI matched 242 files to the site by the fingerprint each file carries, then deleted or archived the old ones that were no longer needed.
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.