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.
She asked the AI if it could cancel her Mint Mobile account. The company's chat agent had told her she needed to call in. She gave the AI her Mint details, the AI opened its own chat with the company and got the cancellation done, with no phone call and no talking to people herself.
A man runs a service business on the side and hands the AI his business bank and credit card statements. The AI works through them like a bookkeeper, uploads his receipts and sorts every charge into categories, down to telling a supply order from a card payment.
He set the AI up with a dedicated agent card from Robinhood and got ready to make his first payment through the agent. The payment was blocked.
Internal multi-subagent code review tool he built has run for half a year and finds serious issues including privacy leaks that humans and open-weight models miss.
The AI created his first five eBay listings for him and helped track the shipments and payments afterwards. All five items sold.
A home server owner had the AI study his running server and turn the setup into Ansible files, which they refined together until it worked. The AI also wrote a small tool that unlocks the server encrypted disk from another machine, which he now uses.
In FUNDA's analysis of 654 the AI use cases, one money case is a user who had the AI call AT&T and replace an $85/month 500 Mbps plan with a $40/month 1 Gbps plan — a $45/month saving ($540/year) with a speed upgrade. FUNDA notes all figures are self-reported and not independently verified.
The AI in the car, with Gmail and Home Assistant connectors, calculated car charging from home power metrics and calendar, and operated the garage door, lights and air conditioners from the car.
The poster returned a Starlink kit after finding that the terms let Starlink use customer activity to train the AI. Starlink's the AI agreed to an $84.75 refund, then changed its mind six weeks later.
A commenter in a hardware reverse-engineering thread says he had the AI develop a working Bluetooth CUPS driver for his Canon Zoemini 2 mini photo printer. Canon only supports the printer from smartphones, so the driver made it usable from his Linux machine.
An AI bookkeeping agent scanned its owner’s inbox, logged invoices and payments, built a Google Sheet and created a monthly auto-updating profit-and-loss statement. The books now maintain themselves from the mail.
Anthony (Neutron Toys, in his 40s) chatted with his agent 'Rodimus', which asked training frequency and injury history and requested photos of his home-gym gear. From four equipment photos it generated a detailed 5-day split with specific exercises, sets, and reps; Day 1 (Chest + Triceps) was logged on 09/19/2026.
His wife was left a massive box of coins by her late grandfather many years ago, and they had never catalogued them. He built an app that scans a coin and records its year, type, series and what it is made of, then checks websites for an approximate value and adds it to the collection. It can filter views, track where each coin is physically stored, and show graphs of the total value and the breakdown by coin type. There is also a virtual coin book he can flip through, using the photos he captured while scanning each coin in. For now the app is just for him.
Forkast reported that the AI shops and browses for its roughly 2.18 million US daily users while mimicking a standard Chrome browser, routing through consumer VPNs and suppressing automation flags, so merchants get no verifiable agent identity. Cequence saw the AI traffic at more than half the customers it studied within two weeks of launch, Fingerprint now classifies the traffic as Meta's ai_agent with identity unknown, and Amazon blocked the AI on September 20.
The AI called car dealerships and plumbers to collect quotes for the user and scheduled a dentist appointment, the calls and booking done in about five minutes of the user's time.
Recompiling the Lion King SNES game with an agent.
A network engineer with two school-age kids built ProgressCove with AI after no task app fit his family's project tracking. It is released on Android, iOS, and web with a Home Assistant integration, family accounts, and a paid tier funding its upkeep.
In the same roundup, another user's Dot went through a live chat to cancel an in-flight wifi subscription and obtained a refund. No amount or provider is named in the account.
Inc. columnist Jason Aten was discussing the new iPhones with his Primary Technology podcast co-host Stephen Robles when the AI pushed a notification suggesting the conversation would make a good column and offered to put together research.
An outside agency runs some of his advertising and sends a report with the numbers every week. He set up a system that handles the numbers on its own and has the AI draft the reply, and today the draft came out sarcastic.
The AI plus Jev built a browser extension in about 10 minutes that ranks HN comments for sloppiness, which he uses to view HN.
His role was cut on Tuesday morning. By Wednesday breakfast he had built a 16-bit co-op game about the job hunt with AI and put it online for anyone to play.
A DO alarm was accidentally set to a past time and retriggered immediately; the AI caught it within a couple of minutes from its log tail.
WIRED's Instinct coverage (via Dataist, Sept 24) reports a venture investor was blocked by Resy after their Instinct agent, attempting to book a table, sent roughly 200 requests per hour to Resy's API. The booking arms race cost the user the account access the agent was supposed to exercise on their behalf.
Asked the AI to break his team's own Postgres MCP guards and it found pg_logical_emit_message, which writes to the WAL inside a read-only transaction, leading to a hardened replacement.
Eric's daughter and her friend needed lodging for a music festival in Europe during her study abroad. His Dot, Jarvis, priced four places and annotated each with whether the walk back from the shuttle has streetlights after 10 p.m. When a provider replied in French, Jarvis read it, updated the comparison and said what changed: one rental ruled out, another cheaper but with a longer, uphill, unlit walk home. Eric finished the checkout himself.
A vibecoded MMO reached 1,000 players over 10 weeks.
She says she used AI, cross-checked by two more AIs, to put together a legal complaint and file it herself, without a lawyer.
He connected the AI to DevonThink, the app where he keeps his documents. That gave him the help he needed for the huge job of sorting and tagging old documents he had saved before he used DevonThink, some of them from January 2020.
A developer gave the AI a token for his code repo and set a two hour cycle. The AI checks the issues page, makes a branch for each issue, writes the fix or change, and opens a pull request. Merges rebuild the app and serve it on his home network, and the AI texts him on Telegram when it has a question or when work is done. He uses the app daily and files features as issues, which are handled within a couple of hours.
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.