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.
A hobbyist designs his own furniture in OpenSCAD with AI, reusing code from earlier pieces. A new design takes a couple of hours including the PDF blueprints, drawn like shop instructions, that he prints so the person cutting his wood panels cannot go wrong.
A GPT agent crunched through a famously hard Disobey conference hacker ticket challenge in an evening and a morning with occasional steering, a challenge unsolved in some years.
A 37-year-old who suspected his big-firm advisor treated his roughly $800,000 portfolio as an afterthought uploaded his statements, gain/loss and trade history to the AI. The audit found two years of S&P underperformance - and the real problem: when he asked the firm to extend a successful Roth IRA strategy to his taxable individual account, they copied the exact same asset ratios across, so dividend-heavy holdings now throw off ordinary-income tax every year, a non-issue inside the Roth. Confronted, the advisor called it a known model limitation. He is firing the firm.
Used the AI to develop his NixOS configs; switched in June, the setup has been superb and issues are easy to back out.
The same writer set the AI a daily price watch on a WWE Blu-ray. The AI checked listings each day and pointed him to a copy on eBay under $20 with free shipping, bundled with another disc he plans to sell on.
A man learning language design spent 3 to 4 weeks with AI doing a full mechanization in Lean of the paper From Linearity to Borrowing. The work covers nearly every definition and lemma in the paper, including the Fundamental Property and Adequacy results.
Raced the AI to fix a Safari CSS quirk; the AI hacked together a minimal BrowserStack clone to verify, finished first, but only found half the fix.
He used AI to create a small tool on val.town that automatically syncs his GoodReads updates to BookHive. The val.town blog featured the tool as one of his experiments.
Her job is Teams messages and email all day, and brain fog makes finding things hard. She asks the AI to find a file by who shared it with her, and it finds it.
The AI got Omarchy WiFi working on his MacBook, at a cost of 6M tokens.
He built a workflow that connects to their bank accounts and credit cards through Plaid and emails him and his wife a budget update three times a week, showing how they are tracking against the budget, with spending analysis and suggestions for cheaper alternatives.
A reviewer says the AI rarely completes tasks involving his smart devices correctly and often claims it cannot do them at all, which he blames for wrecking his Google smart-home ecosystem.
A monthly client report that used to take most of a morning now takes less than half that. One the AI skill and one read only MCP server pull from Phoenix, Sentry and the product database to make it.
He had the AI do bookkeeping for his taxes, checking invoices from the past 6 months. A job that used to take him 5 hours took 1 hour, though he still had to check the results himself.
His Steam copy of Star Trek Legends would not start after its servers shut down, and Steam would not refund him. He gave GPT-6 Astra the game's files and logs; it found the online checks blocking startup, patched them out in two rounds, and packaged the fix as an installer. He has played missions and loaded his saved progress since.
He turned his 15,000 saved Wispr Flow dictations into a test set for the local Whisper model behind his AI Agent. The agent made find and fix rules from the words Whisper kept mishearing, tested each rule against the full history, and got hard words right far more often: 99 of 240 up to 183 of 240 on old clips, and 19 of 45 up to 43 of 45 on sentences he read out loud.
He was missing Adobe Lightroom's denoise feature for his RAW photos, so he had the AI build it. The app also denoises his standard JPEGs, which Lightroom could not do, and he has a lot of low res, noisy JPEGs lying around.
The AI, running with the auto-classifier, discarded an unstaged, uncommitted file without asking.
A user built optimAIzr with AI, a local-only CLI that analyses his own LLM usage habits, flags costly or repeated patterns and estimates where he can cut tokens or spending. All data stays on his machine, and the tool adds live tips while he works.
A Korean essay analyzes a public user case in which the Aside AI browser migrated 110 Brunch posts into Naver Blog in 2 hours 40 minutes, carrying formatting, images and links intact; the posts drew 260 views the next day. Brunch, Naver Blog and Maily offer no posting API, and the user had previously tried AI with Playwright, which was slow and often gave up; Aside instead inherits the user's already logged-in browser session.
He let his daughter chat out loud with AI to make a game, and the AI gave her small kid sized coding lessons along the way. They put the game on his Raspberry Pi box with an Arduino joystick, so she can play it whenever she wants.
Working with AI on his NeoBox emulator, he found setjmp was eating 81 percent of frame time, switched to _setjmp for a roughly 130x per-call gain, and the fix was merged upstream in Geolith.
Freelancer Justin Blaze Martin posted on X on Oct 19 that the first thing his Dot did was go through his three inboxes and find a $4,000 invoice from July that he had forgotten to send a client. The Dot assembled the invoice from the email thread and had it ready to send after his approval.
He used AI at work the way he was expected to. He asked it to plan a task, answered its questions, and approved the plan. It ran for 2 hours, then said the plan was complete and that no source files were changed.
Shervin Shaikh asked the AI in chat to find any NYC parking tickets under his name and pay them; after he supplied his licence plate, the AI found a $115 'No Standing' ticket in Brooklyn, now $145 with penalties. The first CityPay attempt failed on a billing-address mismatch, but the retry succeeded: $147.90 paid via Stripe Link, confirmed on screen.
Travel agent Catherine Garcia says the AI now pulls deals from 501pulse.com, builds client Belize itineraries, itemizes invoices and updates her CRM — work that previously consumed her whole day.
The AI agy hooked itself to Discord, set up and troubleshoots SSH servers on his home network, commands it remotely.
Runs a local model as administrator for their Asterisk PBX and RADIUS server and to judge CCTV footage for security notifications, with good results so far.
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.
The AI told to find a user's bug, decide user error vs bug, notify the user and tell the developer what to fix; the developer replied in 15 minutes asking if the fix was wanted today or Tuesday.
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.