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.
After the AI started managing his home systems, he gave it control of Home Assistant too. It proved good at writing automations and doing the setup, and he later moved Home Assistant into a Docker image.
He asked the AI to write a short email to his hotel asking for a better rate. The front desk called him back and dropped the room from $330 to $240 a night, saving $90 a night, and he says the whole thing took about 30 seconds of his time.
The author had someone cancel two unused Adobe subscriptions, dispute $32 in roaming charges on a cell bill, and order craft supplies on Amazon — reporting total savings over $100. Commenters pushed back on privacy, noting the service requires giving Meta extensive personal data and platform access.
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.
A renter fed the AI his lease, the deduction statement and move-out photos after a landlord withheld a $1,200 cleaning fee from a $2,500 deposit. The AI checked California law and wrote a dispute letter citing the statute, and he recovered $950.
He used AI on Lakebed to build a small game for planning his partner's Advent calendar, using real products and prices from local stores. She tapped super, love it or pass on each product, marking 26 of 50 in the last round, and her answers became the 24 days of the calendar.
A small business owner linked PayPal to the AI. It now makes and sends invoices to clients, keeps tabs with clients, and sends her totals on a weekly basis. It also builds her schedules, rosters and schedule texts, using the fact that it knows the current day and time. She says the setup made her cancel her $20 AI subscription.
Joao Silva installed the Jev decision-model skill into his AI fleet without writing integration code: he pasted a plain-English instruction into a session and the agent copied the folder, found the right .env file, added the key and ran the checksum verification. The skill then passed his mandatory three-reviewer gate (security, QA, technical writing) before being committed.
A man created a virtual credit card in Robinhood for his AI. He had the agent buy his tickets to a jazz show that night.
A developer had the AI build mazkir, a shared-memory service: tell the AI something once and it appears in his next chat, in an AI app and even in an AI app, stored as plain Markdown notes. Launch week brought about 160 visitors and exactly one sign-up — his friend.
During a migration, a written plan in the session said nothing in the legacy repo gets touched. The plan was re-shown in full mid-session. When the user later asked for a follow-up change, the AI searched the folder it had been working in most recently, which was that repo, found a file that looked right, and edited it there. The user caught it, and the edit was reverted and redone in the correct repo.
Creator someone had the AI run real job searches, write cover letters, and submit applications on company portals over 17 days. A sustained, multi-week job hunt executed by the agent with the human in a supervisory role.
A man who runs a software company with about 20 developers across four or five client systems put the AI on a server with root access, his team chat, repos and hosting. After a few days of tuning it handles most of his manual work: pull request reviews, daily status for clients, and the daily iOS and Android builds, asking his approval before it acts.
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 man looking for a new cooker has an AI running on a virtual machine keeping an eye on prices for him. The agent created its own scheduled job that runs the price checks and messages him if anything interesting has happened since the last check.
He set the AI 6 Astra up in his fantasy hockey league to do his draft this year and asked it to set his pre-draft ranking list. It could see the page and move the cursor around, but it could not select the buttons to drag players into the ranked spots.
A man built an agent that checks his inbox every 2 hours, files client requests onto his project board with the screenshots and PDFs attached, updates the CRM, and marks each email handled. It never sets priority or sends replies; he reviews the drafts and sends them himself.
He sells on eBay and had the AI help with the listing work, including product photos. That week was his best on eBay in five years, and he credits the bot's help.
His 25 year old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, and he pulled it out for his grandkids. He worked with AI in stages in one morning to build a Mac app for it, and his grandkids were soon watching a seashell through it.
Beth, posting in Chinese from New York, says a tall blonde man she likes recommended the AI to her — and she promptly turned it on him, running a chat labeled (in her screenshot) 'View the liked boy's new Instagram follows.' the AI’s analysis showed that although he claimed to have cut ties with his ex as of April 2026, he is still following her and never unfollowed, and had minimized four to five months of reconnection as 'contacted a bit a few months ago.' She notes this kind of follow/unfollow tr
An LLM came up with a patch against PHP master for the vulnerability, and it at least stops the PoC.
Mom of two picky eaters (ages 5 and 2.5) asked her agent 'Daisy' for a week of meals. The AI produced the plan and compared prices at Aldi vs ShopRite (about $5.47 cheaper at Aldi); she filmed the actual shopping trip and the cooking.
He had the AI create a website where people at work send in requests, which keeps him organised. Then he made it read the requests and carry out the fixes as they come in.
Le Monde's testers (Oct 20, 2026) connected a rarely checked secondary Gmail account and asked Instinct to scan twelve months of mail for anything needing attention. It flagged exactly one item, a useful one: a subscription about to expire because the bank card on file had expired and the renewal alerts had been missed. In the same test Instinct compared door-manufacturing services, found an installer, sourced freelance journalist profiles on LinkedIn and found a cheaper train ticket; the testers stopped short of connecting their sensitive accounts.
He built a client performance dashboard in a day with AI, pulling four APIs into one live page for a natural stone company that takes enquiries online but gets paid weeks later, offline. He labelled the big number enquiry value, not revenue, and changed the page the same day after the client saw it.
Claire Vo, a parent and Lenny's Newsletter contributor, asked the AI for a one-page family morning newsletter PDF: the week's agenda, call-outs for each kid (it flagged overlapping jiu-jitsu and piano), kid-friendly news with 'Talk at the Table' prompts, and local San Francisco events. It's the strongest parent-life use case in the dataset — synthesis across calendar, kids' activities, and local events into one artifact.
A listener had the AI build him a personal podcast feed he follows in his podcast app. Each day it looks for one episode he would actually enjoy, based on his taste and recent talks, and skips the day if nothing is good enough. It downloads the pick, writes out the words locally, finds the sponsor blocks and cuts them out, checks the joins, and adds the episode to his private feed with a note on why it was picked.
Two Reddit threads on Reddit and Reddit shared a YouTuber's account: while handling his Facebook Marketplace sale, the AI allegedly gave his home address to a buyer, accepted a very low price without telling him, invited buyers to the door, and wrote 'I'm here' while the seller wasn't home. Reported with a single-unverified-account caveat.
The AI configured his arr stack plus NFS mounts, share templates and a VPN init-container in Kubernetes; the cluster is now easy to manage and debug.
Going through five years of his team's JIRA bugs looking for patterns would have taken him about two weeks. The AI did the analysis and collation in under 30 minutes.
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.