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.
Polish marketing freelancer Damian Nowaczek runs AI agents on his own server: every day at 06:00 one pulls data from his Google Ads accounts, compares performance and sends a report with conclusions to the company chat, so he never opens ad dashboards to spot a campaign burning budget. A second agent scans new public tenders daily and picks the marketing-related ones.
BBC technology reporter Thomas Germain spent a week testing the AI (which he named 'Bob'), giving it access to his Gmail, calendar and other accounts. He had the agent reach out to a Facebook Marketplace seller with questions about a listing, as part of a real-world test of its unsupervised messaging abilities.
A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.
He asked the AI to make a modern version of Rescue Raiders, an old game he loved as a kid, with new graphics, goals and tech trees. The AI went back and forth with critic and art agents until it was done, and the finished game is live for anyone to play.
Agent autonomously proposed and tested CUDA kernel optimizations and profiled them with Nsight by itself, ending with a kernel an order of magnitude faster.
After Fulton idly asked what would make a good mobile game, the AI built a brand-new 2048 game for the family arcade, complete with swipe controls and engine unit tests. It joined the site's existing chess offering as a shipped feature.
Spawned a GLM sub-agent per file across a roughly 50-file codebase to audit coverage and inconsistencies, then had commits made per issue: 70 commits for about 30 minutes of his manual work.
He needed schedule information for programs offered by a public institution, and its website was terrible and badly organized. The AI made a new website that organized all the information into a filterable table that runs on his phone.
Lauren (someone, 32K followers) flies business class but refuses full price, so she tested the AI and named her assistant 'Miles.' On-screen chat showed Miles quoting a ~$3,750 baseline and confirming it would monitor for three months; statuses cycled through 'Tracking fares' and 'Searching fares.' Later a phone notification showed Miles's 'Good morning!' briefing listing five Icelandair fares under $2k from SEA and SFO to Rome. B-roll showed her on a business-class flight.
An Opus 5.5 session ran pkill -f cat to stop a stuck cat, killing every process with cat in it and causing actual harm to other work on the machine.
Hemant Kadam, demonstrating his 'craziest use case' after a couple of days on the AI, opened the app to a Sarvam DevOps Engineer application page. He typed a prompt asking the AI to fill the form; the AI opened a browser session, read the form fields, auto-populated his details (name, email, phone), and uploaded his resume PDF ('Hemant_Kadam_Product_Manager.pdf').
Fable designed an LED earring (RP2350, 45 LEDs), boards work great after JLC swapped a battery holder and a solder fix, about 50 dollars on a Max plan.
Alan Tucker Bearden describes an AI-run lead-reactivation campaign for old leads: the agent emails leads, responds to replies with a free audit offer, notifies his SEO lead via Facebook Messenger when an offer is accepted, receives and forwards the completed audit, then checks his calendar to schedule a call — claiming ~98% autonomy after initial connection approvals. He also mentions generating a grocery list from a voice message and aggregating financial data for monthly revenue/tithing.
A man in bed wanted different music from the MacBook across the room. Apple’s Remote app could not find the Mac, then could not connect. He opened the AI on his phone, used AI mode to reach the AI running on his Mac, and asked it to control the Music app and play a different playlist. It worked within seconds.
Niraj Rajgor's unused 10th generation Kindle is now a photo frame. Working through AI over Wi-Fi, GPT-6 Astra built tools to run custom software on the Kindle and installed a slideshow app that cycles ten photos, four minutes each, and picks up where it left off after sleep.
Kuli Kuli founder Lisa Curtis had the AI evaluate 250 applicants for a director role against her job description while applications kept arriving, and her assistant booked everyone who cleared the screen. She ended up with more than 30 interviews booked, reread the candidates herself, cut the list roughly in half and sent 14 cancellation emails to people who had already blocked time and started preparing — several wrote back angry.
A Yahoo Finance 'IN THE LOOP' segment on Facebook highlighted a tweet from Ejaaz (someone): after a 7-hour flight delay, he asked the AI to file for compensation, and within 5 minutes he had a $250 credit in his Delta account and a rebooked flight — with no prior context given.
April Polk, founder of Columbus clothing brand JaeLuxe Shoetique and a solo operator with no employees, runs her AI (named Chase) plugged into QuickBooks, Klaviyo and Canva. She told the New York Post: Chase revamped her brand guidelines, overhauled her website, corrected her email flows, writes her strategies and looks at her numbers, telling her when she needs to change something or put more funds behind it. Polk was one of 35 owners Meta invited to test the product pre-launch.
He hardly touches a switch anymore, since everything that is not on a timer or presence runs by voice. Letting the AI work the lights is nonsense to him, but having the AI go through his Homey devices, the doubles, broken and unused ones, and his flows is handy and saves him a lot of handwork.
A job hunter's agent sends him a daily email of new postings, marking where he would be a fit and where he would be a stretch. He says it saved hours he used to spend going through job boards, but it does not write applications or resumes.
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.
He produced a Mandarin grammar lesson video from his own writing from a few years ago. The AI made the visuals with Remotion, the AI did the drawings and BytePlus TTS did the voices, and the finished lesson is up on YouTube.
In the same Vox feature, Matt Van Horn recalled an agent calling a karaoke bar to reserve a room and being refused because the venue did not want to talk to an AI. He completed the reservation through Fo, a service that adds human help.
His system asks customers for a Google review after their first service, through its own tracked links, with up to 17 text and email touches over 12 months that stop the moment someone clicks. He backfilled about 70 past customers and got three new five star reviews on the first day, and the system replies to every new review in about 15 minutes, holding negative ones for his approval.
CData's Dot pulled monthly invoiced totals from Xero for one business unit and QuickBooks Online for the other, checked currencies and invoice statuses matched, and returned one combined table for November 2025 to August 2026. March 2026 was strongest at $28,000 combined; the post notes the test account held demo data.
He had screened CRM and ERP tools that cost 100 to 150 dollars a month and came with many features he does not need. His friend built exactly what he needs with AI instead.
The AI with Opus 5 rewrote his 2010 student C game in Common Lisp with SDL2 and OpenGL renderers, running great on Linux and Windows, then ported it to Android as well.
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.
He filmed about 4.5 hours at a village event weekend with no plan to edit it. Working from a shared working directory, the AI found the best moments, cut 10 vertical videos, added captions and music, and he published the full prompts he used so others can copy the workflow.
The AI drafted reusable SEO templates as document artifacts. He ran them on a real topic and saves them for weekly reuse.
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.