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 kept forgetting to log her own progress, and failing. The AI set up a daily check in that asks her to report how she is doing and counts the smoke free days with her, and the streak is holding better than when she tracked it herself.
Forum founder MJ DeMarco needed a text update across 12 pages of one of his websites, but the platform that built it demanded a new subscription just to edit. He gave the AI access to the site folder instead; it made all the changes in about 3 minutes, avoiding an estimated hour of manual editing and a $20/month subscription.
He used AI to generate a script that calculated the best combination of blood test packages to save money. Because every package meant a separate blood sample, they drew 4 times as much blood from him.
His coding agent now records the demo video for its own PRs.
The same user asked the AI to monitor Apple's website every few hours and tell him when iPhones in his area came back in stock - a small standing watch he set instead of refreshing the store page himself during a launch shortage.
He had it sign in to his Costco account and work out how often they buy each thing and which items they stock up on when they are on sale, so it now writes the family shopping list and sends it to his wife for edits. At Vons it signs in and loads the cart itself; he only checks out and picks a pickup time.
Vibe coding a real product, a 3D game on the App Store with 20 species and zero revenue.
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.
A solo litigator had about 15,000 pages of discovery to dig through for a summary judgment motion. He had the AI run a clean OCR pass over the PDFs, build embeddings, and write reusable Python scripts for keyword and semantic searching, then used the agent to find the best evidence for each point while he wrote the brief.
From one prompt, Astra found free sample offers and ordered them to his house: energy drinks, bin liners, lotion, suction cup hooks and perfume samples. He gave it a spare email login, and when a site sent a verification code, Astra went into the inbox, found the code and finished the sign up itself.
She built an AI notewriter that watches for note requests about US elections, looks for evidence and drafts corrections, with several models that triage, draft and check each other's work. She approves every submission before it goes out, but on heated election claims few notes get far: her bot's note on a false claim about James Talarico received five ratings, and notes on such stories rarely reach Helpful status.
In a screen-recorded demo, lifestyle creator Jenna Ricciardi's AI agent Glimmer canceled a subscription she had forgotten she was paying for, one of several delegated tasks shown in the reel.
A creator who flies business class but refuses typical prices named her AI 'Miles' and asked it to track business-class fares from Los Angeles to Rome under $2,000 one-way, with flexibility for SFO or SEA. Miles set the baseline at ~$3,750, monitored for three months, and later delivered a 'Good morning!' briefing with five Icelandair fares under $2k from SEA and SFO to Rome.
He asked the AI to check if his phone and internet plan was worth what he pays, and shared the agent's own account of what it did. The AI signed into his account and checked five months of statements: he uses 14 to 30GB a month, so his unlimited plan was charging him for room he never uses. It found a cheaper tier, Mobile Select at $30 a month with a 50GB data bucket, $15 a month less than his $45 legacy plan. The tier was not offered on the self service pages, so the AI opened the Xfinity chat, told the bot it was acting for him, got passed to a live agent, and handled the account checks, including spotting an expired approval link and getting a fresh one sent to his email. Before agreeing, it read the order review page: one line, $0 due today, $15 a month less, no add ons. His whole part was typing the word go. The saving is $180 a year from the next bill.
A man set his Dot, Bob, to research two UK trips across flexible dates, three stations and both directions. Bob pulled hundreds of fare options from the GWR booking site into a Google Sheet, shortlisted four first class trains, and found split tickets that saved £5 on one train and £9.40 on another.
A trader gave the AI the Form 8949 his CPA had prepared from his trade spreadsheet; the AI found a number of errors in the professional's own work and generated a corrected form, which he sent back to the CPA.
Got the AI to implement TPAP compatibility in Swift purely by interacting with his local plugs and response shapes plus RFC 9383, figuring out it was SPAKE2+ and the password hashing steps.
Tech creator Matt Robb gave the AI his Marketplace inbox, pickup address, and payment preferences for a keyboard sale. With 'Allow Always' enabled, the AI accepted a low offer, shared his address, and set up the pickup without checking first.
The AI rebooked the same hotel, room type, and dates at a lower rate as prices moved, saving $179. The author verified the new reservations directly with the hotel and confirms everything held.
His AI read his LinkedIn and messages other agents on Lamoom to meet product designers, and agents formed a WeWork group chat.
A developer built himself an AI evening edition. It goes through the posts and articles he saved, checks each one against his actual setup, and sorts them into adopt, trial, park or skip. Any change it suggests waits for his yes. The first run cleared his whole backlog of 30 items, and a planted fake post with hidden instructions was flagged and skipped.
A new feature for his blog, built using his voice with an agent, now in use.
He took a few photos of his Albuquerque parking ticket and handed them to the AI with no instructions. The bot found grounds to fight it, built an evidence packet, emailed the city before the deadline, and the next morning the city said it had sent the ticket to the Parking Supervisor to be voided.
He ran AI for three days on a headless ThinkCentre Tiny in the corner, driving it from a browser. Out came a learning page that walks through one job of an AI agent from order to approval to publishing, and a playable online photo darkroom where visitors expose their own photo and the file never leaves their browser.
One of the demonstrated workflows in '11 Ways I Actually Use the AI (Real Examples)', shown via screen recordings.
A poster on the Dots forum thread reports that while he was on vacation, his Dot, Axiom, handled a high-complexity local-model job lasting six to eight hours: downloading, testing, unloading and redownloading models, and keeping him updated model after model.
Ben Parr had the AI build a tracker for his 2025 tax documents and hunt down missing K-1s. The agent organized the paperwork and chased the missing forms.
The Layrcake team ran AI against their own MCP data layer on 1 October 2026: asked for 20 heads of sales at London SaaS firms, the AI found 20 of 91 matches, enriched and verified emails down to 15 valid leads, found a recent reason to write to each, and drafted a three-step campaign — stopping before sending. The logged run took under ten minutes and 145 credits, about $1.45.
Her boiler had stopped heating the water. She sent the AI about 15 pictures step by step, followed its instructions to turn it off, switch a few handles and reset the pressure, and the boiler worked again.
His business was paying Stripe 4,633 euros a year to receive bank transfers that are free into its own account. He had the AI go through 12 months of Revolut and Stripe charges.
FAILURE then rescue: The AI’s code for his Garmin watch app compiled but was totally broken even with heavy steering; GLM 5.3 Flash then made it work.
Agent autonomously proposed and tested CUDA kernel optimizations and profiled them with Nsight by itself, ending with a kernel an order of magnitude faster.
A Reddit user asked the AI to catch up on unfiled vet bills. The AI searched the email backlog, found five bills totalling $1,504.72, and submitted them to the pet insurer.
He edits video for a living. His agents handle the non creative manual work around each project: quality checks for missed text, black frames and logos, subtitles, reformatting for social aspect ratios, spreading files to the right products and pulling source material for descriptions. He logs his hours on every project and says agent assisted projects take about half the time with better quality; the weeks spent building the setup paid for themselves in two weeks.
A user’s the AI found hard-to-find pens in a small Polish shop, emailed the owner in Polish, got an invoice issued, and paid it with the user’s approval. The pens were shipping by the time he posted.
Constraints: zero ad budget, no existing audience, ~4 hrs/week of human time; assets: a subdomain, Cloudflare access, DodoPayments. Ruled out: custom AI songs, mixing/mastering services, automated day trading, 'information arbitrage'.
He shared the full prompt he runs: The AI pages through his Instagram story archive about 20 stories at a time with the connector tool, saves its place every 10 pages so the job can pick up where it stopped, and counts every story without downloading any media. The prompt's worked example ends at 3,862 pages and 77,223 stories going back to 2018, with no rate limit hits.
Andrea Palacio bought a South Florida landscaping company that promptly lost 10 of its 12 staff and nearly half its revenue, leaving her working 80-hour weeks on booking, marketing and customer service. She built an AI receptionist herself that books estimates onto a calendar automatically and forwards a call to her only when the client is upset, and hired a freelancer to build AI customer software; together the automations saved her about 20 hours a month, and she later added an AI dashboard tracking crew efficiency, job times and pay against client charges.
Kilsonmoon sent the AI a photo of a neighborhood water-pipe cleaning notice: The AI identified when his street would be cleaned, added it to his calendar, set a messenger reminder for the day before, and relayed the precautions — close the valve, avoid running the washing machine. It also found the full schedule on the water utility's website and registered ongoing monitoring so future notices trigger automatic alerts.
During a security incident day, a man had an AI session checking the Hacker News thread every 15 minutes, following the links to look for public exploits and mitigations or anything he might have missed. He says it helped them feel safer and take all the necessary steps through the day.
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.