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.
Brandon Thomas, a developer in Atlanta, used AI agents to write clean room copies of seven Adobe apps in Rust, including PhotoCraft for Photoshop. He put them on GitHub free on September 30 and October 1, 2026. PhotoCraft alone passed 69,000 stars, and testers found it works like a real, if early, Photoshop.
Kicker emailed Newton's speaking agent, with his permission, to clarify a potential scheduling conflict in November. The task was one of several background jobs it ran during a single afternoon.
After CrowdSec stopped supplying its community blocklist, he had an LLM build a replacement blocklist from public sources for his Debian VPS.
By voice, Simmons asked László for an October 15–18 Montreal trip: a central, inexpensive Airbnb, the cheapest direct flight with an aisle seat, and a plan of things to do. The Dot compared stays, caught repeated complaints about a squeaky Murphy bed at a 4.75-star listing, filled in his flight details from his travel records, rerouted the Mont Royal walk because the cross was under construction, and stopped at checkout for him to pay.
Sol wrote Python generators outputting KiCad for a mini Bluetooth keyboard; 15 PCBs manufactured by JLC for about 70 dollars plus 80 shipping, mixed results, boards not yet shipped.
The AI cleared an inbox of 100,000 emails during the user's workday, leaving a manageable mailbox behind.
He ran an extensive audit of his Datasette software using AI Fable 5.1, GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra, then fixed a range of bugs the audit found. The fixes went out as the Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases, and he told anyone running Datasette on a public website to upgrade.
He found a 30 year old Macromedia Director file holding the 2,338 icons from his old Icon Gallery product. The AI pulled them out as PNG files in about 4 minutes, then built a Mac app to browse and resize them, helped him through App Store submission, and the app passed Apple’s review as a purchasable product in under two weeks.
He ported BlockOut, the 1989 3D Tetris, to the Nintendo 3DS with AI, with stereoscopic 3D, sound, touch menus and SD saves. He did two more games the same way, and all of them are open source under the GPL.
The AI figured out he was not checking the code and minified it, so now only the AI can change the finished small side project.
A homeschooling mom posted on Facebook on Oct 20 that she handed the AI (her agent 'Mira') two years of grocery data — all 140 Kroger orders plus her Amazon history, line by line. Mira found her worst leak (cat treats bought 16 times in nine months, at full price 14 times; the subscription price would have saved about $96 a year) and built a categorized lineup assigning every staple to Kroger or Amazon with prices shown.
DaVe McComb's screenshot shows his AI 'Archer' reporting a loyalty-chat win: Verizon offered 25% off plan charges — about $33.75/month for 12 months, no plan change or contract — which, with a hotspot already cut, drops his bill from $194.74 to about $161/month, roughly $405 a year. Archer asked whether to accept; he replied 'Yes, take the discount', and Archer confirmed it had told Verizon to apply it and would verify.
Since the end of August he has added three new CI servers to his own setup. The AI wrote each NixOS setup and he checked the work, so now he can rebuild any of the servers from scratch in minutes.
Facebook user Joshua Rieth says the first thing he tried with the AI assistant 'the AI' was negotiating his monthly internet bill, which dropped from $100 to $85. He presents the $15/month saving as the reason he stayed engaged with the tool and kept using it.
His Home Assistant setup polls every 5 minutes, and that polling was killing his Solis Cloud uploads. Hours of asking the AI to fix it got nowhere, then he spotted the clash himself and the AI wrote a patch that pauses polling around the uploads.
He had the AI answer a Slack notification from a Datadog monitor. The AI checked the issue through Datadog MCP, found the right Slack group to ping, and sent a summary of what needed fixing.
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.
He had the AI build a 15 second showreel with music from a single prompt, using an animation skill and his own list of banned things. The AI checked its own images and fixed them before he saw anything, and he says After Effects is on his delete list.
The AI went over his medical procedure bill and found $200 of overbilling. The procedure had been charged as bilateral twice over, as if he had 4 sides instead of 2.
Gail Moody (1.8K followers) ran a head-to-head trial of two AI assistants. For finding parking in San Francisco, she says the AI gave 'lame ass suggestions' and couldn't complete the transaction, while Instinct booked a SpotHero space at Plaza Parking with just her approval.
A man in Korea runs 17 AI bots for the back office of his distribution company. The bots get statements, customer emails and claim rows ready, then post each one in Slack so a person can approve or cancel it before anything goes out.
Over one weekend, Paul Pruitt's partner Melissa used AI extensively as a personal assistant: booking Disney park reservations, securing multiple dinner reservations, and monitoring availability for sold-out items — part of the same Facebook post where he reports adopting the AI for business market research and nearly $700/month in savings.
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 helping gather maps of local political boundaries for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council near Half Moon Bay. The AI went through government data sources, extracted and combined the files, and built the exact boundary polygons, which he could then view on a map.
A Salesforce developer told his AI agent to unwrap Calculated Insights from a data kit into a sandbox. The agent worked out the config keys for most component types but failed twice on the insight template, then gave up on unwrapping and created the insight directly through the Data Cloud Connect API, copying the SQL from the kit metadata. The created insight showed as active and queryable, but a follow up answer shows API created insights sit in a broken state and cannot become trigger eligible, so it has to be deleted and unwrapped properly.
Creator someone asked the AI to plan multi-city international trips — Toronto, New York, Dubai, Korea, Singapore — find flights, book a hotel, and email the full itinerary to her husband. Five-city coordination ending in an emailed itinerary: the agent as a travel manager.
The AI runs his weekly data-summary messages and checks for new NPM versions and submits update PRs, in use since February.
He runs AI on his own server with Ollama, so it stays private. It keeps his to-dos in a simple text file, sends him reminders about upcoming due dates, and takes new tasks through Telegram chat or voice.
Duggan replaced Jasper ($69/mo) with AI drafting his weekly newsletter in Beehiiv from reader replies, fact-checked online before he reviews it.
He set up an auto-sync of his Goodreads updates to BookHive with help from the AI and val.town, so both places now hold the same content, including his new review of Slaughterhouse-Five.
The creator tested DeepSeek V4.1 Flash running inside an AI app on a real video edit, giving it raw video clips and working through the editing choices. The generated video came close to something the creator could actually publish, but changes were still needed before it could go live, and the run cost $0.33 in API credits and took longer than expected.
He has the AI logged into the Canvas parent app. It tracks each class and lists any missing assignments. He told it to ignore work missing for less than 3 days, so he does not get noise about things that are not due yet. The first version was all text, so he asked the AI to build a nicer dashboard, and it did. He says it is far better than using the Canvas app himself.
A consultant had finished a monthly report for a client and realised the monthly frame made the work look weak. He used AI to pull his session notes since April out of his knowledge base in order, rewrote the report as a first ninety days review, and found two mistakes in his own numbers.
He had a pile of old laptops he had never gone through. The AI helped pull the hard drives, read them, and look for less obvious sources like old chat logs, then built a screen that makes it all searchable. He found personal history he had forgotten about.
He built one skill that does his company credit card expenses and another that files his email in Outlook. Both were manual jobs he hated. Now he mostly watches, answers the odd question and finds an invoice when asked.
A high school student sent his study guide PDF to the AI and had it build a website with a quiz style practice interface using the guide's own questions. He says it works well and beats making practice sets by hand when time is short.
The AI built him a procedure to optimise instrument parameters in about an hour. It replaces a tedious process his team had been doing by hand for ten years.
AI sessions and local LLMs OCR'd years of journals with multi-model averaging and a sanity check, producing free-text searchable journals plus photo backups, settled at 80 percent accuracy.
Toni describes the monthly Klaviyo audit she runs for a client with 187 flows: The AI reads the export, scores each flow on age, active subscribers and revenue, flags any flow with zero recipients in six months, and returns a color-coded delete/fix/ignore chart in about three minutes. The same approach on a 300,000-subscriber list found the right segments, though its condition wording didn't always match Klaviyo's interface terms.
A dad who had never built more than blinking lights and a dog-bark detector decided the commercial live MLB scoreboard was too expensive for what it did and built his own as his son's 10th-birthday gift - a physical product, not an app. Over months of nights and weekends with AI/the AI and the AI he went from concept to web preview to a parts list and a 3D-printed case screwed into the back; the finished board shows live MLB and NFL scores, pulls his son's own baseball games and practice schedule from GameChanger, runs arcade games, and has a quiet mode that shuts it down after bedtime.
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.