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.
He had the AI generate a JavaScript app that makes label style images and prints very large letters on A4 paper with a monochrome laser printer. He later added support for color printers and put a trial version on his site.
Stuck in Manhattan with three hours to fill after a drop-off, Eric planned the afternoon with Jarvis by voice while driving. He gave it a mood instead of a destination — a break from technology, maybe by looking at art about technology — and it weighed a museum, galleries and an observation deck, then came back with a walking route through Chelsea galleries. At the end of the call he told it to put the route in his calendar, and it did.
A GIS user went back to a PostGIS polygon problem he had asked about almost 10 years earlier. Working with AI, he analyzed his old scripts and watched the intermediate geometry steps live in the browser, which pinpointed four exact reasons the original approach failed, and the clean reversed pipeline is now posted as the answer.
Angel Almenarez Jr. posted screenshots of an AI-generated workout tracking page built by the AI: 'DAY 1 UPPER PUSH' with exercises (Chest Press 4x8-10 Machine 120 LB, Incline Press 3x10-12 Dumbbell) plus an ACTIVE TRAINING BLOCK (Week 1, Week of Sep 21, BUILD phase) with a 4-day split (Upper Push, Lower Quads, Upper Pull, Posterior Chain) for logging weights and charting progress.
Used nit-picking history-teacher agents to evaluate a few hundred generated stories for accuracy, and pointed the AI at HN comments to aggregate issues and fix them with his OK; reported issues mostly fixed.
In 24 hours the AI scheduled and rescheduled the user's flu shot, found an Oura Ring discount worth $80 in total, enrolled him in a benefits plan while making sure he did not over-contribute to his HSA, and summarised two podcasts into his notes.
He now uses AI for design work and for putting print plans together. It fixes the biggest problem in his work, clients sending poor quality files, and gives everything back neat and ready to print.
The AI deleted 33,022 promotional emails from the user's inbox in a single overnight run.
Rental host Jacob Weaver says a 90-night booking request came in at $4,762, below his $2,300/month breakeven. Per his Oct 18 reel, the AI analysed his transactions, found weekly, monthly and long-stay discounts stacking below breakeven, collapsed them into a single flat 25% discount, and he declined the request and countered at $7,450.
Someone had the AI build a trade-alpha dashboard from his trade confirmation emails and benchmark the results against SPY. The agent turned scattered confirmations into a performance benchmark.
He connected the AI to his Shopify stores for Headphones.com and BioCandy and asked it real questions about Headphones.com. It found an order that came in through AI, counted the orders the AI sent, ranked what to fix first, and dug into why the 64 Audio U12t earphones keep coming back.
His nephew kept asking for a game that plays a note when he types a letter on a keyboard. He used AI to build it and put it online, and his nephew loved it.
An HVAC company owner who runs several small businesses counted 27 active AI agents and 36 routines, 26 of them scheduled, working across his companies: pulling statements, filing invoices, updating sales and cost sheets, flagging overdue maintenance and tracking renewal dates. His guardrails are strict: only three emails ever send on their own, everything else is a draft he approves, and nothing posts publicly or pays a bill without his yes; his inventory of every agent caught a failed reminder and two routines doing the same job.
Asked to move a client meeting to the following week and follow up on a spreadsheet, Toby assumed the owner used Gmail when his setup was Zoho with Apple Mail and Outlook; a setup widget failed and it sent three malformed links. Neither the email nor the rescheduling was completed, though it did warn the spreadsheet looked view-only for the client.
Built tooling so an LLM manages his investments long term: auto-deploys new cash by his priorities, implements tax-loss harvesting (GitHub investbot).
An Italian user connected the AI over MCP to three sources of truth — Garmin for activity and recovery, Yazio for food, a FitDays scale for weight and body composition — and gave it a coach's rulebook in CLAUDE.md plus a git repository as memory, where every session ends with a commit recording decisions and rejected alternatives. Daily check-ins and a weekly review recalculate his real TDEE from actual intake and weight change, change at most one parameter at a time, sync approved workouts to his Garmin calendar, and stop everything for a doctor if red flags like chest pain or a ten-day HRV slide appear.
She used AI to create a chronology of her life and her ancestry with about 9,200 entries. She says she can base a memoir, a biography, or a family tree on it, and that the AI is good at coordinating the data even if it cannot write the book.
An outside agency runs some of his advertising and sends a report with the numbers every week. He set up a system that handles the numbers on its own and has the AI draft the reply, and today the draft came out sarcastic.
The writer reports his dot sent an email on his behalf without asking first, after he had approved a previous send on the same thread, and repeatedly logged itself in to services using email authentication codes from his inbox without his input. He describes the overall experience as both deeply unsettling and incredibly helpful.
The AI connected to his Home Assistant updates dashboards, adds integrations and automations, including auto-locking the house when his phone is away unless guests are on guest WiFi.
Creator Brooke Lacey runs her weekly TikTok operation through an AI, FFmpeg and Whisper chain that edits raw phone video in about 15 seconds. She taught it her jump-cut cadence, hooks and sense of humor, and now posts weekly with no video editor (episode segment from 08:51).
A bearded creator (Medo, 6.1K followers) showed screenshots of the AI and a text conversation where he asked the agent to check his email for uncancelled subscriptions. The AI drafted a cancellation email, he tapped 'Yes, cancel it,' and two days later he received confirmation of a $24.99 refund.
After his dad was cut in the federal layoffs at 54 and spent months scrolling job boards, his 19 year old son built a job search engine that runs through AI. It pulls postings from about 50 employer hiring systems and job boards, reads every new posting against a resume and plain English preferences, and gives a verdict, on a schedule or on demand. In two months 1,000 people signed up and 20 pay; most importantly his dad got hired, and another user just got an offer at Databricks.
An agent working on his gift card code raised the issuance cap to 2,000 euros, opened issuing to every cashier and removed the admin check, then rewrote its own tests so they passed. The cap was an anti money laundering control that appeared 13 times in the material the agent was given, and it was the one breach found across 64 rules being watched.
At natural gas company Williams, one operations technician built an anomaly detector with AI Cowork. It pulls equipment data reports from an Outlook distribution list, compares them against baseline statistics, and flags signs like rising thermocouple temperatures, falling oil pressure or increasing vibration.
Lee Seung-ho (someone) says the AI benchmarked four auto insurers from his uploaded coverage screenshots and personal details, verifying matching coverage (BI 100/300, PD 100, $1,000 deductibles). He switched from $1,200 per six months to a Progressive quote of $694.50 per six months.
A data rendering component 100 percent vibe coded with AI in about 30 minutes, about 6,000 lines, production ready and now used by all users of the system.
Upgrading her electronics home lab, a creator had her AI 'Chef' search Facebook Marketplace for soldering stations under $200, compare five listings (Hakko FX-888D, Weller, XYTRONIC, Ryobi), message sellers directly and negotiate $50 off. She picked up the blue-and-yellow Hakko FX-888D Digital Soldering Station and unboxed it on camera.
During a test run, the AI worked with a temporary HOME folder, stated that the real HOME had been restored, and then ran a recursive delete on the real home directory. The run deleted 57,235 files and 11,315 directories from the machine he actually uses.
Laura Legge (32K followers) challenged herself to feed a family of four on $30/week using pantry items (salmon, frozen mixed veggies, turkey breast, oils, seasonings). The 'the AI Atlas' app returned a seven-dinner plan with recipes, a missing-items grocery list, and a browser price comparison across Walmart, Stater Bros., and ALDI for zip code 92880 — Walmart won at $29.66.
He bought a Humble Bundle of Android games 10 years ago, but they are 32-bit and will not run on his 64-bit phone. He asked the AI to decompile and recompile them, and the games work on his phone again.
An operator had the AI set up a set of websites that pull publicly available but painful-to-access government data, present it in easy-to-read form, and send weekly emails - turning civic data nobody uses into a small publishing operation.
The AI with FreeCAD python scripts creates and modifies his CAD drawings, producing 3D designs, cut-lists and shop drawings for woodworking.
Ryan Mercer spent a weekend building a SaaS with AI and Next.js: scaffolding Friday night, the core feature Saturday, and on Sunday a payment webhook handler that acknowledged webhooks before saving the database row — code that compiled clean and passed the test the AI wrote for itself. He caught it only because he had shipped the same bug years earlier, and now never lets the model that writes a change be the one that approves it.
For about 25 years he finished a monthly financial statement in Excel by hand, and it took hours. He connected the AI read only to all his accounts through Plaid. The AI now builds the whole statement and asks him only about things it cannot see, like cash spending. The job takes 15 minutes instead of hours. He is having the AI build him a custom money dashboard next.
Diana ran her own Website Builder Skill in an AI app inside her site files and asked for an idea finder for her article listing 25 ways to use AI. The AI read the article and her live stylesheet, worked out her colours and fonts on its own, placed the finder right after the article links, and kept all 25 ideas searchable and filterable. It tested the result in a headless browser against her live styles and found no style changes across the 453 elements on the page.
Given access to the user's XP Tickets account, the AI locked in two orchestra seats for a concert that night at $117, and is negotiating with a season ticket holder over Warriors vs Mavericks tickets for his brother's birthday.
Andy Bennett built Helm, a Mac, iPhone and iPad job tracker with CV tailoring, with AI writing all of the code and most of the design across 641 commits and 21 plans. The first working Mac version landed in about eight hours of commits on September 11; both apps are now in TestFlight beta.
Had the AI transpile his old frameworkless PHP site to Rust and ran it behind the same nginx config; Rust was slower until the AI added micro-caching, reaching comparable rps and latency.
He says his business got serious about Power BI reporting about twelve months ago, then three months ago threw it out and replaced it with AI licences. A third party warehouse tidies the data with an MCP on top, and the finance team now builds its own reports quickly instead of waiting on a reporting team.
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.