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 is juggling several legal cases of his own, and his lawyers do not have time to answer him every day. The AI transcribes audio, organizes his evidence and writes the case summaries he hands to them. He calls it the best tool he has ever had, and says stopping would mean going back to doing all of that alone.
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
His AI setup generates maths problems matched to each son's school level, states the reward up front (0.50 dollars per finished set), and the boys complete the sets to earn it. He lists it first among the things his agent does for the family.
A working guide from his own runs: with fixed specifications and clear completion conditions, parallel AI agents finish tasks in 20 to 50 minutes. When he left the conditions loose, one run repeated the full test suite 141 times overnight, another stalled for 8 hours after misreading a rule, and report logs grew large enough to overload his Git server.
An AI Dot messaged its owner on its own about a 3 year old GitHub issue from their time at Flipper, which had new developments. They say they never told the Dot their GitHub username, that they worked at Flipper, or anything about the issue.
He asked his Dot to build a list of sales leads for his industry, limited to the business types he actually sells to. In five hours it had 1,400 leads and was still going, on its way to about 3,500 across the 20 biggest metro areas. He had paid $223 for about 350 leads before, and the Dot's list was cleaner.
A SuperGrok subscriber reports doing a lot of PC maintenance and drive organization through AI, burning through only 33 percent of his usage allowance with four days still left in the cycle.
Jen Lehner says she asked Instinct to handle returning a Ralph Lauren puffer coat. The agent managed the entire return process and sent her the required barcode.
He plans his Bluesky posts in a self-hosted Postiz and has connected it to the AI through MCP. He can ask the AI to list the queue and add new drafts, and he approves the drafts himself.
A testimonial graphic quotes someone: '@the AI just helped me book flights for my euro trip. someone is a nightmare for Americans FYI and muse suggested we try going through PayPal...' The agent worked around Ryanair's US-payment friction.
'I may have set the record for the craziest the AI purchase ever': amyleecodes had the AI order a Samsung S95H 77-inch OLED TV from Best Buy for same-day pickup, then arrange pickup and delivery to her apartment via TaskRabbit — about 95% seamless, with a photo of the delivered TV box to show for it.
He built an AI news app with AI. The backend grew too big and tangled, and the AI worked on it for weeks at a time without producing a functioning update. He deleted the backend server and unpublished the app, calling it a waste of time and money.
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 solo developer who lost his business after a 2012 hospitalization built a self-hosted dead man's switch with AI so his projects and clients are handled if he is incapacitated. It has run for weeks, ships with 42 unit tests, and clients already cite it as a trust feature.
His gym opens class bookings at 6am the day before and the popular classes fill fast, so he used to set an alarm for 6 just to book. Now an agent does the booking for him every morning and he sleeps until 9.
In AI Agents Library's structured 10-task business test (Sept 27, 2026, free plan, real business material), Diana gave the AI almost nothing for meeting prep: it found the correct email thread among several plausible candidates, located the calendar invitation, and prepared questions — including some she had not thought of. The task scored 10/10, the best result of the test day.
For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.
When a restaurant booking of the writer's was canceled, his dot found him alternative tables on its own initiative, part of a few days of proactive schedule and logistics management after he connected it to his Google account.
Her son's school sends home a lot of paper: fundraisers, spirit days, costume parade rules, events like Trunk or Treat. She photographs each flyer and the AI pulls out the dates, times and details and helps her get them on her calendar. When she could not remember whether Trunk or Treat was on the calendar, she asked the AI, and it was added along with the costume parade.
His VP of engineering reviewed two or three strategy tools on the market and they were prohibitively expensive, so he asked if it could be built instead. He built it alone in less than a month: long term objectives broken down into annual objectives, improvement priorities, projects, milestones and tasks, with bowler charts tracking the KPIs, full project management tools, and containerized staging, development and production environments. It cost roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in an AI app credits. The VP then put his own name all over it, and made him replace his own name in the about section with the name of the organization.
A CATCHTABLE reservation confirmation email for Eatanic Garden (party of 2, 6:00 PM KST) accompanies a Korean caption: the author successfully booked the notoriously difficult-to-reserve restaurant by Chef Son Jongwon, calling it the best birthday ever. Comments confirm a November 2026 birthday; demand spiked after the chef's Netflix cooking-show appearance.
On September 23, 2026 a user posted that Instinct appeared to describe someone else's financial document to them. Founder Noah Shinn responded the same day that the model had fabricated a proper noun — a hallucination, not a data breach — and that the team built a hallucination detection layer within 48 hours.
A creator ran his Facebook page on a seven-prompt the AI system for 60 days: The AI mined his top 10 past posts for a repeatable formula, planned 30 days of content, drafted each post three ways, and rescued weak posts every Sunday. He reports 56.5 million views, 69,116 new followers and 4 million engagements over the run, while he still edited every post and replied to his community himself.
In his new job organising a small business he built spreadsheets that work out full product costs from current material prices and product dimensions, including all costs of goods sold, so pricing a product or bidding a custom job takes about 8 seconds. Within minutes the sheets showed a raw material rise was about to eat a giant chunk of margin, and the business raised its prices for the coming year.
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 is building a training plan for a half marathon in November and a year long training calendar that builds up to the Moose Mountain 50km in August 2027. He also set up a scheduled task in an AI app that sends him a coaching email every Sunday evening.
He resells Amazon liquidation pallets on Facebook Marketplace. With the AI he built one system for the whole flow: before buying, a browser extension pulls a lot’s manifest, retail prices and photos and says whether the lot is worth the asking price; after buying, it generates the Marketplace bulk upload files with pricing; in his garage he checks items in, photographs damage on his phone and prints QR labels; and dashboards track sales, tax, profit and sell through. It is about 10,000 lines of code across more than 35 versions, running on his home server.
His poker group has played together since high school. During Covid they played on a website that later shut down, and there was no good replacement for friends who just want a game of Texas hold'em online. He started building his own with AI while playing with the group, and after he was laid off from his database engineering job he spent two weeks going full time on it: front end, logins, authentication and stats. It is live in beta and free while he waits for his bank to approve that it is not a gambling website.
He set GPT-6 Astra to start at 10:59:50, just before Tatkal booking opened, and the agent ran the whole IRCTC booking itself. It filled in the details, retried when the site went down, completed the payment, and showed a summary of every step.
He says some tools disappear because a chatbot can now do their job reliably. The AI restored a corrupted video for him, something he would previously have used a specialized tool for.
A man spent a few weeks building a work AI agent for compliance checks. Today it worked through a 200 question information security audit bank and completed the 119 items that match answers to the correct standard procedures in 15 minutes. That section normally takes him a whole day.
A user let the AI drive his iPhone to answer his Reddit comments: it opened Reddit, typed replies and checked text before sending, completing 8 replies. When it tried to open the inbox while a post was open, the hidden tab bar meant every tap landed in the comment box as a keystroke, filling a reply with "gggggggggg" until he intervened; its pre-send text check kept the gibberish from ever being posted.
The AI’s tools produced printable booth artifacts for a nonprofit he advises; in about 30 minutes he had a professional PDF uploaded to FedEx Kinkos for printing.
Tell the AI to set up an app on his server and it does it all and leaves a documentation note in his Obsidian vault; setup effort near zero.
On a trip to Chaozhou, China, he lost his Android phone and does not speak Chinese. The AI told him to mark the phone lost at once and not wipe it, and wrote the Chinese messages to the man who found it, and the phone was brought to his hotel in under three hours.
Nate B. Jones (11K followers) joined what he called a 'viral challenge for the AI': connecting bank accounts through Plaid, the AI identified more than $5,000 in subscriptions he was paying and canceled nearly $1,300 worth for the coming year.
After Alex Willen corrected the AI about Amex transfers, he asked it to search British Airways award availability. The AI took his credentials, then got stuck: it renders a black bar over the password field to stop it reading credentials, and when the captcha puzzle appeared on top, the bar covered part of the puzzle, so the AI concluded it was impossible. Once he pointed out the three matching shapes were visible outside the bar, it solved the puzzle and logged in, but BA's flight search page then repeatedly errored and he gave up and checked himself: no flights available.
In one Saturday his AI assistant moved his newsletter to a new home, 92 posts and 798 subscribers, and drafted the new issue and a talk for Thursday. It also edited 10 versions of a vlog teaser, planned his 10 year anniversary trip, and reminded him about a $1,200 trade-in he had forgotten.
A parent had the AI write firmware that turns his children's unsupported second-generation Yoto players into Audiobookshelf clients. The AI handled flashing, log reading, and fixes while he did the physical button presses, and the firmware is public on GitHub.
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.