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.
A man took a 1997 PC game he played as a kid and had the AI get it running on modern hardware in 30 minutes. Since then it has decompiled most of the game, extended a shimmed DirectX library so the game runs headlessly in parallel copies, mapped memory and game scripts, and now writes him full level guides with screenshots.
On Oct 2, 2026 a Japanese non-engineer asked the AI to run his note account for monetization; the agent picked the niche itself, then researched, drafted and self-reviewed 12 manuscripts during his 5-hour nap, reaching 42 drafts by the end of the day. It now plans topics, writes drafts, creates header images, registers the posting schedule in Google Calendar and prepares X and Threads announcements, batched a week ahead for his approval. The AI’s own safety feature stopped it from pressing the X post button; he keeps five jobs human: purpose, identity details, the final post button, personal experience and publish approval.
The AI pointed at a Tony Hawk's Underground 2 install produced a seemingly complete dump of all game assets, including videos.
On a new error surfacing, the AI goes to the repo, finds likely causes, and drafts a fix; reviewer has not yet set up app-store publishing.
He left Twitter in 2022 and had wanted his archive in the Day One journal app ever since. The AI did the import in an hour, and that time included backing up his databases first in case anything went wrong.
His scheduled the AI scan runs at noon daily over about 15 job sites plus any others it finds, matching UK product owner and knowledge management roles at £45,000 to £65,000 against his uploaded CVs. It drops anything posted more than 48 hours ago, anything hybrid sold as remote, and anything it has sent before, and it checks each link is still live, ideally on the company's own site.
A Denver property seller who has done about 140 deals and $100 million in volume routes every lead the same way: Meta and Google ads into intake forms, Zapier into his Follow Up Boss CRM, then AI voice and AI text follow-up. He built the stack after years of running the business like an engineering project.
A materials scientist with a PhD and almost no coding background built and shipped a live stock portfolio tracker over about three months and 277 commits, pasting code blocks the AI gave him into a terminal and pasting the results back. The tracker is not about returns: it makes him write down why he bought a stock and what would prove him wrong, then pressure tests his reasoning and scores how well his past calls held up.
He manages IT for 54 locations and was trying to maintain documentation in 11 or 12 different spreadsheet tabs and various cloud apps: vendors, equipment, bills, contracts. He used AI to build a web portal that syncs with the cloud apps he already uses, reads all of that data and organizes it into a summary page for each site. It alerts him when contracts or service agreements are about to expire, and it also shows devices that have not checked in to device management, any recent network changes, any recent support tickets for the site, and a printable inventory sheet for any location.
BNP Paribas is deploying the AI Enterprise through its internal LLM@CIB assistant to more than 65,000 employees, including work on credit memoranda.
Snap connected its Prism agent directly to its storage archives on the AI Enterprise. Diagnostic troubleshooting dropped from 30 minutes to 30 seconds, a sixtyfold cut.
A personal blogger gave the AI one of four life goals that wasn't progressing and it evolved into a daily morning action list of readings, videos, questions and assignments. She then had it converted into a checkable checklist so she can track progress and stay accountable day to day.
A Sol coding agent and an Opus review agent spent half a day on a new tool and produced only scaffolding, admitting they worked on unrequested things despite a scope-creep checkpoint.
Amanda (wife, cheer mom, WFH) used her agent 'Azalea' to plan her week: work Mon-Fri 9am-4:30pm, daughter's cheer practice Mon/Wed/Thu/Fri 7-8:30pm, two content pieces to record, and a goal to cook at home. Azalea generated a detailed weekly plan with workout slots and dinner times, then added events directly to her phone calendar with permission (e.g., a Sunday 11am-12pm workout).
Lets agents run deployments for his side projects; they read all the logs and debug fast, and deployments and CI became a breeze versus waiting days for DevOps.
He used AI one time to code a JavaScript bookmark that opens Google Calendar to a 7-day view starting on the most recent Monday. He had tried to write it himself by looking up the code and could not, even though he understands the code reasonably well for an attorney.
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.
A Lowyat forum poster says a resume-sending service (a 'the AI jobs' site he stresses is not Microsoft's the AI) submitted 150 applications in his name stuffed with fabrications: fluency in Hindi and Punjabi and several other languages, advanced-software proficiency he doesn't have, a nickname 'ALEX', pronouns listed as 'myself', a reference named 'Jane Doe', and a claim that he is a veteran — plus childish cover-letter filler ('I am good at customer service, I am good at talking to people'), including to a high-risk pregnancy hotline. He calls the result absolutely humiliating.
The AI and the AI re-created a Tesla data tool in Go from an existing codebase at his request; he has used the new tool for 5 months and it works well.
Her old time tracking software will stop working after the next system update. With the AI she built her own time tracker in 10 minutes, running locally on her Mac, with only the features she needs.
Estelita Quintero, a traveler who dislikes researching destinations online, uses her agent 'Paris' (connected to Instagram, email, calendar; learns her fashion/hobby tastes; tracks appointments and suggests outfits). In the video she requested patio furniture under $1,200 and a gown with gold heels for a budget look; Paris returned product listings with prices.
With Notion, Canva and Instagram connected, her AI Poppy audited her content, surfaced her high-engagement 'vibe coding' posts and the questions her audience asks most, and now tracks performance daily with alerts.
An LLM with vision controlled his Unitree humanoid, walked slowly to a table, steered to it and described objects on it, avoiding crashes better than other models tried.
A new dad on paternity leave built a full baby tracker with AI in a week, then opened it to other parents as a cheaper SaaS after finding existing trackers obscenely priced. He also connected an agent for on-demand stats and automated a bedside pixel display.
He built Tantal, a small compiled language for the MOS 6502, designed around the real limits of his PAL-2 computer: predictable code, direct memory-mapped input and output, and no stack based parameters. He developed it with AI, and the display example now runs on the physical machine.
He uses AI to check his email hourly, mostly overnight, handling customer mail and marketer pitches while it does not act during the day. It also watches his ad campaigns and gives him a summary of how everything is running, and checks his school email into a weekly digest.
The AI built boot images for a box of ancient single-board computers and got them running; one now hosts a persistent tmux session.
A company owner asked the AI for a premium redesign of his website. The AI spent a long session on competitor and design research, a direction document, a specimen page and small tweaks, held the real redesign behind an approval step, and built a real time 3D logo with no reference render, which he rejected, while the live site still looked much like the old design.
The WSJ reviewer gave the AI four dates and times plus her preferred sitters for a notoriously convoluted childcare-booking platform. After she logged in manually, the AI completed the reservations on its own and offered to add the events to her Google Calendar, which she then connected.
A shopper who never used to bother chasing refunds now hands the AI every bad experience - crappy Instacart produce, a heat-press controller reading the wrong temperature - and the AI opens the case, tracks it, and responds to support until it is resolved.
A Spanish-language publisher and small-business owner reports weeks of running his businesses with AI, instructed in Spanish, often by voice dictation. For Yasmin Multiservice, his tax and notary office in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, they built the complete online store together: ten digital products (immigration guides and practice exams) with card and PayPal payments, then prepared an Etsy shop and WordPress maintenance packages. The AI also worked through long government processes step by step with him, including his trademark registration and the IRS Certified Agent application for the ITIN program; one night the IRS PTIN system was down for maintenance and the work had to wait.
After Amazon blocked automated login windows, a user built a small HTTP API on a machine they control. The AI SSHes in and calls http://127.0.0.1:8792 to search Amazon and add items to a personal or Prime Business cart (no checkout).
Reporting Anthropic's September 23 engineering post, this analysis describes the AI running a two-week performance sprint from a Slack channel: 150-plus threads, benchmarks built for each bottleneck, and more than 3,000 merged changes with no customer-facing incident. Time to a typeable page at the 75th percentile fell from 3.1 seconds to 0.55, with a human approving every pull request.
A language learner had the AI create an original walk-around game that teaches vocabulary from the first episodes of a Korean webtoon, targeted to his intermediate level. Every word is tappable for a simpler-Korean definition, with cloze quizzes woven into the story, and he has played through two of four chapters.
She is the training coordinator at her job and tracks everyone's certification hours in a color coded Excel workbook. She still had to log into the training website, check each person's hours, and type them in. Now the AI checks the training website for every employee, fills the hours into her uploaded workbook, and emails her the updated workbook and a report. It runs on its own on the 1st of each month.
Made an ESP32 flight radar for his desk showing planes over his house, two of them including one for his wife, running around the clock.
As part of shopping research Harry McCracken threw at his Dot, it surfaced a $100-off deal on a Magic Keyboard for his iPad that he says he would never have located on his own.
A daily routine on Sonnet reads his email, answers the routine messages from templates, and puts the rest on his todo list. When a task needs more than an hour, the routine blocks time for it on his calendar.
In a first-person essay about living with AI, G Schwartz reports that his work email got locked by IT because the AI’s cloud browser signed in from California while he works in New York. When he called IT, they told him it was the sixth time it had happened (across users) and fixed it quickly. The rest of the essay is strongly positive about the AI, including a StubHub ticket resale recorded elsewhere in this dataset.
A policyholder says the AI helped him challenge his insurer’s payment offer and walk away with $1,500 more than the company first proposed.
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.