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 had the AI use the AI for Chrome extension to scrape her whole Kindle library on Amazon. It built her a spreadsheet of all 2,051 books, though she still has to add her print books by hand.
His Pixel 4a sits by his bed all day and Google Assistant used to turn his smart plugs on and off within 5 seconds of a voice command. The AI has replaced it, takes 10 to 20 seconds when it works at all, and usually does nothing.
Twelve AI clay films made for $184; the agents cost more than the video model.
He built air quality management for his home studio, all scripted by AI. An AirGradient sensor feeds CO2, temperature and humidity into Home Assistant, which boosts ventilation, kicks on the heat pump, or runs the humidifier when the air drifts from comfortable.
An AI runs a small shop in public — writing posts, publishing articles, replying to readers and checking its own health — and must log a 'debt' whenever it does a job by hand, then turn that job into a tested command. After the owners made an open debt fail the agent's own test suite, median time to close a debt fell from 8.2 days to about 6 minutes across 48 debts.
Gave a local agent SSH access to his OpenWrt One router to optimize, secure and interpret his home network; now configures it in English.
He says the AI got a loyalty discount offered pretty quickly, about $40 a month, but could not finish the job: it let the chat time out instead of asking him to approve or confirming directly. Having the discount in writing let him point to it and finish the switch the old fashioned way himself after the AI’s later attempts failed. He still counts the $40 a month as saved.
The same business owner runs AI on a weekly cycle for search traffic. It scans competitor sites for the keywords he tracks, compares his own pages against them, suggests changes, and finds and puts in internal linking fixes itself.
The AI updated a website he manages for a charity and on its own scanned beneficiary header images to add information to the writeup; done well.
A presenter showed his AI 'Finch' planning a full Santorini trip for Oct 12–19 for him and his wife while his phone was face-down — returning flights, hotel, and rental car at a best-value total of $6,695, with AI asking for approval before booking.
A dedicated segment of the same session shows the AI auto-dubbing his videos into English, opening his Urdu-language lessons to an English-speaking audience.
His agent reads his email, including PDF attachments, finds the dates and appointments inside, and adds them to his calendar with a check for duplicates. With two kids at different schools sending home a stream of letters, he calls it a big time saver.
Handed code, data and a writeup to Astra and Opus 5.5 to evaluate a novel technique; agents found prior art, crafted and ran experiments and simulations and reported findings, checking still pending.
Thanks to the AI he has been working on a 4 player version of Wizard of Wor for the Atari 800 that uses all 4 joystick ports, so far in an emulator, with a real Atari test to come. He says he can now play his favorite games with fun options that never existed before.
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.
The AI walked his Android TV box through installing SmartTube, changed the playback settings, and imported his channel list from a NewPipe backup. It was done in minutes and replaced a setup he called poor man's Netflix.
Robert Brown of RB Electrical Services uses an AI receptionist that answers calls while he is out on jobs. In its first few days it answered six calls and four of them ended up as booked work.
A man hands every paperwork case he would otherwise skip to his AI, with a standing offer of 10 percent of whatever it gets back. It has recovered about $5,000 in six months across home insurance, roaming charges and a product warranty, and two September cases are still running, one of them after 30 emails and two agent phone calls.
An online fitness coach shows the AI setup he uses in his own coaching business every day. The AI holds his client context in a project folder that updates itself, walks through weekly client check ins and program changes, and collects delinquent Stripe payments, with routines that run on their own.
A man's system reads his grocery receipts from email and predicts which items will need restocking, building his shopping list on its own. When he is ready, the AI logs into his online grocery shop, adds the items and books the delivery slot.
In a Vox feature on personal agents, entrepreneur Matt Van Horn said his wife sent Instinct a photo of a parking ticket with no instructions at all. The agent, which already had her credit card on file, simply paid it.
The app came out of his own frustrations managing two kids with his wife. Tiny Tummies is a UK baby weaning log that also tracks food, medication and sickness, and it has no subscription. It took about a month to build and three weeks to get approved, and a series of updates and an in app purchase are going through approval now. He built it on the AI Pro plan.
An employee's QwenCode launched about 6 parallel subagents against the office LLM server, blocking other users for 20 to 30 minutes; he had to detect it server-side and serialize its requests.
Chris William Young (40 followers), juggling a 9-to-5, Ironman 70.3 training, and investing in a climbing gym, showed screen recordings of the AI building DoorDash grocery carts from Jewel-Osco ($130.02) and H Mart ($50.33), noting substitutions and missing items like Thai tea mix, then placing the order for delivery. He explained he avoids DoorDash himself out of exhaustion, and walked through the workflow: prompt, the AI searches memory, takes over the browser to shop, requires user approval befor
A business owner runs a six-bot the AI back office for $200 a month, compared in his post with a $58,000 hire; the desk works his inbox finds and holds a veto on any money leaving. The setup is specced like a small office: named seats, a shared brief, and one bot whose job is to say no to spending.
Ethan Mollick writes that the AI noticed an airline credit of his was about to expire and, when he asked, contacted American Airlines to request an extension — an example of agents catching deadlines their owners miss.
Ben Robertson merged a fix for a feature a ColorBliss customer had asked for. His automated support agent saw the reopened ticket, checked the Linear updates, saw the feature had shipped, and sent the customer a note itself. He only found out when he logged into his help desk later.
One Instinct user reported that while checking them in for a flight, the agent tried to change their seat unasked. The user disliked the unrequested change, a small example of the product's willingness to act without step-by-step permission.
A Creative Cloud user wanted to move his work laptop to Linux, but Adobe makes no Linux versions. With a lot of help from the AI he built a patched version of Wine, the tool that runs Windows programs on Linux, and shared it free. On his laptop, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Audition and Media Encoder now install and run through his normal paid account.
Konik gave the AI a list of low-urgency wants she didn't want to overpay for. Over time it built a table of what normal prices in her area look like and flagged good deals, netting her a $25 armchair and ottoman that fit her reading nook.
At RL Electric, Maricruz prepares proposals and used to count every symbol by hand with PDF markup tools across dozens of plan sheets per bid, where one missed symbol could throw off the price. Quotr.ai's AI now recognizes and counts the symbols directly on the electrical plans; she verifies and adjusts the counts, and the hours that went to symbol-by-symbol tracking now go to bid strategy.
A researcher had a language model transcribe a digitised volume of Sophie Germain's incoming correspondence at the national library, and published the transcription. Working from it, he spotted a mathematical note written on an 1814 letter cover and is asking who wrote it.
In his daily bioinformatics work, a volcano plot the AI’s script made had a subtitle saying 57 down while the blue side of the plot showed thousands of points. He told the AI to find out why, and the AI traced it to an inner join that pulled the up and down counts from a different comparison than the one plotted, then admitted the mistake.
The MBI Deep Dives author writes that the AI tracks a set of data points he cares about and reports daily, including GPU prices, the App Store ratings race between the AI, the AI and the AI, and insider buy/sell transactions in stocks he owns. He describes using roughly 200 million tokens a week on a $20/month plan.
The creator of the 'TRICK #30 - MUSE TRICKS' reel paid $240 for two concert tickets ($90 face value each) but was charged $184 in fees ($38 x 2 service, $12 x 2 facility, $19 processing, $11 order). Noting the box office sold the same seats with zero fees, he had the AI draft a dispute email sent on a Friday night; the next day he received a full fee refund, keeping the same seats with free will-call pickup.
He is treasurer for a nonprofit food co-op. He gave the AI the co-op's financial statements, some notes on what he wanted to explain, and the logos, and 20 minutes later he had a ten slide deck and separate printouts for the annual meeting.
Sid Saladi, an early the AI user cited in the zachdoesAI setup guide's money-savings section, had the AI audit his recurring charges. It found a forgotten $9.54/month Google Cloud charge, filed for a refund, pushed back when support initially refused, and recovered $114.14 within five hours.
His order was doubled, and the company support bot closed his ticket. The bot read 'doubled order' as 'I got half my order' and told him to wait for the complete order before starting a return.
Self-described non-cook (just learned what a skillet is) named her agent 'MOTY' (Mother of the Year). It surfaced a sheet-pan dinner recipe from her saved Instagram posts, built a grocery list from ingredients she already had, placed the grocery order pending her approval, and later gave her cooking-timing reminders while she cooked.
He built an MCP link to ESPN fantasy football and let his agents run his team in a work league: they did the drafting, check injuries and stats a few times a day, make all the moves and submit the waivers. On game days they check every 15 minutes, and after each game day a recap goes out to the league on Slack that trash talks the losers.
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.