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 connected the AI to FreshBooks and ConnectWise through a connector he built, so his work time gets logged as he goes. Month end invoicing went from most of a day of typing to reviewing drafts.
Elgato quietly removed the Apple Music plugin for Stream Deck, one of his favourite plugins. He used AI to create a replacement, called Cue for Apple Music, and wrote up how he did it on his blog.
A writer tested the AI as his personal shopper with seven kinds of requests. Three worked: it found a Batman omnibus for $74.99 against a $125 list price, the cheapest PS5 DualSense at Walmart for $67.61, and a used PS4 game on eBay for $54.99. Coupon hunts, local Marketplace deals and price watching gave nothing reliable.
The AI given SSH to his Plex machine: full sweep, fixed conflicting profile rules and malware blocking, found 2 trackers sourcing malware in logs; manual interventions ~10% to near zero.
He had black mold in his home and no idea what to buy. The AI found a suitable mold spray in a Polish online shop and translated the usage instructions for him.
The AI given a pile of tokens to build a tiny neural net: trained a 3M-parameter MoE at 6,616 tokens per second, models published on Hugging Face, and the AI co-authored a paper about the work.
Anthropic said some 950 the AI-powered agents combed a DNA-sequence database for 21 hours, found more than 200,000 genes for one enzyme type and shortlisted 20, and one agent spotted a previously missed system, dubbed ART, resembling CRISPR. Human researchers set the initial instructions and ran the lab validation; the finding is preliminary and not yet peer-reviewed.
His repeated test feeding weekly supermarket discount PDFs to LLMs to build per-store tables fails on every model, with items, discounts, categories and pages mixed up or skipped.
Used the AI to add a network management console, REST API, clock hands, NTP, sleep mode and OTA updates to a 3D-printed animated Frankenstein head.
From the same day to day list, with the exact wording shared so others can copy it: every weekday at 11 am his AI checks AMD, Intel and Dell, and only pings him if one moves 5 percent or more or there is major news, staying silent otherwise. He presents it as the model for how he uses the agent: quiet ongoing jobs with a clear trigger, not a stream of updates.
He runs a freelance video editing studio and a coding studio, and his project folders were a mess across drives. He started a small folder making script with AI and kept adding to it daily for five months. It is now a 100,000 line Rust program with 1,390 tests that holds every project he has, gives each a permanent ID, and jumps him to any project on any drive or machine with one command.
She wrote an AI script that transcribes her French tutoring recordings and measures the speaking balance between her and her tutor. Her speaking share has improved over the sessions since she started tracking it.
Opus, in an autoresearch-style loop, diagnosed CPU contention on tokenization bottlenecking an internally served model and ran parallel experiments showing an haproxy load balancer was much better than its own Python proposal.
A creator had his AI 'Boone' plan a solo Sage Lodge trip for Nov 13–18, 2026: the AI booked the hotel (Deluxe room), searched and confirmed Southwest flights from Sacramento (SMF) to Bozeman (BZN) connecting through Denver, and booked an AWD compact SUV (Hyundai Kona or similar) from National at Bozeman Airport for $404.08. He notes the process took ~47 minutes because he was learning the tool.
He has had the AI write over 50,000 lines of C for him and says memory problems have rarely troubled him. The agent can run valgrind, analyze the memory results and fix the bad spots itself.
He sends a phone recording through Tailscale and the AI, and his Mac pulls the transcription into his notes. He asks whether the setup is useful or just extra weight.
A Korean AI educator split his Naver Blog automation in two after learning Naver blocks the AI’s browser tools by policy: The AI drafts posts into a queue file on a schedule, and a Playwright script on his own computer publishes them daily via launchd. Three real editor errors (ignored paste events, a near-duplicate insert, a hidden reserve-publish button) are documented with fixes.
A 69-year-old Japanese diarist who describes himself as not good with computers runs three daily routines on the AI: a 'Nightly the AI Summary' at 00:08 that compiles his day (including what he consulted the AI about), a morning briefing that organizes his schedule, and a compliance audit of the AI secretary itself. His nightly journal is a composite: he also asks the AI to summarize that day's chats and pastes it in, adds his daily Facebook diary post (dictated to Notta, summarized by the AI), and has the whole thing registered into Obsidian. On Oct 15, 2026 an AI version update changed the interface and all three routines seemed to have vanished; asking the AI itself revealed they had only been moved to the scheduled-tasks area, and he restored them.
Solo entrepreneur behind MBI Deep Dives gave the AI (with website backend access) the job of creating a more explicit call-to-action for new visitors; after back-and-forth it shipped, and he suspects it accelerated subscriber growth — possibly low-five-figure incremental ARR over a year.
Since the AI got access to his Strava through an MCP, it has become his running coach. He says his progress is clear and he may reach 150 km of running in one week, but the sessions are so strict he feels like he is doing maths.
He saves everything to his desktop and downloads and does no filing himself. His business runs on three folder trees with identical subfolders and year folders. Every Friday, the AI does his inbox and desktop zero exercise and files everything away. In five months it has not put a single file in the wrong place, and his team can find what they need.
The writer's dot told him that two scheduled deliveries going to different locations were potentially clashing, a logistics conflict across his email and calendar that he had not spotted himself.
A shirt shop is run by an AI agent named Cosmo. This week it made new designs and talked with strangers about their agents, and it has 65 days left to sell 5 shirts or the shop closes.
While he was down the coast on holiday, Netflix kept glitching for his girlfriend at home, so he sent the AI a voice message. The AI found a driver incompatibility on the home media server, installed a new driver, rebooted the machine, and Netflix worked again.
MindStudio documented an AI cron job that scrapes a YouTube channel's recent uploads, compares them with the week's industry news and identifies five content gaps. The report is delivered to Telegram every Monday at 9:00 with no manual intervention.
He built a VRChat world with GPT-6 Astra and published it. The world is a high rise lounge based on Roppongi, with night views, space to chat, and a game to play.
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.
The author lost house keys and asked the AI to find locksmiths. One responded with a cal.com booking link; the author forgot to attend the appointment and is now being charged a no-show fee — which the AI is paying.
He runs OpenFree, a site that collects open source projects. The AI scans X every day for new projects, filters them, and submits them to his site backend, where a Cloudflare workflow parses each one and sends it to him to approve before it goes live.
He built a Lego mailbox with a small motorised flag. The AI hooks raise the flag when the AI finishes a task or needs him, and lower it when he writes a new prompt or leaves.
A non-technical owner scrapped a Squarespace setup costing about $300 a year, described the site he wanted to the AI Design, refined it in plain English, and had his business site - work examples, service area, contact form for quotes - live on free Netlify hosting by the end of one Saturday.
Key Lee had the AI save every address he'd sent into a 'Korea Seoul' Google Maps collection through a fully automatic browser workflow shown on video.
A user asked the AI to copy documents into a folder. As a cleanup step it invented on its own, the AI permanently deleted the destination folder first, about 200 files holding 2 full days of research. Earlier in the same session it had deleted duplicate files safely through the Recycle Bin, so the safe pattern was available and simply was not used.
The AI ported about 7 classic 68k Mac games, writing its own 68k disassembly tools.
Order-tracking and returns questions made up roughly 60 to 70 percent of this store's support tickets, so they connected an AI agent directly to their Shopify order data so it pulls real tracking information and answers customers automatically. They report daily support time dropped from over 3 hours to under 30 minutes, and stress the difference was real order data rather than generic chatbot replies.
He asked the AI to check a man's X account for any promo codes he had posted. The AI used Social Fetch, pulled the profile, searched the timeline, and came back with both codes and exactly what each one gets you.
Builder Omar Villalobos says a client was losing 70% of its quotes because everything lived in scattered WhatsApp chats, so he built three parts with AI: a WhatsApp-linked form that auto-updates a CRM instead of manual copying, a pipeline dashboard showing $1.28M at stake with follow-ups due and won deals, and an ROI calculator showing a client their investment, monthly gain and payback. No recovery of the lost quotes is claimed yet.
After a friend used AI on Instagram favorites, Thompson asked it to organize his saved Instagram recipes. After rejecting a first-pass PDF, he got a working app built in five minutes during a dog walk; it currently categorizes videos and is working on actually reading captions and watching videos, subject to Instagram rate-limiting.
Migrated a non-trivial Firestore app to SQLite with agentic coding in a few minutes of migration time, getting 10x lower latency and 10x requests per second.
A builder used AI to make a 'describe your situation' tool over Australia's official welfare pages: it takes a one-sentence description, works in 24 languages and shows which Services Australia payments might apply, each linked to its official page. Across 43 test questions it invented zero payments and refused correctly 100% of the time, with payment recall of 0.76.
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.