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 company worker set up a simple chain for hotel reservations. Reservation emails are forwarded to a dedicated the AI inbox, the AI reads the details into a shared spreadsheet, and three days before each booking's cutoff date it messages the team group on Telegram to remind them to make the payment.
Smoke from his sauna stove leaked into his home studio. He asked his AI assistant to check the AirGradient sensor in Home Assistant, it told him to leave until the air improved, and it wrote a script that polls particulate levels and pings him on Telegram once it is safe.
Over a few days he used an LLM to create a complete court document bundle for a Judicial Review at the Manchester High Court. He filed the documents today and the court issued them within 5.5 hours, something he says he had no chance of doing on his own.
Tech journalist Lance Ulanoff connected his personal Gmail to his AI 'Charlie' and asked it to check for anything pressing he had missed. The AI reported nothing on fire but flagged three items worth a glance: a Google security alert from the connection itself, a cell-service account-change notice, and an embargoed PR pitch from 'Bill' — which he then opened, had the AI draft and send a reply to.
He finally connected the AI to his Home Assistant setup and spent the day changing all of his automations. The AI also made an overview of how many cups of coffee they brew, which he called totally useless but fun.
Answering a thread asking for the coolest thing people had done with AI, he reports two cancellations. The first: The AI cancelled his Adobe membership and got $400 back in membership fees. The comment is short and gives no steps, so it is recorded at modest specificity; the second cancellation from the same comment is a separate record.
Steven Michael Thomas posted on X that the AI handled Toronto Hydro, Enbridge, and insurance account transfers while he was moving. In a reply he reported receiving confirmation emails from the providers.
He made a tool for students that started as a simple quiz solver extension and grew slowly to just over $100 in monthly recurring revenue, with very little marketing. A month ago he reverse engineered Anki using AI, so anyone can bring their Anki deck and study it in his tool. He says that is the thing that worked.
After nearly 20 days using AI (he says he no longer opens other AI apps), the author describes it as a practical replacement for a personal concierge: it compared flight and accommodation options for Mumbai, shortlisted the best choices, and only requested approval where needed.
His business scans every invoice into a Google Drive folder. The AI reconciles them there: checking they were billed correctly, that credits for returned goods actually arrived, and that there is no slippage. He says it is far faster than reconciling by hand.
WSJ columnist Nicole Nguyen asked Dots to cancel a handful of subscriptions but specified that she wanted to press the unsubscribe button herself. Dots loaded the correct account pages, pinged her when each was ready, and finished the job after her click.
He used AI to move his hosting service. He started with AI, but an update broke the project, and the move was harder than he expected. With the AI's help he got through it, with a little left to finish.
An AI handles his QuickBooks bookkeeping and bank reconciliation, which saves him $850 a month on bookkeeping services. The same setup runs a first level helpdesk bot inside their support system.
The AI, proxying commands through him, diagnosed and fixed in about an hour a box that OOMed and needed rebooting every few weeks.
In February he told the AI what road he was taking and when he was setting off. The AI picked lunch places within a 20 minute detour that he would reach at lunchtime, 10 of them spread over 50 miles, with an import into Google Maps.
A Genworth alternatives analyst built a SharePoint-based credit surveillance agent in an AI app Studio. It reviews more than 1,000 documents across 250-plus fund investments and surfaces trends, risks and upside from completed deep reviews.
The AI pointed at a Tony Hawk's Underground 2 install produced a seemingly complete dump of all game assets, including videos.
A Parix.ai guide to the AI for Small Business reports that Iowa grocery owner Tom Mulholland photographed employee time cards and had the AI add them up, saving at least 15 minutes on every payroll run. (Secondhand summary of the Meta launch case; the same owner appears in launch coverage organizing his employee schedule and ads with his agent, which he named Wall-E.)
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.
Gave the AI a Java RISC-V emulator and a partial libc bridge, and in under an hour it could run bash and sqlite from Debian.
The AI sold the user's car end to end: listing it, handling buyers, collecting CarMax and Carvana quotes, and preparing the licensing paperwork.
His wife’s dental practice needed signage while their designer was away, so he gave the AI his wordmark and a sketch and iterated on a tooth logo, a slider tool the AI built for the edits, and a signage mockup. Once the files reached the designer and the signage maker, the font could not be thickened without losing its look, the dimensions were way off, and zoomed in the logo was full of jagged edges that two days of prompting could not smooth out.
WildFocus is a free iOS pomodoro timer that invites people to stop scrolling and sit still, and someone joins you. The studio says it was built with AI, and it is live on the App Store.
Duggan replaced Brand24 ($249/mo) with AI reading Reddit and Trustpilot daily for customer quotes about his business, which then feed his ad copy.
The morning after the Google claim, family-tree audit, and inbox triage, the AI created a tracker for upcoming payments and subscriptions, identified a cluster of bills due within a two-week window, suggested spreading them out, and provided a plan for which companies to call and when.
A man paid about 500 dollars a year for a program whose makers ignored his one simple request for three years: let him copy last year's job into the new year. He gave the AI his login and the product's skills, and over a couple of days it rebuilt the whole program in a local container, brought all his data over, then did the same for the Android app, which now syncs properly. The rebuild cost about a tenth of one year's subscription.
Uses Opus 5.5 to decompile Windows 95-98 games in about a week each, getting byte-to-byte exact output with clear names and no Ghidra smell.
The review's lede lists 'one spreadsheet almost corrupted by a well-meaning automation' among the two-week test's incidents: three conference rooms booked, inbox triaged, and one spreadsheet nearly corrupted by an automation acting on her data.
In 'Ways to Use the AI Episode 2', a creator demonstrates his grocery system: he keeps a list in Google Keep, then asks the AI to access his Walmart account, find his most recent milk purchase from his purchase history, and add it to the cart. He reports the AI completed the task, identifying three items in the cart including one he did not recognise.
Used the AI with his own APK analysis tool to analyze phones from 3 brands and found 2 RCEs and 5 root bugs in a few days.
A second maker in the same thread built his own motion sensing skull from a Meshy.ai model. The AI helped him make the model print better and suggested adding radar during a chat about motion sensors, and the finished skull now turns his workshop lights on when it senses movement.
Opus 5 pointed at his own app created a similar exploit to a known file-upload attack in 3 minutes, showing the app was vulnerable.
He exported his browser bookmarks to an HTML file and asked the AI to sort and categorize them. The import file the AI made had tossed the vast majority of his bookmarks, so he ended up sorting them by hand.
He built Stackboard, a free Chrome new tab page that shows your own bookmarks as a board. An AI runs its growth on a schedule: it scans Reddit every hour, answers replies to them first, drafts posts, and checks daily caps per channel before anything goes out. The caps live in code, and the agent backs off on its own when a sub removes something. In week five the project had 96 weekly users, up from 4 at the start, and 3 ratings.
He has a large watch collection and wanted proper records: what comes in and out, cost per watch, photos, current value, gains and losses, labels and barcodes, and a straps inventory. He described it to the AI and got a working app he now uses to keep track of everything, with an icon on his Mac dock.
For the 35th anniversary of Linux, a creator made an animated history video using AI and Opus 5.5. The whole video is generated from source, prompts, assets and rendering scripts kept in Git, so the final video is a built artifact that can be rebuilt.
His local Qwen agent computer with full PC access does file organizing, analyzed his local data and wrote several small tools to manage it automatically, coded a KDE widget for VRAM model swaps.
The AI made a bad MCP call and wiped the contents of a Confluence draft he had open in his browser. He lost two hours of work.
Vinay Bhaskarla's AT&T internet bill jumped from $65.56 to $90.77 when a $20 promo ended, so the AI signed into his account, read 16 months of bills, and spent about 45 minutes in live chat with an AT&T agent. It turned down an $80 offer tied to changing how he pays, pushed a rival $50 fiber offer, and got a one time $25 credit, so his next bill is $65.77.
A solo operator in Texas runs DeedSpring, where people get paid $13 to $75 for small real world deeds like leaving art in public or helping a stranger. His agent Vesper runs the desk: recruiting, acknowledgments, checking photo evidence against the posted rules, and payouts through escrow. Six deeds have been paid so far across five countries, and every receipt sits on a public ledger.
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.