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 told the AI his AT&T bill was high. The AI scanned his Gmail for the account details, checked competitor plans and prices in his area, then negotiated with customer service in the browser, escalating to second level support, and won a permanent $25 a month reduction. His part was one prompt and confirming the final offer.
Kicker completed most of an arcane insurance-broker document about Newton's new office by finding the lease, researching city websites and checking budget documents. It answered all but two of the broker's questions and asked follow-ups where it was unsure.
His 2019 LG TV has a great screen, but the official Plex app took about 30 seconds just to show the profile picker, because it is really a web page. There is no public native toolkit for the TV, so he rooted a spare set, read the TVs own software with analysis tools and the AI, and built a native Plex client of his own. On the same TV it shows the profile picker in about 3 seconds.
Micro.blog founder Manton Reece notes that soon after he configured and named his Dot, it suggested work on its own: using its GitHub connection and memory of his projects, it investigated a Search Page plug-in's Hugo compatibility issue, tested a fix across multiple Hugo versions and prepared a pull request.
He connected the AI to NetBox so the agent does his home lab documentation. The AI scans his network from a tools server, enters hosts, VLANs, virtual machines and Proxmox cluster details into NetBox, logs pending updates in journal entries before and after they are applied, and now runs an incremental scan every day at 02:00 UTC so the inventory does not go stale.
His team has coding agents write and update a wiki of decisions, open questions and status as they work, which he reads to set direction for the next agent sessions on real projects.
The AI debugged a longstanding game engine text rendering bug in 10 minutes with a 3-line fix and tests, but the PR sat 6 months, closed unmerged, and the bug is still there.
He builds the visual overlays used in car inspections in Blender. The AI creates and maintains the Blender files with him, renders them, and pushes the output to the iOS and Android repos.
He set up an AI routine that reads all his school email and archives anything that is not about his kids. Each day it sends him a short bullet list of the important ones and adds calendar events when needed.
Built a huge toolbox of tools with AI for converting and previewing G-code for his pen plotter, which he uses for plotter images.
Pelcro moved its site off Wix and now runs every change through AI: a custom migration skill rebuilt the old pages, and each new change goes branch, pull request, automated checks, human review, sandbox, then live. Nothing ships unless lint, type, build and content checks all pass.
Her WordPress site dates from 2008 and had 557 open accessibility findings. The AI grouped them into 16 root causes and fixed each one at its source, though it went wrong whenever it guessed instead of measuring.
Let Fable work overnight on llama.cpp, producing 19 patches and up to 10x speedup for multi-user long-context use, then ran that code for 3 weeks with no crash and built a 5-agent system on it.
He let the AI do his Christmas shopping and it completed a purchase for his wife. He says he is excited to see what he bought her for Christmas, because the agent picked it.
He and a colleague used AI to transcribe over 28,000 documents for the Papers of the War Department project. They wrote up how they did it on the RRCHNM blog.
A 14 person dental practice on Daniel Island had $612,000 of diagnosed treatment that patients had never booked, and the staff's own AIs (six the AI, four the AI, two the AI) now read each day's patient notes every evening, offer open slots to the longest waiting patients and book on a yes. Of the $612,000, $188,000 of work is done and $241,000 more is booked, and same month bookings rose from 38 percent to 71 percent.
An engineer had just had the AI reapply local, uncommitted code changes. Separately, a GitHub Actions run he had triggered against production was mid-flight, in the middle of creating a replication subscription on a live Postgres server. He said undo the work it just started, meaning the local edits. The AI read it as the production run and cancelled it mid-statement, leaving whatever partial state the kill created. The local edits were not touched until he clarified.
A man learning language design spent 3 to 4 weeks with AI doing a full mechanization in Lean of the paper From Linearity to Borrowing. The work covers nearly every definition and lemma in the paper, including the Fundamental Property and Adequacy results.
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.
The AI and the AI manage his whole home network from a git repo, keep daily journals and a central TODO, refresh stale docs and plans, and deployed projects he had wanted for years.
They found 24 Android vulnerabilities using their open source AI security agent.
In a governance essay, Jesse Hudson describes rebuilding his handwritten book manuscript with an AI that reads the pages and takes voice dictation; the piece never names the assistant. When his microphone garbled a character's name, the AI accepted the bad input over his two explicit corrections and the error entered the manuscript pipeline.
The AI helps him put GA4 and Microsoft Clarity tags live, with reviews and confirmations built in so he can check the event triggers fire. Cross checking the two tools showed bots being lumped into direct traffic.
A screen-capture reel from someone (Irene, 'Smart American Life', 59 followers) shows a Chinese-language message documenting an AI negotiation with a retention rep named Kia: $1,440 total savings via a $20/month discount for 24 months, a $10/month autopay discount, 3 months of free internet, and a new rate of $45/month down from $75/month plus tax. Presented as a US life-hack with itemized terms.
Keerthi Jeethuri, a Seattle-based designer and TEDx speaker (19.6K followers; wallpaper, wedding invites, branding), posted a reel captioned 'What do you mean I have an assistant who does EVERYTHING!!!! someone someone.' The reel shows the AI running her business back office: writing LinkedIn job posts, screening applicants, building Google Sheets shortlists, and handling TicketTailor ticket sales for her 'Desi DaVinci' workshop.
A United flyer in a status match challenge had the AI set up an agent that checks his Gmail for upcoming flights and adds the bookings he expects to take. It builds a chart of his progress in the style of United's own graphic and updates the chart on its own.
He wrote down what he is looking for in a criteria file and an AI on his VPS does the searching 3 to 5 times a week. It checks job board APIs and feeds, throws out anything it showed him in the last 90 days, and drops a report with notes on each posting into his Obsidian vault, where he reads it on his phone.
He lost most of his vision this year to a rare genetic condition. With the AI’s help he built a tool that lets him play games again, designed so other people with sight loss can use it comfortably too; he plans to release it free with the source open once it is ready.
Ben Parr had the AI build a tracker for his 2025 tax documents and hunt down missing K-1s. The agent organized the paperwork and chased the missing forms.
X user someone asked the AI to review their finances and claw back cash. The AI found a monthly book subscription unused for over a year, canceled it, and recovered a year's worth of charges.
A Business Insider Japan writer set up six AI bots besides his main one and has run them for about a week. One checks his to-do list and pushes him to reschedule, one picks out mail that needs a reply and drafts it, one pulls expense items from mail into a spreadsheet, and one looks up missed call numbers in his mail and contacts and sums up who called.
A pipe burst in his house two months ago. He now has the AI run his side of the claim. It reads the policy, files his living expense receipt scans, watches messages from the insurer, calls out delays, fights coverage decisions, and keeps logs of letters, estimates and invoices.
An AI user runs the agent on a headless home server with his DoorDash and email credentials stored in 1Password. The AI logs into DoorDash with a skill it built itself and chats with support reps, and the user says it now gets refunds issued with no issue where DoorDash had turned stingy with him.
Liang Gou wrote no code himself: he directed the AI to design and build a complete grading app for his wife, a high school math teacher grading 100+ papers a week at 3 to 5 hours per test. The rubric engine reconstructs a rubric from a single graded example, its eval bank comes from real AP Calculus AB free-response exams, two models cross-check grades, and the agent tested the app itself in a browser before deployment.
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.
She connected Granola to the AI. Now the action items from every call go straight to her Gmail tasks.
When he first got the AI Desktop, he asked it to search his OneDrive files for something. To his surprise, it started returning things from someone else's OneDrive environment.
Added SQLite and Postgres adapters to a formerly MongoDB-only CMS in one wild weekend, verified against a large existing test suite; a task out of the question for their team size before current models.
A man connected the AI to a Robinhood agent subaccount through its connector and gave it as much freedom as he could. It trades on its own and has made a small amount of money so far. He keeps the risk ring fenced in the subaccount rather than his main account.
A parent of three was copying school, cram school and nursery dates from paper prints, LINE and email into Google Calendar by hand, and nearly missed a field trip lunch. He built Hanamaru: the family posts a photo of a print in Slack, the AI pulls out the dates, and it registers them on the right child's calendar, asking in the thread first when it is not sure.
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.