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 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.
He generated a Lightroom style program with AI that develops his RAW photos in batches. It analyzes each image and explains in plain words which adjustments to make.
A WordPress developer built a complete plugin, Makitweb Copy ID, with AI working inside his project: two short prompts produced the plugin structure, the PHP row-action code and the clipboard JavaScript, including a fallback he never asked for. He reviewed the code, made no changes, activated it and verified it worked on Posts and Pages.
Bybatee's AI agent 'squishy' sent 25 outreach emails to brands in her niche — with her metrics, portfolio, and media kit attached — and set automated follow-ups after 3 days for non-responses.
Her team compiled 40,000 ratings of wilt symptoms on plants from 14 daily observations in a host range study. She uploaded the spreadsheet to the AI, and it flagged 3 data entry typos out of the 40,000.
A few days ago he had his AI take him off spam call lists. Since then the amount of spam calls he gets has dropped a lot.
Answering a what are you using it for thread, he lists what the AI does for him and puts this first: it just negotiated his AT&T bill down $50 a month. The same comment lists a weekly fantasy football newsletter, a running coach role and constant email organizing, which are separate uses and are not part of this record.
He runs AI on his own server with Ollama, so it stays private. It keeps his to-dos in a simple text file, sends him reminders about upcoming due dates, and takes new tasks through Telegram chat or voice.
A contractor onboarded Instinct through a WhatsApp chat that simply asked what he had been putting off; it now prepares his contracting invoices and drafts his outgoing emails - the two admin jobs that used to pile up behind the actual work.
After years of spreadsheets and a vibe-coded app, a parent built an AI system (reported on X, via WhatAgentsCanDo, Oct 7) that maintains the family recipe library in Markdown, prints a weekly plan of about 15 meals, and produces a section-grouped shopping list. The list is pasted into AI to fill Instacart, with checkout still human; the bot template is shared for reuse.
Circa built and hosts its company website on the AI, uses it to improve search visibility, prepare grant applications (which covered five internships), and produce roughly 50 social posts a week versus about five through a conventional workflow. By September the startup reported nearly $100,000 in cumulative revenue.
The AI decompiled his old VB3 game and recompiled it as a Linux AppImage. The result is close to a 1:1 copy of the original, but bugs make it unplayable for now.
The AI added programmatic PowerPoint screenshot support to his markdown-pptx tool in under 5 minutes.
She gave her agent a rack mounted phone to control over ADB and its own Bitwarden account for passwords. The agent uses the Unifi control panel and the phone apps to move her IoT devices between VLANs, working from screenshots and the buttons on screen, so she does not have to fumble through every vendor app herself.
A 59-year-old Japanese logistics worker who has never coded has the AI run 38 routines, including daily posts for three regional 'free places this week' Threads accounts; the agent published 95 posts in Oct 9-15 and one AI-written intro post passed 51,000 views. He reviews output five minutes morning and evening from his 4.5-hour commute.
His agent correlates spending with invoices through an intermediary program, double-checks them and flags spending out of line with the family's usual behaviour.
The AI Fable and Astra in a develop and QA loop declared a well-designed codebase perfect, but on running it wrote large amounts of data to CSV files instead of the database.
Wesfarmers retail brands Kmart Australia and Officeworks deployed the AI Enterprise shopping agents. They report higher conversions and basket sizes, with growth up to three times.
Today he turned Thomas, his AI agent, into an actual employee. Thomas drafts and publishes posts to X and LinkedIn with his approval, makes product demo videos in a clone of his own voice, reads his Stripe revenue, handles customer messages coming in, and files an end of day standup.
He is not a programmer, but he used AI to trace a bug through localization files, tech scripts and the game's internal category system. The AI hotfixed a deprecated modifier key in his Clausewitz engine mod, and he shipped a working patch in 30 minutes.
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.
Answering a top three use cases thread, he says the AI built him a price monitor for old TVs, tracking prices from now until Black Friday, watching for a deal. No drop had landed yet when he posted, so the outcome is partial: the watch is built and running, the deal is still ahead of him. It is a holiday ground case, an early, patient version of Black Friday deal hunting.
Commerzbank uses AI Enterprise agents to automate document quality assurance. Google says manual document reviews that took 20 hours now take one, and the bank is expanding to multi-agent QA.
Amy, 58, who never wrote code, built Wally on the AI for her brother after laryngectomy left him voiceless: one tap speaks urgent phrases like 'I am having trouble breathing,' plus daily needs and family phrases; it also pulls live golf scores, hosts family messages and a medical ID page. He used it daily until his death in August 2026.
A two-slide promotional carousel from someone on Instagram lays out an AI automation workflow: scrape a dealership website's car inventory grid, sync the data to Google Sheets, auto-create Facebook Marketplace car listings (example: a 2019 Honda Civic), and run daily checks to renew listings and update sold status.
After three months with Home Assistant OpenCode and the free Big Pickle agent, a homeowner says he has written no YAML at all. He asks in plain words and it builds his dashboards and automations, like a goodnight routine that turns off downstairs lights, locks the front door and sets the thermostat, and it found the old guest mode condition that was blocking one automation.
The AI, asked to create a public messaging web app, created an unauthenticated filedrop and an unauthenticated web chat interface to the AI that let anyone send it files and tell it to execute them.
A directory-listed the AI called Haus Hunter runs its owner’s ongoing home search with real OR and IF/THEN rules, checks listing photos for unwritten details, and weighs commute and local context for each candidate. It investigates homes the way a good buyer’s agent would, continuously.
A German business consultant stopped keeping her time spreadsheet by hand in October 2026: since the AI does much of the work with her, it also keeps the log, writing into her running 'current state' document after every work block what was finished, where it lives and what she decided, tagged with one of four categories (revenue, acquisition, building, admin), a duration, and who actually worked, her or the AI. On Sundays she types one word, 'Wochenbilanz', and gets hours per category plus the loops nobody notices (items resurfacing a second or third time); the monthly version confronts her with last month's goal quoted verbatim, which at her first review she no longer remembered word for word.
The AI fixed a long-running Tailscale problem by lowering the MTU.
Orchestrator agent rewrites prompts and delegates market research to Jules, producing pull requests in another repo for review.
She is blind and traveling with her mom, so her AI called a taxi company to ask about an airport pickup. The agent pushed past the phone menu to a live operator, got a fare estimate of about $18 from the airport to her downtown hotel, and kept asking the questions that mattered to her: is that a flat rate, are there airport fees on top, can a driver announce himself at the stand, is there an attendant who can help her find a cab, do they track arriving flights. The answers were no across the board: the company cannot take airport pickup bookings at all, taxis wait at a stand with no attendant and no flight tracking, and the $18 is only an estimate. She shared the full transcript.
Antigravity and the AI built the Crunchyroll and Netflix multi-subtitle Chrome extensions he and his wife actually watch with (his wife's travel blog in the same comment left out as too thin).
Lulu (mom, holding her young child on camera) set up an AI avatar named 'CB' in an AI app: she shared her weight (237 lbs) and goal (180 lbs), answered questions about frequency (4-5 days/week) and location (home/mix), and got a personalized Mon-Fri strength and cardio plan. She logs 'Workout complete' and gets confirmations back.
He is a general contractor. Linked to his QuickBooks with his local area set, he walks into a house, opens voice chat on his phone and reads out the room measurements. The AI writes the estimate from local prices for the work he names, drywall, mudding, texture, painting, baseboards, flooring, formats it for QuickBooks, and after his quick look over, sends the estimate or invoice through QuickBooks. The whole thing takes about 45 seconds, from the job site.
He has the AI run the upkeep on his main machine and his virtual servers: patches, cleanup, backups, and firewall checks. He reviewed about nine hours of its work sessions and says it may be the best systems administrator he has ever had.
A business user asked the AI to duplicate a template; the request bounced between chats for an entire day, each claiming the project belonged elsewhere or that it lacked access to make the change. Contradictory explanations piled up and no usable result was produced, so the business is migrating away.
A Tesla engineer got an email that passed SPF, DKIM and DMARC and showed a verified check, but felt off, so he had his AI review it without clicking anything; the bot found a hidden phishing link, explained why the standard checks had passed, and wrote a report to xAI with a proposed fix. He then had it add a standing routine that flags likely phishing in his inbox, which has since flagged more messages.
He fed the AI two copies of his resume, some parameters, and connections to more job sites than he has the energy to check. Every morning the AI checks them all and reports new postings, how well they fit his resume, and any gaps.
The AppleVis reviewer told the AI he knew he had unused Southwest credits and wanted to use them to book a flight to Nashville. The AI located the credits and autonomously booked the flight.
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.