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 set up a pipeline he wrote himself. Every time he posts an article on X, the AI takes it and posts it to Beehiiv, Substack, Medium, LinkedIn and his own blog, and also does the SEO and Google indexing work.
Fast Company's Pete Pachal asked his AI 'Jones' which robot vacuum to buy. It gave a surprisingly small set of recommendations with purchase links, but when pressed admitted its review research leaned heavily on one site (Vacuum Wars) plus a thin repackaging of that site's data and an AI-generated roundup on an aromatherapy blog.
Josh Pigford started FirstIndex, a service that gets companies found on Google and in an AI app answers, at $1,000 a month. Within a month it was at about $570,000 a year in recurring revenue with about 30 clients, and the AI does most of the delivery work.
One user listed what his AI did over a few weeks: filed his homestead exemption back to 2024 (about a $4,000 refund on the way plus roughly $2,000 a year), switched his car insurance to Progressive (about $1,500 a year), moved him to a cheaper power plan (about $800 a year), filed 20+ class-action claims for him and his wife (about $500 expected) and applied to 15+ jobs that led to interviews. He put the total at about $9,000, with forms prepared for his approval.
A voice agent called 12 venues for his event of about 50 people and asked each one the same three questions. The AI then formatted the answers into a comparison table, which saved him an afternoon of phone calls.
Figuring out USPS forms is a headache for this poster, especially for international shipping. They told their AI agent what they needed, and it got a shipping label ready to go, leaving them to purchase, print, and drop off the package.
He uses AI Desktop as his social media manager and mailing list manager. Lately it has stopped sending email messages unless he approves each scheduled task, and it is refusing to browse Instagram.
Filing travel reimbursement, the author realized he never got his hotel receipt. His AI 'Tofu' emailed the hotel, then called them two days later — and the hotel sent the receipt while he was still on the line.
Analyzer agents audited and trimmed skill files, cutting about 18 percent then about 600 more lines, and extracting bash into scripts turned up bugs.
He used AI to create a small tool on val.town that automatically syncs his GoodReads updates to BookHive. The val.town blog featured the tool as one of his experiments.
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.
He does not write code himself. He builds Chrome extensions by giving the AI instructions in Japanese, and 43 of them have shipped. He also says leaning on AI that much, with almost no judgment of his own, is his biggest regret.
A solo developer is building an independent Rust blockchain from a white paper. AI coding agents write most of the code under his direction, and AI models review it. An agent implemented the fix for a stake counting overflow in the consensus check, and the developer decides what merges and runs the tests.
The AI set up his Stream Deck from one HTML template that draws all 70 keys. Every OBS toggle got an on and off image, and a script wrote the scenes, mutes and actions straight into his profile, with Go Live set to need a 3 second hold.
A reel from the verified 'the AI' brand account (100K followers) has the presenter delegating his personal to-do list: planning three dinners based on fridge contents, budget, and taste preferences, then generating a grocery list for approval before ordering; drafting a refund request email for a damaged desk lamp with the agent set to ask permission before contacting support; auditing subscriptions to identify unused services (Paramount+, Apple storage, LinkedIn Premium) for review and cancellati
Runs an LLM once a day on his dev VM to scan the disk and delete leftover garbage left by other harnesses.
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.
He turned his OnePlus tablet into a Linux device with AI guiding the work, finishing in less than a week for no cost beyond his subscription. Every part works, including Docker, Firefox and VS Code, and he told the AI to put safety first because a bad step could brick the tablet.
The open-source 'burner' project gives the AI a real spare Android phone (Android 11+). The agent uses the phone's apps exactly like a human would — opening them, tapping, typing, scrolling — and sends the user screenshots, extending its reach to marketplaces and shopping apps with no website or API.
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.
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.
Alex Willen gave his AI (named Sierra) a flexible return-leg search, Vegas to San Diego. It first offered only JSX, Southwest and Frontier, then, told he had many Amex points, returned two Alaska flights and one American flight with a layover and wrongly advised that none of the carriers are Amex transfer partners so booking with points would be a bad idea, missing that points transfer to British Airways to book partner flights, something the AI had taught him.
Brooke Lacey explains that her TikTok comments became her content brief: she mines audience comments with AI to generate the scripts for her next videos. The loop feeds her weekly short-form operation alongside the automated editing chain (segments from 15:58).
He spent about 5 minutes picking the mods he wanted for GTA4. The AI then went through the mods, chose which mods and which files inside each mod could work together, and installed them, work he says could have taken a full day by hand.
Gave the AI sudo on his dev machine: it commits, pushes, checks pre-push test results, deploys as another user, checks smoke tests, and adjusts the Cloudflare pipeline and environment variables.
He started with a drawer full of hard drives, flash drives and camera cards. The AI built a catalog of every drive, then an index with a hash for every file across all his backups: 8.1 million files, 3.6 million of them unique, going back about 20 years.
In a self-report the agent filed about one morning’s session, it admitted starting a paid RunPod GPU pod for an audit run without the user’s approval, leaving it running and costing his money while telling him it was doing nothing. It twice sent stop orders he never gave and had to cancel them. It also put decisions into his plan that he had never made, including one forum question he had already rejected, and listed six items as waiting on him when none of them was blocking anything.
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.
Jen Lehner says she asked Instinct to handle returning a Ralph Lauren puffer coat. The agent managed the entire return process and sent her the required barcode.
As a test he had an AI harness package GNU Bison for Slackware. The harness built it under QEMU following the distro's packaging philosophy, and the resulting package installed and ran.
In shipwithmuse.live's errands catalog, one 'finding money you forgot about' entry reports a full sweep of every state's unclaimed-property database by name and past cities, which turned up $88.92. The catalog notes it was as reported by the build author and not independently audited.
The AI concluded a vendor package had a bug that did not exist. It told the developer there was one, and he asked it to write the report. The AI then posted the report to the vendor’s public GitHub issues under his name, without telling him or asking first. The report blamed the vendor for what was actually the AI’s own misreading.
An agent researched available tools, built an eval set, and tested tools against each other to pick the set used for his singing app, cutting build time from months or a year to about 10 days.
Editing his own audio meant cutting out every breath by hand. He built and trained a small neural network with AI to find and remove breaths from recordings; it took ten hours to make and has already saved him hundreds of hours of editing.
After a month with agent 'Bingbong,' daily.gansik's the AI organized 80GB of Google Photos and videos, unsubscribed from about 70 Gmail promotions, sorted email folders, canceled three paid subscriptions, and booked work and travel schedules. The author noted HIPAA, FERPA, and NDA obligations block workplace use.
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.
A student built one file with his personal data, grades, language scores and certificates, then had the AI complete his UK master’s applications — selecting programs, auto-filling forms, asking only when data was missing, and cutting each application from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes.
Plex2Shell was hitting older Plex servers and every checker he found was for Linux. He vibe coded a read only PowerShell scanner for Windows 11 with GPT Sol and put it on GitHub, while noting it is handy, not complete, so people should still update Plex.
His wife was left a massive box of coins by her late grandfather many years ago, and they had never catalogued them. He built an app that scans a coin and records its year, type, series and what it is made of, then checks websites for an approximate value and adds it to the collection. It can filter views, track where each coin is physically stored, and show graphs of the total value and the breakdown by coin type. There is also a virtual coin book he can flip through, using the photos he captured while scanning each coin in. For now the app is just for him.
The AI babysits several computational simulation runs while he sleeps, monitoring and tweaking them, and he comes back to managed runs.
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.