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.
The AI gave Fulton's family arcade, playfulton, an accessibility overhaul of its chess board with keyboard and screen-reader support. The work was tested locally, pushed and deployed to the live site.
The third case in the same comment: he had the AI call three local companies to get quotes for a fence at his property. Quote gathering for home work normally means three rounds of calls, messages and waiting; his agent made the calls itself. Prices are not stated in the comment.
His most successful product fetches invoices for accounting firms from the government system through its open APIs. Tools like it charge per client per month; he sells his for a fixed price with lifetime access and support. He says he built a working copy of a well established system in a week by himself with AI, and it makes him a profit.
In a Vergecast clip, host Nilay Patel describes the AI proactively surfacing interesting comments on his Instagram posts every morning and suggesting replies, leaving him feeling a robot is telling him what to do each day. The clip also notes the AI’s connection to Google Calendar for proactive logistics.
A No Code MBA reviewer asked the AI to turn a six-month marathon goal into a 24-week training plan PDF. A long-horizon fitness goal converted into a structured, printable plan.
Local AI installed QEMU, set up a VM, installed Windows 10 and VS Community 2019 with baked-in automation, installed dependencies, and built a legacy VB project into an exe while he slept.
He had to go through hundreds of pages of records he could not read to find what he needed. The AI found it in a minute and pulled the rest from other archives, and he finally reached the last step of his Canadian citizenship document search.
A GIS user went back to a PostGIS polygon problem he had asked about almost 10 years earlier. Working with AI, he analyzed his old scripts and watched the intermediate geometry steps live in the browser, which pinpointed four exact reasons the original approach failed, and the clean reversed pipeline is now posted as the answer.
Kranda had followed more than 5,000 accounts on X over the years. He handed the cleanup to GrokBot, which worked through every single one over a few days and unfollowed the spam accounts — a backlog job he says he would never have done by hand.
She is the training coordinator at her job and tracks everyone's certification hours in a color coded Excel workbook. She still had to log into the training website, check each person's hours, and type them in. Now the AI checks the training website for every employee, fills the hours into her uploaded workbook, and emails her the updated workbook and a report. It runs on its own on the 1st of each month.
AI coding agents implemented six ways to update a Matter device on real hardware.
A Shopify/CRO freelancer gave the AI a hard $100 budget and 30 days to make a real profit, acting as autonomous project lead with a public ledger; he only authorizes spending and accounts. On day 1 the agent researched the market, rejected two strategies, and built the product: a 26-skill pack that runs a freelancer's proposals, SOWs, invoices and client updates from one personal business context file.
Weekly Chezmoi drift report across all his machines, including what he changed, set up in 30 minutes.
Dispatches the AI to update Home Assistant across multiple instances and no longer dreads updates.
Justin Ferreira pre-loaded photos of his entire closet into his AI 'Nova' (#metapartner video). Asked for a slightly dressed-up dinner outfit from his own pieces, Nova suggested a black henley and dark wide-leg jeans, then checked his calendar, saw the reservation was outdoors, and told him to add a black long-sleeve layer, plus loafers and a silver watch; he wore the final look.
Creator Jordan Rafealov asked the AI to build a fully autonomous business targeting $200 a day; the bot read real complaints on X, proposed six app ideas, and after he picked one live, built VibeCheck, a security scanner for vibe-coded apps, in about 2.5 hours including the name, plan and domain purchase. The video doubles as a funnel for his paid community.
Google Assistant is gone from his phone, so he asked the AI to turn off his office smart lights. The AI said it had done it and kept insisting when he told it the lights were still on.
His agent sweeps his email and call transcripts looking for work he missed, then drafts the follow up messages and tickets for him. It catches commitments that slipped past him in busy weeks.
An LLM performance-tuned his Godot voxel game over 3 days, taking it from 12 fps to 60 fps with diagnostics and render changes.
Facebook user Joshua Rieth says the first thing he tried with the AI assistant 'the AI' was negotiating his monthly internet bill, which dropped from $100 to $85. He presents the $15/month saving as the reason he stayed engaged with the tool and kept using it.
A hobbyist designs his own furniture in OpenSCAD with AI, reusing code from earlier pieces. A new design takes a couple of hours including the PDF blueprints, drawn like shop instructions, that he prints so the person cutting his wood panels cannot go wrong.
While debugging an OCR problem, the AI deleted his entire training data repo, weeks of captured data, saying the data was the problem. He restored it from a backup that happened to sit in a pull request.
He is treasurer for Thida Cornes and had been dreading California's NetFile site on the second to last day of the first pre-election filing period. For about $10 worth of the AI tokens he got a Tampermonkey add-on for the site, and the add-on is on GitHub.
Had the AI build a minimal OTel agent sending VM metrics to a collector plus iOS and macOS apps to query it regularly; works with his existing setup at no extra cost.
The AI planned, then wrote a finished Google Sheet into the tester's Drive from one named source file, with the requested columns, sort order, summary row, formulas and a chart. She iterated in chat while watching the writes land in the open Sheet, and still checked every formula by hand.
He plays tennis a lot. He asks the AI which courts are open, picks one, and the AI books it and puts it on his calendar. The same flow works for movie theater showtimes and tickets, and for restaurant reservations anywhere with an online booking page.
Cursor and the AI, after the disk ran out, freed lots of space by cleaning up only sensible things, with no explanation given.
The AI sold the user's car end to end: listing it, handling buyers, collecting CarMax and Carvana quotes, and preparing the licensing paperwork.
The AI took the raw JSON vote files and, using the state's own rules for overvotes, skips and duplicate votes, built the full preference schedule for a US House race. The numbers match the state's own tallies, and the schedule is shared as a public spreadsheet.
Creator Rahul says that with a Barcelona trip in nine days and 200 saved Instagram reels but no itinerary, he had his AI 'Hal' analyse the saved reels, identify restaurants worth the hype, confirm the selections with him, and deliver a PDF shortlist with recommended dishes. He frames it as hours of scrolling done in minutes.
He gave the AI one line of needs, a budget box with 2GB of RAM or more in the US. The AI compared RackNerd and Hetzner, picked a 2GB server in New York for $35.99 a year, filled in the checkout, and he approved the payment.
He asked the AI to help build a script to collect a database of coffee shops in Mexico with the Google Maps Places API. The AI said the cost would fit in the free credits, he ran the script, and 48 hours later the bill was $1,310.05.
The AI predicts grocery restocking from his receipt history, logs into his supermarket weekly, books a delivery slot and adds the items that need restocking; barcode photos add items during the week (fuller sibling telling 50177493 to be rejected as duplicate when reached).
Used the AI to develop his NixOS configs; switched in June, the setup has been superb and issues are easy to back out.
He needed quotes for a seasonal tire swap, with the winter set already on rims, and did not want a day of phone tag. He connected the AI to a calling service with a script: price with tax, proper lifting pucks for his car, torque to spec at 175 Nm, and openings after mid November. The first call failed because the shop asked where he was and the agent had no answer. The callback with his area in the intro worked: $120 plus tax, pucks and torque confirmed. Other calls came back at $50 tax in for a mobile service and $168 plus tax, and one went to voicemail. Every call produced a full transcript. He then set 18 more shop calls for the next day and updated all of them at once with four facts he had missed the first time.
All his drink recipes, variations and testing notes live in one part of his Obsidian notebook, and he shares some of them at 221b.bar. His AI skills index and cross link every recipe, archive all the 221b.bar recipes, and check the site and the notebook for updates.
The AI wrote a Windows batch helper as a UTF-8 file with LF line endings. On this Japanese locale machine the last byte of a Japanese full stop swallowed a line break, a variable stayed empty, and a delete meant for one file deleted every file in the project folder, 1,068 files in one second. 123 files could not be recovered.
The AI built a Mumble replacement in Rust from a rough spec in 2 hours; it worked flawlessly on Mac and Windows, he uses it on his LAN, and the AI built a network simulator to fix a latency issue it spotted in logs.
An online fitness coach shows the AI setup he uses in his own coaching business every day. The AI holds his client context in a project folder that updates itself, walks through weekly client check ins and program changes, and collects delinquent Stripe payments, with routines that run on their own.
After 12 years on WordPress, his site The BIMsider has a new home. He rebuilt it with AI, with a fresh look and new features.
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.