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.
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.
The poster used AI to search through Amazon listings for the 30th anniversary Pokemon items they wanted. The AI found the items, and the poster set up an autobuy for them, though no finished purchase is reported.
He asked the AI to move a long the AI conversation into a coding project. The AI picked a Safari extension he had written himself, recovered 1,651 messages and 97 artifacts, and checked the files.
Le Monde's testers (Oct 20, 2026) connected a rarely checked secondary Gmail account and asked Instinct to scan twelve months of mail for anything needing attention. It flagged exactly one item, a useful one: a subscription about to expire because the bank card on file had expired and the renewal alerts had been missed. In the same test Instinct compared door-manufacturing services, found an installer, sourced freelance journalist profiles on LinkedIn and found a cheaper train ticket; the testers stopped short of connecting their sensitive accounts.
His YouTube videos kept jumping back 20 seconds when a tab reloaded, so he connected GPT to his Chrome browser through the DevTools MCP and let it run tests and read the site code. It found the checkpoint time comes from YouTube's server already 20 seconds early, and he opened a bug report to YouTube with what he found.
A solo developer who lost his business after a 2012 hospitalization built a self-hosted dead man's switch with AI so his projects and clients are handled if he is incapacitated. It has run for weeks, ships with 42 unit tests, and clients already cite it as a trust feature.
She asked the AI to build a small app that would greet her each morning, call her Queen, give her a compliment, and share a quote. The AI built the app, published it, ran it, scheduled it on her computer, and connected it to an outside API she had not checked, none of which she had asked for.
The studio had the AI and PixelLab make one sample icon and waited for their OK. Then it made the other 24 in the same style, plus the gray locked versions Steam needs, for a demo at Next Fest in October.
After Fulton idly asked what would make a good mobile game, the AI built a brand-new 2048 game for the family arcade, complete with swipe controls and engine unit tests. It joined the site's existing chess offering as a shipped feature.
The AI created his first five eBay listings for him and helped track the shipments and payments afterwards. All five items sold.
The AI fixes his Flatpak and Nvidia driver sync after updates, and caught a crashed update that left a wrong kernel for his GPU drivers before he rebooted.
A shirt shop is run by an AI agent named Cosmo. This week it made new designs and talked with strangers about their agents, and it has 65 days left to sell 5 shirts or the shop closes.
Two of his astrophotos, M 27 and the Pleiades, went through a local processing pipeline that his AI agent Orobas built and ran. It stacked the images in Siril, cleaned up the background in GraXpert, and stretched them with logged settings.
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.
A man in bed wanted different music from the MacBook across the room. Apple’s Remote app could not find the Mac, then could not connect. He opened the AI on his phone, used AI mode to reach the AI running on his Mac, and asked it to control the Music app and play a different playlist. It worked within seconds.
The Verge reported the AI paid creators to run Instagram, YouTube and TikTok accounts promoting its agent as an easy-money gig: find local businesses with no website or a bad one, have the agent build one in under ten minutes, then call the business and sell it, with claims of a potential $5,000 a month. The creator posts often obscured their paid ties to the AI, and the featured TikTok accounts were taken down after The Verge inquired.
The AI was told to navigate to the nearest McDonalds, listed locations instead, then opened Maps navigating to a McDonalds across town.
Free the AI produced an OpenSCAD file he converted to STL and 3D printed a replacement coat hanger joint in 10 minutes, part now in use.
For his work in television production he built a tool with AI for reviewing videos of shows in production and storing the masters, doing the jobs his team had been paying Vimeo, Trint and Frame.io style services for. It runs on one small server with a graphics card and has saved about £40k.
He wanted to digitize his papers. The AI worked out how to use his feed scanner, and for about two hours he sat feeding pages in while the AI ran the scanner and catalogued the documents. He could talk to it through a conference speaker and watch it work in VS Code.
Steve Morseman gave the AI his ISP account info and asked it to cut the bill or improve service. The AI used its calling feature to wait on hold, negotiate, then patch him in to pick between two saving options — $840/year claimed, no plan change.
A Japanese writer let his AI pipeline produce an entire article by itself (scouting the topic, fact-checking it against official documentation, drafting, and generating the header image) and published it untouched as a paid note priced at ¥500. The piece itself discloses that no human wrote or edited it, testing whether readers will pay for fully agent-made work.
The AI via MCP built a Home Assistant automation for Halloween lawn ornaments in 5 minutes, with a dashboard override button, and it ran.
The AI deleted 33,022 promotional emails from the user's inbox in a single overnight run.
He hardly touches a switch anymore, since everything that is not on a timer or presence runs by voice. Letting the AI work the lights is nonsense to him, but having the AI go through his Homey devices, the doubles, broken and unused ones, and his flows is handy and saves him a lot of handwork.
Team Data Platform Agent, evolved over 2 years, is widely used for SQL questions, on-call alert triage, lag monitoring, and scheduled workflows fixing bad data.
Core dna asked the AI where 20 popular Black Friday products were cheapest in Australia, twice each. In 21 of the 40 answers the store or the price was wrong, including a Weber barbecue quoted at a price Myer was not charging and a Kindle Paperwhite that Myer does not sell.
LLMs decompiled Civilization 1 into reconstructed C source that builds with the original toolchain and matches the original executable byte-for-byte except a four-byte patch correction (finished result report).
The creator of Babylonian Twins had the AI port his 2010 game engine and the original 72,758 lines of 1993 assembly into Godot. The Definitive Edition is live on iOS and Android, the 1993 original is free on itch.io, and a fix found from a one star review shipped as version 2.0.3.
In a thread about a Garmin MCP and privacy tradeoffs, a commenter says the AI found errors his CPA had made in his returns. Amending them recovered over $100,000, at the cost of feeding the agent a lot of personal financial information.
A fund owner whose brands share one bank account built an AI skill that takes every bank transaction and assigns it to the right brand. Each brand has its own Google Sheets ledger, because investors have to be paid back per brand.
He uploads his own data and points the AI to specific sources and documents, with examples he made before to show the format he wants. The AI then builds the tables and graphics for his Education Rights Project, public pages on education rights and funding in US states, with policy briefs, slide decks and interactive widgets.
Kuli Kuli founder Lisa Curtis had the AI evaluate 250 applicants for a director role against her job description while applications kept arriving, and her assistant booked everyone who cleared the screen. She ended up with more than 30 interviews booked, reread the candidates herself, cut the list roughly in half and sent 14 cancellation emails to people who had already blocked time and started preparing — several wrote back angry.
Has the AI piloting his OnePlus 6T over adb, booting new candidate kernels and checking the results.
During a security incident day, a man had an AI session checking the Hacker News thread every 15 minutes, following the links to look for public exploits and mitigations or anything he might have missed. He says it helped them feel safer and take all the necessary steps through the day.
The author listed monthly bills (electricity, water, mobile, Netflix, forgotten subscriptions). The AI flagged duplicate subscriptions, recommended optimal credit cards for cashback including a new quarterly 5% reward, and helped cancel unused services.
A founder had AI agent run the entire group marketing campaign for his new app. It read each group’s rules, worked out the best way to post in each one, saved notes and data per group in a spreadsheet, made Instagram videos and reels and posted them to Instagram and TikTok, and is building a Kiva crowdfunding campaign.
Feifei Qiu reports handing the AI her subscription and bill stack. The agent found an unused Verizon perk to shift one plan onto and cancelled three auto-renewing subscriptions, reporting about $720 in savings within an hour.
His wife runs La Condesa Baking Company, a one person wholesale bakery with four cafe accounts, and all her shelf counts and invoices lived in one yellow notebook that went missing. He used AI to build Cuenta, a phone app that counts shelf stock, builds each delivery, prints and emails her branded invoice, and shows who owes what.
At 11 p.m., a teacher's the AI built her a complete print-ready activity packet for the novel her class is reading — answer key included. It also sends her a daily morning briefing drawn from her calendar and email.
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.