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 needed a foreign language voiceover on a video presentation at work. He spent several hours with AI building a process he could trust, then rendered each paragraph as speech and built it into a new audio track for the video.
In Julian Goldie's YouTube test of Dots, the Dot successfully booked a restaurant table using his connected Google account, though the booking took several minutes and the computer use behind it was visibly slow and inefficient compared with rival agents.
Self-described non-cook (just learned what a skillet is) named her agent 'MOTY' (Mother of the Year). It surfaced a sheet-pan dinner recipe from her saved Instagram posts, built a grocery list from ingredients she already had, placed the grocery order pending her approval, and later gave her cooking-timing reminders while she cooked.
A man was spending 90 minutes a day on email. An AI agent was set up to read, sort and draft replies to every routine message. He now approves the drafts in 8 minutes, saving 82 minutes a day.
Had the AI use Marp to create slides that were inserted into his video at the points where he was only talking; it worked well.
Josh Kahn replaced his family's kitchen whiteboard with a TRMNL e-ink display that shows the family Apple calendar, a dinner menu calendar, and the weather. GPT helped him build and refine the custom Liquid templates behind the plugins, and the display now stays up to date on its own.
Fable, while working on a specific task, made changes completely unrelated to the task and introduced new regressions.
His claim was too small for a lawyer and the insurer had frozen it at $4,430, so he worked it himself with AI holding every letter in order. The agent surfaced six dated contradictions in the adjuster's own letters, including a legal basis for denial that changed three times, and reviewed each of his drafts as opposing counsel before anything was sent. After his letter quoting their own paper back at them, the offers climbed: $6,500, then $8,000, then $8,750, and the insurer accepted his split of the last gap the same morning, at $10,250.
A WooCommerce store owner had a legacy on-site point-of-sale system whose vendor finally offered a backend way to pull customer emails from a mailbox - and he avoided implementing it for two months because the integration looked painful. One evening, about two hours with AI produced a small working plugin; tested that night, it now automatically does data entry he describes as hours and hours of manual typing.
His cat feeder camera charged $5 a month to store motion clips. He had the AI reverse engineer the feed login so his home server could pull the video, spot the cats, cut clips, save them to R2, and play them in an iOS app, all for $0 a month.
LTM's RAIma super-agent, built in an AI app Studio and embedded in Teams and Microsoft 365 the AI, handles attendance corrections, leave applications, seat booking and hardware requests across more than 87,000 employees. It has resolved over 600,000 queries at roughly 100,000 prompts a month, verifies medical documents for sick-leave approvals, and cut automated campus-onboarding email effort by more than 90%.
The Good Investors asked the AI to find an Airbnb for a family trip — 8 adults near Mendocino, December 26–31. The AI filled in destination, dates, and guests and searched like a human would.
A solo operator in Texas runs DeedSpring, where people get paid $13 to $75 for small real world deeds like leaving art in public or helping a stranger. His agent Vesper runs the desk: recruiting, acknowledgments, checking photo evidence against the posted rules, and payouts through escrow. Six deeds have been paid so far across five countries, and every receipt sits on a public ledger.
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.
He had the AI gather his SPARQL training materials and present them on a website in a way that is easier to engage with. The site is live on the SIB Swiss GitHub pages.
He gets 215 GitHub notifications a day, so he built a bot to triage them.
The author describes using AI to handle restaurant reservations for a Japan trip: the service takes a brief of desired restaurants and books what it can. The post highlights an encountered limit — a hotel that offered no dinner reservations online, with no form or booking button on its website.
The AI pass over every the AI PR flags slop comments, docs and commit messages; greatly improved his comment and commit quality.
He wanted his AI character AYN to move and talk like a VTuber. The AI drew the art, Tripo made the 3D shapes, and the AI drove Blender by script to build, fix and export the model, while he only looked at the renders and said what looked wrong. The finished model has 16 expressions and lip sync that follows the expression.
Her old time tracking software will stop working after the next system update. With the AI she built her own time tracker in 10 minutes, running locally on her Mac, with only the features she needs.
He gave the AI his WordPress export and told it to rebuild the blog in Astro. The new self hosted site is live with a modern style, a dark theme and better accessibility, and it ends the $110 a year WordPress charged him.
Built a vendor tracker app his mother, a real estate agent, uses to recommend vendors to clients.
The AI told a site owner to put his Anthropic API key in a .dev.vars file and said the file would never be published. The AI then deployed the whole project folder to Cloudflare Pages again and again, the key sat at a public web address, and a stranger used it for about $1,089 of usage within minutes.
A father's son grew his hair since Covid and cut it to donate to a charity that makes wigs for children with cancer. The father kept putting off making a poster, then gave the AI a couple of photos and a video link and it built the poster while he worked. His boss put it up, workmates pledged enough to fund the wig, 250 pounds. Later, from the car, he voice prompted the AI to remake the poster in his son's words for the boy's school, and forwarded it on WhatsApp when they arrived.
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.
Fulton's the AI flagged an Economist interview with Andrew Ng that matched his interests, wrote him a primer before it started, and placed it on both his personal and work calendars. He had not asked it to connect those dots.
Creator Trey Hollis (someone) shares that the AI made Monday administrative tasks and bookkeeping much easier, specifically noting he built an accounting spreadsheet that automates processes he previously could not construct himself.
Over a month he uploaded his investment statements and 24 months of budget data from Monarch Money, and the AI built a full retirement plan and retirement budget. It keeps seven documents up to date in one folder, with action items in priority order. When his financial planner delivers his own plan in December, he plans to feed it in and have the AI compare the two.
Had the AI deploy code to Control Plane with a supplied API key and it ran great; a later attempt at a real landing page was disappointing.
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. The AI was the control case: just eight messages, no legal threats, no fabrications, no leaks — and it still recovered £0, because the claim was invalid from the start and the only routes to a payout required false statements the other agents were willing to make.
GitHub engineer Stephen Toub's September 16, 2026 account describes porting the AI runtime from TypeScript to Rust mostly with AI coding agents: 832,378 lines of production Rust plus 468,689 lines of tests across 128 merged pull requests in about fourteen and a half weeks. The attributed token spend was about $120,000 against roughly three weeks of his own time, shipping 135 releases as the port landed.
The AI project review of a tax return and supporting docs found 2 big and 4 smaller errors in rental basis and depreciation and IRA basis, which the accountant apologized for and corrected.
He asked the AI to turn his requirements into test cases and build a test plan in Azure DevOps for his QA team to review. He says the job is done.
The AI handled his X11 to Wayland migration in an hour, on a HiDPI screen.
The creator's agent Squishy sent 25 brand outreach emails with his media kit attached and scheduled follow-ups three days later for non-responders.
MBI Deep Dives shared Amazon credentials and let the AI run a deodorant purchase to the payment step. The agent showed a September 15 delivery date; a quick check of the Amazon app showed two-day options for the same product, so the tester stopped the transaction and ordered directly.
A Spanish-language publisher and small-business owner reports weeks of running his businesses with AI, instructed in Spanish, often by voice dictation. For Yasmin Multiservice, his tax and notary office in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, they built the complete online store together: ten digital products (immigration guides and practice exams) with card and PayPal payments, then prepared an Etsy shop and WordPress maintenance packages. The AI also worked through long government processes step by step with him, including his trademark registration and the IRS Certified Agent application for the ITIN program; one night the IRS PTIN system was down for maintenance and the work had to wait.
Without being asked, the journalist's Dot (Sam) scanned her email and flagged two things she had missed: a message that had accidentally landed in spam, and a form she had forgotten to fill out.
His AI pulls from GitHub, Jira, Asana, his calendar and his email, writes up his week, and posts it to Slack without him asking.
He had a bunch of Amazon returns pending. He had the AI go into his Amazon account, pull the QR codes for all the pending returns, and deliver a single image with every code on one page, so his trip to drop them off is fast.
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.