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.
Creator Matthew Berman describes giving an AI access to his local machine on a standing weekly job: it scans every file, finds deletion candidates totalling about 380GB, and sorts them into low, medium and high risk. The bot operates under one hard rule — it may categorize but must never delete anything itself.
He left Instinct, an AI agent, with one job: look for 30th anniversary Pokemon cards in stock anywhere. It sits in the background and alerts him to places that have stock.
Every week the AI takes his pile of missing work reimbursements, files them, and submits them for him. He says it is the real time saver for anyone who travels for work.
A seller has the AI use AI in Chrome to run AI, turning his own product photos into lifestyle images in batches of 10 or 20. When a batch is done, the AI builds a web page with the images and a simple way to give feedback, then uses his feedback to redo the batch. He uses this route to avoid paying for API use.
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.
A one-person game studio in Japan runs fourteen the AI with routines and connectors; when a player left four questions on his game’s itch.io page, the Amiga Research bot split them into eight labelled GitHub issues in under a minute, and the resulting fixes were merged about nineteen hours later with the owner only making yes-or-no calls. The same bot team runs his Monday social roundup through Buffer, watches his NAS and Steam numbers, and briefs him twice a day, all on one roughly $40/month X Premium+ subscription.
A dental worker had the AI run Blender on his own computer and write Python add-ons for his design work. It built a tool that turns a shell into a based model, one for basic aligners, an automated baseplate designer, and a custom impression tray designer. A fifth add-on, for copying dentures, did not come out as well.
A peer reviewer put a manuscript's reference list into AI and asked it to find a web link for each one. Two references were fictitious and 13 more looked suspect, so the reviewer rejected the paper.
He said he built his setup with AI and local models. He told the agent to use a GitHub tool to download his Garmin data automatically and store it in a local SQLite database, and the data includes sleep and HRV, not just workouts.
His free French teaching site Ralentir travaux, used by millions of visitors, had been more or less abandoned because its old code ran to thousands of pages. Over about six months the AI and the AI cleaned, fixed and modernised the code and added new tools, and the rebuilt site relaunched for its 20th anniversary.
Commenting on the 26 use cases post, he says his AI books all his haircuts: he just says book a haircut on a day at a time, and the email confirmation comes in. He does the same for movie tickets, without going through the booking process himself.
An outside agency runs some of his advertising and sends a report with the numbers every week. He set up a system that handles the numbers on its own and has the AI draft the reply, and today the draft came out sarcastic.
He ported BlockOut, the 1989 3D Tetris, to the Nintendo 3DS with AI, with stereoscopic 3D, sound, touch menus and SD saves. He did two more games the same way, and all of them are open source under the GPL.
Connecting the agency's own MCP-based SEO service to Toby took an afternoon of wrong turns between desktop and web plugin setups, but once authenticated it created both monitored sites and completed full crawls: 44 pages for the law firm and 111 for the medical practice. Google data imports were still skipped because the service had no Google connection configured.
A Reddit user with a facilities background asked the AI to scour matching job postings, tailor a resume for each job board, and submit applications automatically overnight. Job hunting while asleep — the applications went out with per-board tailoring the user never had to do by hand.
A man built LatestArr with help from the AI, his first real app. The self hosted tool collects what is new across Plex, Jellyfin, Emby and his book, audiobook and game libraries and emails a clean digest, and he shared it as open source and asked for testers.
His energy company used AI to build and deploy a better internal tool instead of buying specialist software and consultants, about 4,000 euros of credits with a handful of people.
A man has a monthly task of changing about a dozen labels. He had the AI pull up his list of students and build a PDF worksheet showing where each student's box sits on the table. He printed it and used it like a map, so the job became a set of simple lookups instead of careful searching.
Agency owner Nick Saraev documented handing his business's work to the AI for a week: auditing every task, having the AI plan the automation systems, building evals, and turning the winners into reusable skills. The tasks that scored well were scheduled to run without him; he kept judgement calls for himself.
He downloads all his lecture slides and feeds them into NotebookLM for an audio overview. A pipeline then transcribes the audio, has the AI write a timed spec, uses AI Design for the animations and the AI for the filler content, then renders and stitches everything into an hour long recap of the whole semester.
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.
AI through tscircuit and OpenAI models designed and autorouted about 15 ordered RP2040 and ESP32 PCB designs; known mistakes include improperly rotated connectors and routing loops.
The AI had been optimizing llama.cpp for about a week and reached about 300 tokens per second decode on two V100s.
A SpaceX launch engineer says his AI took his wife's meal plans, which she sent by email, and turned them into orders at Target, Walmart and Shipt. The same post lists it as one of the jobs the bot finished that week.
The AI keeps his hobby history site published, adds and resizes new pictures on request, and checks dead links and finds archive replacements.
Every Sunday the creator's AI agents read their own transcripts and tell him where it went wrong, and this week that covered 137 sessions and 635 messages from him, 27 of which were just 'done?' or 'update?'. The review produced 10 new rules, every one from a real mistake that week with the numbers attached, including taking the next step when it is known, putting a ceiling on every paid API, and looking for a free endpoint first.
In shipwithmuse.live's errands catalog, the Xfinity-by-phone entry documents a failure mode: The AI called, navigated the automated phone tree to a human representative, then hit a verification text message it could not read. Its fallback was to patch the user into the live call.
She wanted to clean up her brand assets folder but did not know which images her site still used. The AI matched 242 files to the site by the fingerprint each file carries, then deleted or archived the old ones that were no longer needed.
The writer asked his dot for help with his new broadband provider. The dot did deep-dive troubleshooting, contacting the provider's support itself, and figured out a login issue he says he could not get around on his own.
Opus 5.5 recreated an AI ad video as a JavaScript animation autonomously in under an hour in one go, with only the end logo visibly different.
One the AI user posted that he keeps a dedicated bot whose only job is handling his Amazon returns. He flagged the setup as one to watch after Amazon began blocking the AI ordering.
Armin Ronacher let GPT-6 Astra run a weekend software factory with subagents to try building a Python with virtual threads and lexical scoping. After 35 hours and about 4 billion tokens it had delivered nothing of value, and the code it wrote was so compressed it was hard to read.
A researcher updating his own old question says he now asks his agent to download the papers his reference manager could not get. The agent works in the browser while he is signed in with his school login, and he clicks through the human checks himself.
His shop sells electronics accessories into Thailand and Malaysia, and one wrong word, waterproof instead of water resistant, once cost two months of returns. Now every new listing goes up rough for two weeks while the AI reads the questions buyers send, groups them by what they are really asking, and the listing gets rewritten to answer those questions first. Buyer questions and returns both dropped.
He left Wix and had the AI build his own blog, with AI in Chrome doing the setup clicks in Azure, GitHub and DNS. The new blog went live on 17 September 2026 with all eleven old posts moved across, and since then it has had about a hundred updates and four new posts from him.
A Korean automation instructor sells an AI skill kit for Naver Blog and documents his own test on a real shop: he handed the skill five shop photos and a one-line memo, and it wrote the post, placed photos, a video, a map and tags, and completed a scheduled publication in 3 minutes 20 seconds. With a reservation set, Naver itself posts at the chosen time even with the computer off.
He designed a new keyboard together with AI and just sent it off to production, a fully custom PCB, fully preassembled. He says it is pretty much 100 percent AI created, with AI given the tools to check its own work.
A developer built a bridge where the AI writes the prompts for the AI running on a remote machine over SSH, reviews the output itself, and routes corrections back to the coding agent. One agent manages and quality-checks another agent's code work.
During the mid-August Massachusetts tax holiday, the reviewer made 2 Best Buy purchases via the American Airlines mileage shopping portal and did not get the miles. He asked the AI to file missing mileage claims, access the receipt data from Gmail, and save a PDF of the Best Buy email receipts to Google Drive.
His corals died but the tank lights still ran a coral schedule. The AI drove a Raspberry Pi over Bluetooth, changed the light and pump schedules, and found the lights had been dimmed to about 35 percent and their clock was 6 and a half hours late, then fixed the time.
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.