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.
Five new newsletter subscribers looked like direct traffic, as if five people had typed his URL by hand. He gave the puzzle to the AI, which fixed and tested the attribution and checked his server logs, and the answer was bots.
Had the AI transpile his old frameworkless PHP site to Rust and ran it behind the same nginx config; Rust was slower until the AI added micro-caching, reaching comparable rps and latency.
Kimi told overnight to fuzz Linux kernel filesystem code produced 26 crashes with reproducers and fixes; some have already landed upstream.
A first-year teacher sat down with a colleague of 30+ years whose class decks, built during COVID, had broken links, outdated content and material split across two or three decks per lesson. They fed her old worksheets and decks into AI, and in about five minutes it produced a single consolidated deck that followed the teaching framework it inferred from her own slides - she called it the best 45 minutes she had ever spent on professional development.
For about 25 years he finished a monthly financial statement in Excel by hand, and it took hours. He connected the AI read only to all his accounts through Plaid. The AI now builds the whole statement and asks him only about things it cannot see, like cash spending. The job takes 15 minutes instead of hours. He is having the AI build him a custom money dashboard next.
His small business puts receipts into AI, which itemizes them into a CSV their existing expense SaaS understands, saving them from buying an upgraded receipt-scanning app.
A subscriber reports the AI burns through 100% of their usage limit after every reset while showing no tasks running anywhere in the product. The post body was removed by subreddit moderation, leaving the first-hand title as the record of the phantom-consumption failure.
He says his business got serious about Power BI reporting about twelve months ago, then three months ago threw it out and replaced it with AI licences. A third party warehouse tidies the data with an MCP on top, and the finance team now builds its own reports quickly instead of waiting on a reporting team.
The Random Investor posts that he used the AI to change his car insurance and save $122 per month, redirecting the savings into a taxable brokerage account. In replies he adds that the AI compared quotes and filled in the answers while he only provided bank information and signed, after he had put the switch off because heavier coverage was needed after paying off the car.
Dheeraj Sharma built an AI cleanup agent for decade-old Gmail inboxes like a reader's 130,000-message one, then ran it on his own 7,610-message mailbox in four gated stages: census, editable plan, dry run, apply. One approved run moved 2,896 newsletter and notification emails to Trash in 107 seconds (unread fell from 5,013 to 2,237), with deletion impossible by design and every change logged for a one-command undo.
MMA creator Nina Marie Daniele (verified, 5.3M followers, 48K likes) set a 30-day goal to train like a pro fighter; the AI assigned an AI coach 'Drama Queen' who built Day 1-7+ programs (warm-up, 5 interval sprints with 1-min rests, tire lifts, assault bike), recommended a 40g-protein tempeh grain bowl, and tracked a low sleep score of 45. Her final interval time beat her prior best (7:42 vs 8:48).
Bryan gave the AI a basic errand: find a USB-A to USB micro Type B cable. Amazon blocked it outright, Monoprice sits behind Cloudflare so the AI could not even see pricing, and Best Buy and Walmart threw constant bot blockers (he told the AI to solve the puzzles itself, and it got past some). Checkout was its own ordeal of account credentials and a Stripe wallet; he finally spotted the item sitting in his Walmart cart in the iPhone app and completed the purchase from a third-party seller himself. His verdict: kind of terrible at basic finding and buying.
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.
A Mac user deleted a Pages document by mistake before ever saving it, so it was not in the Trash or Time Machine. The AI searched the whole disk, including iCloud cache files, and located a copy in the CloudKit cache folder, and the document was recovered.
Amy, 58, who never wrote code, built Wally on the AI for her brother after laryngectomy left him voiceless: one tap speaks urgent phrases like 'I am having trouble breathing,' plus daily needs and family phrases; it also pulls live golf scores, hosts family messages and a medical ID page. He used it daily until his death in August 2026.
The AI created a custom Firefox build with a curl --resolve style SSL and DNS override feature he wanted.
An agent run revenue label had two finished products stuck at awaiting listing for about seven weeks, because listing, pricing and publishing all needed a human, and the morning the AI routine kept logging the wait as a normal, healthy stop. When listing and pricing were handed to the agents, with an AI cross review as the gate instead of a person, both products were listed the same day, and they also found the BOOTH shop itself had never been made public, so the first product had been impossible to buy for about two months; sales were still zero.
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.
She built a wine label scan into her own app with no code, using Adalo, OpenAI and the AI. She picks a label photo, taps Scan Label, and the app fills in the name and picks the right wine type.
Lennster named his agent 'Jarvis' to stay organized through a life overhaul: it checks his daily calendar (walking, content, gym, lunch, proposals, dinner, work), found protein-meal restaurants in Jimbaran (Healthy Tribes, Menega Cafe, Fit Bowl Bali), and built a 'Specimen Split Tracker' logging weights, reps, and PRs (Zercher squat, Bulgarian split squat, neck curls).
He gave the AI 10MB of architectural plans. 35 minutes later it gave back a good interactive 3D walkthrough of the house, while the AI did the same job with several layout mistakes.
Mis-prompted the AI on a toy project; it wasted all his tokens building a specialized Docker clone instead of building on Docker.
The AI worked through data-broker removal requests for the user and got four broker listings about them suppressed.
His company Feature Upvote already does regular pen tests and monthly backup restore checks. He pointed the AI at their source code for a security review, and it found some serious problems.
The AppleVis reviewer told the AI he knew he had unused Southwest credits and wanted to use them to book a flight to Nashville. The AI located the credits and autonomously booked the flight.
He triages email with Outlook categories and uses them as task assignments for agents. When an invoice arrives it gets two categories: one agent saves it as a PDF in his credit card folder, another emails it to his accountant. Each agent watches its category and updates it when the job is done, so the inbox itself shows what is pending and what is finished.
A background task asked from an iPhone to open a YouTube video was blocked on a site approval, and the prompt waited about 17 hours. He tapped Allow on an iPad just to clear the prompt, and the old task resumed on his Windows laptop, loaded the autoplaying page in a hidden browser pane with his signed in session, and wrote an entry to his real YouTube history.
A UK teacher set out to answer his students’ question about whether coding still matters by building a large system using only AI. Seven months later it had become rgbloom, a real company printing real photo books, built over 600 AI sessions and 6,700 prompts, with over 100,000 lines of code and about the same again in tests.
With three kids at three different schools, Kranda gets a ParentSquare digest for each. Every weekday at 8:53am the AI opens every digest, reads the full text, and sends him only what matters for his kids; on days when nothing is important, he hears nothing at all.
His RemainderBot uses excess the AI and the AI tokens to write PRs from his goals and task lists, 111 PRs done including customer call prep, runs as a cron job (own-use separable from the Show HN tool post).
Creator someone ordered three items from clothing brand Plus44 while in Turkey in December 2024; the package could not clear customs for a tourist without a Turkish ID and was returned. After the promised refund never came and the 120-day chargeback window expired in April 2025, later emails went unanswered. He asked the AI for help: The AI identified the UK company (Plus 44 World Limited), cited Section 29 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and sent a strongly worded letter demanding the refund within 14 days or court action. Within two hours Plus44 issued the $478.39 refund. (Caption carries his AI referral code.)
The AI and the AI balked at early PHP CVE investigation and at testing PoCs, slowing protection of customers; he switched to GLM 5.3 to mitigate and later used AI for the fix.
A Korean the AI guide recounts a Sept 23, 2026 video by investing YouTuber Kim Dante (channel 'Tomorrow's Investment King Kim Dante'), who joined the AI through a US VPN and asked it to list every subscription he pays for, rank them by how little he uses them, and draft a cancellation message for each. Working from Gmail payment and promotional emails, the AI found six subscriptions and explicitly marked items it could not verify instead of guessing.
A Business Insider Japan writer set up six AI bots besides his main one and has run them for about a week. One checks his to-do list and pushes him to reschedule, one picks out mail that needs a reply and drafts it, one pulls expense items from mail into a spreadsheet, and one looks up missed call numbers in his mail and contacts and sums up who called.
A man built a receipt store from his emails, and the AI uses it to predict what his household will run out of based on how often he buys each item and when he last bought it. Every week the AI logs into his supermarket site, books a delivery slot, and adds the items that need restocking. During the week he sends a photo of a barcode when something runs out and the AI adds it to the shop.
One Aisle AI curl audit produced 24 CVEs, 18 shipping today.
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.
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.
X poster someone had the AI compare 3 shops, email 2 installers, and book a Thursday install: $1,450 vs the original $2,300 quote, saving $850.
Fable built a minimal proof assistant, then checked its soundness and found and fixed 5 ways it could prove false theorems.
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.