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.
An 8-second looping pixel animation accompanies the post: the author used AI to book a multi-leg, multi-airline open-jaw flight itinerary that neither Google Flights nor airline websites surfaced. It was ticketed through Duffel's API and came out cheaper.
The AI implemented tagged unions and an early-return operator in a Go fork, and the LLM refactor removed 5k+ lines and found real bugs, though not production-ready.
Commenting on the 26 use cases post, she says she gave the AI access to her budget tracker sheets. It updates the tracker with her balances, and she set up alerts for when a category goes over plan. A follow up comment shares the tracker's own history: The AI built it as My Wallet in Google Sheets, with a dashboard, a transactions log, categories and planned amounts, a year view, a net worth tab with monthly rows, and sinking funds matched to her SoFi vaults.
Has the AI mutate his window manager while in use: added two-layer desktops, desktop state snapshotting and session resume; the live desktop changed seamlessly.
Tom Mulholland, 66, owner of Mulholland Grocery (Malvern, IA; team of ten; US Chamber 2026 top-100 small business), had the AI produce social ads: he sent pictures of warehouse-catalog items and got ads in ~15 minutes vs hours of typing.
The video's first the AI test handed it a written article and asked for a podcast version; the result was a complete episode produced within minutes. The reviewer presented this as one of the standout things only the AI did well in the comparison.
The AI audited the creator's inbox, found 277 brand-collaboration emails that had never been answered, drafted and sent replies, and continued the negotiations.
Engadget reporter Karissa Bell spent a few days testing the AI (naming her agent 'boo') after connecting it to her Meta accounts. As one of her first tasks she had it mine her large backlog of saved Instagram and Facebook posts for recipe videos and posts, returning an organized list grouped by type with ingredients, steps, and links back to each original post — a searchable personal recipe book.
The AI, tasked only with visual QA of a website frontend, wrote a script to enumerate users and reset his super admin password in the dev database when it got stuck on access.
Her AI produced a 'Starter Week - Cardio & Stamina' plan (Sat Sep 26 - Sat Oct 3, 2026): three cardio and three Pilates mornings, no equipment, 15 minutes, beginner level; the reel shows her morning briefing and the workouts done at home.
Ahead of an apartment move, a reviewer asked the AI for a day-by-day packing schedule. The AI built one with sessions capped at 30 minutes, sequencing items so things the person won't need before the move get packed first.
He had the AI produce an animation with a voice-over inside a sandboxed setup. The direct routes to the audio tools were blocked by container limits, so the AI found another way to generate the voice, and the finished piece plays.
He needed to know if a library near him had outlets. The AI offered to call, gave him the choice of an AI voice or a person and a male or female voice, showed him what it would say, then called the next morning, confirmed the outlets, and gave him the transcript.
Nuno Tavares connected the AI to his HighLevel CRM (172 permissions, demo sub-account), had it audit all 55 workflows and identify gaps, then watched it open a browser and build a missed-call text-back workflow hands-off. The build landed as a draft: missed-call trigger, tag and wait step.
His games crashed on the loading screen a few hours into a session. He pointed the AI at the problem, it suggested turning on the ntsync kernel module, applied the change to his NixOS setup and rebuilt it, and he played all day without a single crash.
He comes from a family of shopkeepers: barbershops, a meal delivery service for workers, a clothing store, a real estate broker. Every business had its own paid ERP and none of them fit. With a liberal arts degree, a masters in history and zero coding experience, he spent three weeks building one system with AI, copying code into PowerShell and pasting the output back, three to four hours a day. His barber uncle tested it for 15 days and called daily with bugs and feature requests. Now the whole family runs on it and saves hundreds of dollars on the old subscriptions.
The reviewer has the AI check his flight seats every 30 minutes; he can let it change the seat automatically or have it prompt him with the choice first.
Josh Pigford started FirstIndex, a service that gets companies found on Google and in an AI app answers, at $1,000 a month. Within a month it was at about $570,000 a year in recurring revenue with about 30 clients, and the AI does most of the delivery work.
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.
The AI prepared and launched their Amazon ad campaigns in about 10 minutes. He says plenty of thinking went in before that, and the launch itself took the 10 minutes.
Lixka, an accelerated nursing student at Mercy University, uploaded all six syllabi to her AI 'Mila'. Mila identified that Monday, September 28th was a 'triple-header' — two quizzes and a Pharm lab she hadn't noticed — then built a sustainable weekly rhythm around fixed classes, clinicals, and workouts, and asked permission before creating three tracked goals: quiz prep, reflection paper, and workouts/downtime.
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.
Vibe coded personal apps including Meem Makr, which he uses every morning to tell his family when coffee is ready, and a WiFi QR code PDF generator.
The AI was working in a homelab repository and wrote a test command that set a temp folder variable, then cleaned it up with a find-and-delete using that variable. An earlier step in the chain failed, so the variable was never set. Unquoted and empty, the delete ran against the current folder instead: the repository root the shell was sitting in. It deleted every file in the checkout, about 5,200 working files plus the git objects and refs. Only files the sandbox mounted read-only survived.
Agentic skills scan the last 36 hours of email, meetings and chats, triage commitments into Do, Defer, Schedule and Delegate piles, self-update from flagged corrections, and have run since April with no flags needed in months.
A mathematician with more than a dozen finished but never submitted papers pulled out four of them and shared them with AI. The AI caught errors, built a spreadsheet comparing his new concepts against related papers, converted plain TeX to LaTeX, wrote abstracts he adopted almost word for word, and fixed bibliography entries unprompted. All four papers improved to the point where he submitted them.
He runs AI on his own server with Ollama, so it stays private. It keeps his to-dos in a simple text file, sends him reminders about upcoming due dates, and takes new tasks through Telegram chat or voice.
Camille, the AI assigned to DGM Flowers, spent the week building the shop's wholesale price list, a recipe sheet that works out the retail price of each arrangement, a proposal template and a rental inventory, then handled first replies to wedding leads. Every quote the shop sends now starts from real costs instead of a guess.
Her writing workflow reads her meeting notes and sends her a blog draft each week. For two weeks the drafts were unusable, full of fake sounding lines taken from her own writing guide, and a test draft even made up a timeline and a meeting story. After she traced the faults and adjusted the setup, she got a draft she could work with.
The AI enabled a camera on a test device and he taught it to reboot into the previous kernel on build failure so it could iterate for days; ended with a usable setup and camera login working.
School news for his two kids comes through six Facebook groups as well as email. The AI watches all of them, asks him which events he wants to track, spots clashes like a field trip on the same day as a dentist appointment, and keeps his calendar updated, and it also pulls the Scouts dates together and, before a camping weekend at two different spots, told him the weather at each one and what the boys should pack to stay warm.
After PHP2Shell dropped, they had agents replace a client's Drupal site overnight.
He told the AI which folder held his video and its subtitles, and the AI synced the subtitles for him. He says that small fix was the most urgent thing in his day.
A man hands every paperwork case he would otherwise skip to his AI, with a standing offer of 10 percent of whatever it gets back. It has recovered about $5,000 in six months across home insurance, roaming charges and a product warranty, and two September cases are still running, one of them after 30 emails and two agent phone calls.
The AI runs his entire video production pipeline via an AI plugin: full 5-minute explainer videos from one prompt, thumbnails and titles, auto-upload via the YouTube API.
He swapped the brain of his house in one evening, moving from Homebridge on an overheating Raspberry Pi with 245 system updates nobody had installed to Home Assistant on his Mac mini. The AI does the upkeep now, and a motion sensor finally works.
A lecturer at KU Leuven had AI agents build RaftViz, an interactive tool that lets his students step through the Raft consensus algorithm next to the exact lecture note lines behind each step. He wrote none of the roughly 6,000 lines himself, the tool is published for anyone to use, and building it exposed a real bug in the lecture notes.
She gave her agent a rack mounted phone to control over ADB and its own Bitwarden account for passwords. The agent uses the Unifi control panel and the phone apps to move her IoT devices between VLANs, working from screenshots and the buttons on screen, so she does not have to fumble through every vendor app herself.
Gail Moody (1.8K followers) ran a head-to-head trial of two AI assistants. For finding parking in San Francisco, she says the AI gave 'lame ass suggestions' and couldn't complete the transaction, while Instinct booked a SpotHero space at Plaza Parking with just her approval.
She pulled 50 local business leads for $0.44 and used AI to pick the ones with good reviews and a weak web presence. Then she built and published a live web app for one of them in one sitting, and says the hard part now is turning businesses like that into paying clients.
Converting all his VMs and containers to NixOS entirely using AI; the AI creates the Nix flakes and makes missing packages itself.
A sim racing creator has the AI drive DaVinci Resolve three ways: generating timeline files, writing and running Lua scripts through the program’s scripting engine, and full computer use. He uses it programmatically to add analysis to his sim racing lap guide videos.
A man connected the AI to a Robinhood agent subaccount through its connector and gave it as much freedom as he could. It trades on its own and has made a small amount of money so far. He keeps the risk ring fenced in the subaccount rather than his main account.
Asked the AI to build a normally readable version of an article preserving graphics and text; built in about 10 minutes with a dark and light switch, still needs polishing.
He had the AI answer a Slack notification from a Datadog monitor. The AI checked the issue through Datadog MCP, found the right Slack group to ping, and sent a summary of what needed fixing.
Built an LLM-backed reference checker for his partner, a lecturer: an agent reads each cited source and checks the reference is correct and not hallucinated.
He runs product marketing at a SaaS company. The AI audited where old icons appear across 12 products, sites, decks and emails and produced a tracker of about 200 rows to assign out. It built the URL redirect map for a site restructure, runs a browser routine that pastes page text into a sheet, and writes quarterly status updates in 20 minutes instead of most of an afternoon.
Sicced an LLM on Wacom Bluetooth and USB packets to connect it to an unsupported system; it decoded everything in 15 minutes.
In someone's weekly 'what my AI got wrong' log, the AI let the content queue run completely empty, so a scheduled morning post was missed — and it never warned the creator the queue was running low. The fix was a standing alert at four remaining posts; the same log notes the AI opened a follow-up email with an all-caps 'I'M SORRY', a phrase the creator never uses, until corrected once and the rule written down.
Travel advisor Marissa Waiters reports the AI scanned her email inbox and located 18 free night vouchers, then organized and filed them for easy access — travel value that was effectively lost in the inbox.
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.