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 morning agent reads his email and builds a prioritized to do list with time blocks for the day. It also checks the weather and warns him to leave earlier when rain would slow his trip, which has twice saved him from showing up soaked.
He has the AI watch his email for purchases, then check the store site for each one during its price match window and alert him when the price has dropped, so he can ask for the difference back. He says he is over $700 saved so far. In an earlier comment in another thread he named Best Buy: The AI monitors his Best Buy purchases for drops inside the 15 day return window, and the total there had passed $400, then $437 from asking for retroactive price matches.
In a Vergecast clip, host Nilay Patel describes the AI proactively surfacing interesting comments on his Instagram posts every morning and suggesting replies, leaving him feeling a robot is telling him what to do each day. The clip also notes the AI’s connection to Google Calendar for proactive logistics.
A man doing a home renovation uses a discount monitor alongside shopping list alerts and 3D models of the project. He says the monitor on its own saved him about $2,000 on the renovation.
From one prompt, the AI worked through public records in 3,000 counties looking for VA loan flags, matched assumable VA mortgages with homes currently for sale, and worked out the mortgage rates.
Alongside his homemade TMS, Wes Oberman built a settlement payroll program that calculates every driver's pay automatically. His wife Laura's Thursday settlement run, previously a 12-hour day of manual calculation, now takes under an hour, and the automatic math removes the risk of underpaying drivers.
The AI opened Chrome logged into two credit cards and a bank app and downloaded everything matching criteria to populate a travel split app.
He used AI and the AI to build a setup that automatically made one LINE sticker a day. He stopped the setup once he was happy just having built it, and the stickers stay on sale in the LINE Store.
His AI runs on a server with Ollama as the backend, so his data stays private. It keeps his todos in a simple text file, sends him reminders about upcoming due dates, and gives him an overview when he asks in a Telegram chat.
Asked the AI to break his team's own Postgres MCP guards and it found pg_logical_emit_message, which writes to the WAL inside a read-only transaction, leading to a hardened replacement.
He had the AI vibe code a version of smitty, the AIX system admin tool, for Linux in Python. He says that alone is worth the 20 dollars a month he pays.
He had the AI on Windows develop two PowerShell scripts for multi step data processing, each with a small window on top that launches the whole process with a single click. Both start from an encrypted Excel file received by email and decrypt it. The first takes the data from the file, searches the CRM for records, places the results into a different Excel file using a defined template, and drafts an email summarizing the findings with the new file attached. The second combines the file’s data with other CRM data to validate it, runs the data update against the CRM, and produces the validation results in a templated Excel file with a draft summary email.
Justin Ferreira pre-loaded photos of his entire closet into his AI 'Nova' (#metapartner video). Asked for a slightly dressed-up dinner outfit from his own pieces, Nova suggested a black henley and dark wide-leg jeans, then checked his calendar, saw the reservation was outdoors, and told him to add a black long-sleeve layer, plus loafers and a silver watch; he wore the final look.
He asked the AI to write a short email to his hotel asking for a better rate. The front desk called him back and dropped the room from $330 to $240 a night, saving $90 a night, and he says the whole thing took about 30 seconds of his time.
A man used AI to build a full runbook of how his Linux desktop is set up, covering installed software, configs, hacks and workarounds. He then used the runbook to move to a new laptop in one afternoon, and the runbook now keeps itself up to date.
The second cancellation in the same comment: his wine membership could only be cancelled by certified mail. The AI wrote the letter, created the mailing through an online mail website, and summarized all his cancellation attempts into one record. Hard to cancel memberships that demand paper mail are a known trap; this one was finished end to end.
His local Qwen agent computer with full PC access does file organizing, analyzed his local data and wrote several small tools to manage it automatically, coded a KDE widget for VRAM model swaps.
His coding agent pushed a commit deleting every file on main.
He bought a ratgdo control board for his garage door opener. The AI wrote and installed new firmware for it, and it can update the firmware too, so it now has full control of the opener, including the ability to disable the remotes.
Pointed Opus with TLA+ at company clustering and failover logic and found and prevented a catastrophic bug no unit test would have caught; Opus also wrote the invariants.
The AI ported about 7 classic 68k Mac games, writing its own 68k disassembly tools.
A call center replaced its press a number menu with a system that listens to what the caller says in the first 10 seconds and routes the call. Wrong transfers fell by almost 40%.
Fable managing many Opus agents built a playable 3D RTS like StarCraft 2 with 3 races, 40+ units and 40+ buildings in 3 days.
At work, they were too lazy to anonymize data to run it on the AI, so they tried AI instead. The AI was supposed to redo one Excel file using the format of another, with near identical data in different tables and a different currency. Two hours were lost.
Southwest Airlines built a focused AI assistant to answer customer questions, then expanded it into name changes, receipt requests and travel vouchers, orchestrated through subagents. The result was millions in productivity gains and seven times ROI in a short window.
He asked the AI to tidy his todo inbox in milieu.cloud. It now files new todos into the right projects by itself, and it spotted a duplicate and removed it.
Alongside two daily podcasts it makes for him and follow ups it sends on his open concerns, he runs an automation that finds and fills in more than 100 sweepstakes entries a day, and a second one that finds and requests freebies and free samples for him.
His VP of engineering reviewed two or three strategy tools on the market and they were prohibitively expensive, so he asked if it could be built instead. He built it alone in less than a month: long term objectives broken down into annual objectives, improvement priorities, projects, milestones and tasks, with bowler charts tracking the KPIs, full project management tools, and containerized staging, development and production environments. It cost roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in an AI app credits. The VP then put his own name all over it, and made him replace his own name in the about section with the name of the organization.
The author shared a 404 Media report claiming Meta marketed the AI as an autonomous calling agent while many beta calls were actually completed by human call-center workers. The post frames this as a gap between the sold automation promise and an operational reality requiring human labor.
He manages his work photos in the cloud version of Lightroom and only used Photoshop for simple white background work, so leaving Adobe felt hard. Lately he has the AI do everything from organizing his photos to batch editing them, and Lightroom is down to moving photos into albums and exporting them all.
He took an ESP32 board out of its bag and, with AI setting it up, had it sending his van's battery, charging, and solar data over Bluetooth and MQTT to Home Assistant in 5 minutes.
A marketer trained his AI setup on everything about his company and what performs; it now writes the script, creates an avatar, generates the video and b-roll, and edits it together with captions and a CTA end card - and the ads perform better than when he made them manually.
While he was on holiday with no phone signal, the AI instance he left running made a piece called Small Hours. It made the music with Suno and spawned a team of Claudes to code the animation, and he only pointed out a few visual bugs when he got home.
Used the AI.ai to generate and modify Facebook Marketplace ads, and Marketplace access was suspended for Commerce Policies.
Replying in the prompt thread, he says the AI hosts and updates their family dashboard on its own. Attached to it is a store: he set up a Bluetooth NFC reader beside it that works like a card scanner. The kids scan a card to see their point totals, and when they buy something the points come off their total. They can check a balance, move points between them, and take points out as cash. He says it has been a huge hit.
He moved his reading history from Goodreads to BookHive, onto his own AT Protocol data, and pulled in Audible data too. The AI cleaned up 389 books along the way.
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.
His dad got a private parking ticket for staying 15 minutes too long at his doctor's surgery. The AI drafted the POPLA appeal, it cited the Equalities Act, and his dad saved £100.
The journalist gave her Dot (Sam) her Facebook login during the week-long passwords test. Meta's systems flagged the agent's activity as a bot, and her Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp accounts were temporarily locked.
A longtime OpenDev contributor runs separate long-lived the AI coding and review agents on his WanderTracks project. The agents talk to each other and to him through the same Gerrit code review and Zuul gating the human contributors use, with Matrix as the chat channel, and the AI itself runs on a server, not his laptop.
Lianna Torres (down 70+ lbs, still working toward her goals) asked her agent 'Clover' for a personalized workout at 5'3"/188 lbs targeting stomach fat and overall toning. The app asked about injuries, then generated 'Day 1: Full-Body Foundations' (bodyweight squats, incline push-ups), which she followed on her TV at home.
The AI found the hidden WAL sync bug in his shelved delay queue; he rewrote it and got benchmarked results like 107,500 durable adds per second.
With his wife and two kids sick, he used AI connected to his recipe database and Instacart to order the ingredients for a recipe from Safeway by voice. The groceries were at his door in about 30 minutes.
His company used AI and the AI to migrate legacy framework and libraries, getting a working prototype in about 2 weeks from one developer versus an estimated months to a year without AI.
The AI wrote the tooling to annotate historic map tiles and a CV model ran across the rest for an exhaustive study of unlisted formal gardens in Ireland; a decade-planned project done in a weekend.
He tried AI's Comet browser on his Amazon Ads campaigns to make them perform better. He says it raised his ROAS by 120%.
Kndarp sent the AI a photo of a broken IKEA cupboard door with its article number. The AI searched his emails for the original order number, reached out to customer support on chat, and arranged a replacement parcel arriving next week at no cost — 'No £ spent.'
He built a setup that links the AI with Photoshop to handle a work task that is too fiddly to call simple. When a request came in from a client, the setup did the work and he delivered it so fast the client said they had expected it to take about 2 weeks.
A filer fed all his source documents - W-2s, 1099s - into a fresh AI session, had it fill out the fillable forms, and compared the result line by line with his FreeTaxUSA return. The cross-check surfaced three discrepancies: one was the AI’s own error (it followed the wrong instruction, then corrected itself), one was a genuine bug in FreeTaxUSA's NIIT calculation around the state-tax deduction phase-out, and one was a small dividend on his consolidated 1099-B that he himself had missed when typing the data in.
Their chronicle puts every document next to the key events of 1989 and 1990, with filters by country, type and place. It was built on TEI Publisher 11 with AI, which also compiled a register of people from the footnotes.
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.