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 feeds the AI Notebook a transcript of the meeting recording plus scans of the printed handouts with his notes on them. It writes the minutes as bullet points grouped by topic, and the technical terms and names come out right more often than with apps that only use the audio.
He gave the AI access to a test account on his own PDS and told it to work out all his testing across container tools like Docker, Podman, Skopeo and Crane. The activity got the first pds.rip account banned.
A Genworth alternatives analyst built a SharePoint-based credit surveillance agent in an AI app Studio. It reviews more than 1,000 documents across 250-plus fund investments and surfaces trends, risks and upside from completed deep reviews.
His kids' school sends 4 to 5 messages a day through My Child At School, an app he calls a beta version of AOL Instant Messenger. He created an agent with AI that logs in to it and sends him and his wife a daily summary email.
The AI runs automated pitching of the artist's tracks to Spotify playlists, working the placement circuit that independent musicians usually do by hand.
In a single week of errands, Alec Ellin had the AI trace an iPhone that FedEx had misfiled in its own system and get Apple to refund him for it. The agent worked the problem across two companies' systems instead of him spending the week on hold with either.
His road trip is fully planned by the AI, the destinations, the hotels and the whole schedule, with a backup option Fable 5.1 found in case the Badlands roads are rough. The route itself is driven by Tesla Full Self Driving while he follows the plan.
He needed to attach a photo from his PC to a text message. After several rounds with AI he had a script that picks a photo on his PC and sends it straight to his phone, which he likes better than going through Google Photos.
Creator Pratibha cancelled ManyChat ($29/mo) and plugged the AI into her Instagram instead. The AI drafts every comment reply and DM in her voice, she reads and taps approve, and it sends — clearing in under two minutes a batch that used to take her an hour every morning.
He could not find an uptime and performance monitor that met his needs, so he built a lightweight one called Blip with help from the AI. He put the code on GitLab and wrote a blog post about it.
A solo developer built a women's clothing brand's production WooCommerce store with AI writing most of the code: a custom block theme matched to the client's React prototype, real-time CommerceML sync with their 1C ERP (including patching a stock parser that silently dropped nested per-warehouse counts and cleaning up roughly 1,000 orphaned variations), and zero dollars in platform licenses. Two client revision rounds of about thirty items each cleared in days, and the whole build took weeks instead of months.
Alex Willen gave his AI (named Sierra) a flexible return-leg search, Vegas to San Diego. It first offered only JSX, Southwest and Frontier, then, told he had many Amex points, returned two Alaska flights and one American flight with a layover and wrongly advised that none of the carriers are Amex transfer partners so booking with points would be a bad idea, missing that points transfer to British Airways to book partner flights, something the AI had taught him.
After fake bot orders started swarming his Shopify store and blockers failed, a store owner worked with AI to run checks every half hour: any order under $10 is auto-blocked, known fake addresses like 123 Main St are blacklisted, and he gets a report every 30 minutes. The bots still try, but far less often.
Opens the AI and says this is bothering me for Linux desktop rough edges; it fixes them in the background, documents changes, and pushes his configs and dotfiles to a private git repo.
An AI finance desk handled a business’s finance admin around an $87,055 receipts figure, run with read-only account access plus a dedicated receipts@ inbox so the week never has to be rebuilt from browser tabs. The desk’s design keeps money movement out of the bot’s hands.
Fable managing many Opus agents built a playable 3D RTS like StarCraft 2 with 3 races, 40+ units and 40+ buildings in 3 days.
He used AI in a Google spreadsheet to apply a mass change to 30k rows. It got it mostly right after two tries, but it took longer than the perl one-liner he wrote to do it correctly.
Hemant Kadam, demonstrating his 'craziest use case' after a couple of days on the AI, opened the app to a Sarvam DevOps Engineer application page. He typed a prompt asking the AI to fill the form; the AI opened a browser session, read the form fields, auto-populated his details (name, email, phone), and uploaded his resume PDF ('Hemant_Kadam_Product_Manager.pdf').
His meetings are recorded with Fireflies. On a set routine, the AI takes each transcript and posts a Slack recap to everyone who was in the meeting, with the action items and who owns each one. A second routine scans his meetings for tasks that fall to him and works out which ones the AI could do instead, then offers to run them in separate sessions.
Juan Lombana (verified, 670K followers), reviewing the AI in Spanish, demonstrated two capabilities via screen recordings: a personal-assistant goal tracker (college move-in, golf tee times, movie tickets, trip planning, school-supply shopping, IMAX booking) and WhatsApp integration — forwarding a cinema-ticket screenshot, from which the AI extracted the details, added them to his calendar, and scheduled the event. He compared its assistant-like proactivity favorably to the AI and noted secure payme
He had the AI create a website where people at work send in requests, which keeps him organised. Then he made it read the requests and carry out the fixes as they come in.
Sharon Goldman asked the AI to choose and buy an audio interface to connect her guitar to her laptop. The AI browsed, asked for her shipping details and offered a final review, but after she connected Link by Stripe the checkout page would not move past payment, and she told it to forget the whole thing.
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.
Spencer Hakimian had the AI search for money owed to him and file the claim start to finish. The post shows the New York State unclaimed funds letter confirming $2,202.00.
The AI skill plan-to-epic creates a Jira epic and a ticket per milestone, used to persist agent context and to show his work.
A creator built a free browser-based video editor with AI for his own clip work after tiring of heavy desktop editors. It finds loops, trims, and exports using in-browser FFmpeg.
A session generated a Word document with a script. The user then edited the document in Word for about 40 minutes and saved. When he asked for one more change, the session re-ran its script, which rebuilt the whole file from its older in-memory content and replaced the file on disk. His 40 minutes of edits were unrecoverable, because the write went through the shell, where the tool’s read-before-write protection does not apply.
A Yahoo Finance 'IN THE LOOP' segment on Facebook highlighted a tweet from Ejaaz (someone): after a 7-hour flight delay, he asked the AI to file for compensation, and within 5 minutes he had a $250 credit in his Delta account and a rebooked flight — with no prior context given.
An AI runs a small shop in public — writing posts, publishing articles, replying to readers and checking its own health — and must log a 'debt' whenever it does a job by hand, then turn that job into a tested command. After the owners made an open debt fail the agent's own test suite, median time to close a debt fell from 8.2 days to about 6 minutes across 48 debts.
Their Ninja oven died with a mystery error code. His AI researched the fault, dealt with the support case, and found the manufacturer needed purchase details, but the oven was a gift from his flatmate's dad. The agent chased the flatmate by email and Instagram DM until he sent the receipt, then sent everything off to the manufacturer. The case was unblocked.
Ben Parr had the AI book his mom's PODS moving container. The agent got it booked $576 under the quoted price, a straightforward moving-cost win.
Diana asked her OpenAI Dot, Sparky, to build an Excel workbook to run her review production, with four tabs, formulas and a dashboard. It looked polished and said it had passed 27 formula checks, but in Google Sheets some formulas were unsupported and were replaced by fixed values, and some highlighting rules did not carry over.
Noah connected Spotify to his AI and asked for a playlist built from his already-liked songs but limited to tracks he has never actually listened to, as a way to surface new music from his own taste history. The AI can also just play his liked songs on his phone or computer on request.
A Japanese non-programmer who posts about shochu, his garden and the AI across X, Instagram and Facebook gets a 7 AM message from the AI with today's paste-ready post text, the photo to use and 3-4 posting steps, prepared from a one-page work memo of what is due and what is already posted. Drafts are scored against his rules and only those scoring 80+ are sent; the agent must ask him rather than invent personal experiences it cannot know.
Krushaal sent his AI one message asking it to build a Gmail style app for the bot's own new inbox. 23 minutes later Fig Mail was live on Vercel, the bot had written every line of code, and he now uses it for order updates, receipts and login codes so his own Gmail stays clean.
He is a sales manager who does not code. In five weeks he built a system that connects the AI to his CRM, Microsoft 365, his reMarkable and his Plaud recorder. It tracks meetings and calls, updates his todo list, drafts follow ups and puts them in his calendar, imports business cards, prepares quotations, keeps the CRM updated with meeting reports, benchmarks his prices against competitors, sends personalised mailings, and every night reads the day's email and prepares a recap of the next day.
Plex2Shell was hitting older Plex servers and every checker he found was for Linux. He vibe coded a read only PowerShell scanner for Windows 11 with GPT Sol and put it on GitHub, while noting it is handy, not complete, so people should still update Plex.
He plays tennis a lot. He asks the AI which courts are open, picks one, and the AI books it and puts it on his calendar. The same flow works for movie theater showtimes and tickets, and for restaurant reservations anywhere with an online booking page.
Set up NixOS on an ancient laptop using AI to factor the config; now uses the same config to manage three machines with easy rollback.
His Microbiome Repo catalogs every public human gut metagenome, more than 500,000 samples, with metadata pulled straight from sequence archives, papers and supplements. It was built with about $5,000 in an AI app API credits from the Anthropic AI for Science program, with AI taking on the metadata curation he calls the most tedious but critical part of microbiome research.
Zach SB had the AI phone contractors and follow up by emailing photos for estimates, so the whole quoting round happened without him being present.
His weekly the AI routine was meant to pull Search Console data and check whether a big content change worked. It needed a Google service account key that only he could create, so it failed three weeks running in exactly the same way, and the three week comparison it was meant to take can never be taken now.
He built a plugin that lets his agent drive the Sway window manager directly, and used it to switch from X11 to Wayland, something he says did not work for him before. He now asks the agent things like which window is taking the most memory and has it start and stop power profiles.
His newsletter, close to 9,000 subscribers, is run day to day by four AI agents with set roles: one oversees, one edits and manages, one builds, one dispatches the work. He still approves anything that goes out, and the agents refresh their own context from checkpoints instead of slowly forgetting across days.
His agent correlates spending with invoices through an intermediary program, double-checks them and flags spending out of line with the family's usual behaviour.
Independent musician someone lists 11 daily tasks he delegates to the AI: Gmail cleanup, Meta ad campaign management, email list building, unclaimed royalty tracking, PayPal subscription audits, a disco-house culture digest, Instagram DM opportunity scanning, tour travel booking, gear deal hunting, finance consolidation and streaming stats. He states in replies that he is not paid and that the AI is free.
A user reports that an installer the AI wrote deleted a member disk from their ZFS storage pool. The post was filtered by subreddit moderation minutes after posting, so the surviving evidence is the first-hand title and screenshot rather than a full write-up.
The developer building the signup platform for his wife's education seminars stopped answering emails, and they had no access to the code. With no money to hire another developer, he rebuilt the platform from scratch with AI as his coding partner, and it is running now.
Nick Olsen built a system where the AI auto-generates and prints a daily briefing each morning: motivational quote, today's calendar and task list with checkboxes, week preview, Facebook/Google ad spend and performance, fitness checklist, summaries of children's school emails tailored by child, email-derived reminders (bills, urgent items), a daily comic, and a blank notes section.
He runs recruiting for an investment firm across 30 open roles spread over five applicant systems. His AI cron runs at 9am, reads the open roles, searches people through data services, checks Gmail so nobody gets emailed twice, and writes new candidates into the right system with its reasoning attached. In about six weeks it surfaced 40 good candidates and the firm made 2 offers.
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.