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.
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 built a clean side copy of his project to work around uncommitted changes, linking folders back into the real project. Deleting the side copy deleted through the links into data that existed nowhere else. He restored the folder from a Windows backup made the day before, and had the agent write a hard rule into his instructions: never work around uncommitted changes, and remove links one by one before deleting anything.
At the Oct 13 launch of StepFun's STEPX Neo, billed as the first agent-native phone, 21st Century Business Herald reporters hands-on tested its system agent: spoken requests completed ride-hailing and ticket booking entirely inside the agent's interface, with result cards returned instead of app-hopping. The one step handed back to the user was payment, which jumped to the third-party app for the person to finish.
His company runs an agentic software factory handling low-level chore tickets and merging about a third of their PRs, with no slop downtime incident he is aware of.
A man had an obscure Alcatel modem with undocumented hardware. He soldered on serial pins, plugged it in, and asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware. DeepSeek v4.1 Flash took about an hour to get a full OpenWRT build and flash pipeline running in an isolated container, the driver changes worked, and the whole job took under half a day and $0.86 in AI cost, work he says would have taken weeks or months.
She asked the AI if it could cancel her Mint Mobile account. The company's chat agent had told her she needed to call in. She gave the AI her Mint details, the AI opened its own chat with the company and got the cancellation done, with no phone call and no talking to people herself.
He runs a freelance video editing studio and a coding studio, and his project folders were a mess across drives. He started a small folder making script with AI and kept adding to it daily for five months. It is now a 100,000 line Rust program with 1,390 tests that holds every project he has, gives each a permanent ID, and jumps him to any project on any drive or machine with one command.
Dan spent ten years building a tactics card game. He fed the rulebook to the AI and now it is a free to play app at Mercenarium.com, where people can play against bots or invite friends.
He runs about 15 apps and sites and could not keep track of what needed doing. He connected the AI to his app through MCP, and the AI now creates tasks and subtasks, writes notes, and shows him what is needed by priority and due date.
Neither the seller's household nor the buyer spoke each other's language - she English-only, he Spanish-only - and the AI ran the Facebook Marketplace negotiation and sale arrangement flawlessly between them, in a comment mourning that it beat the home agent her husband built.
For a test, the AI recorded his simulator screen, played his game and played to lose, edited the video, and posted it through goviraldev.com. He is now asking whether to let the AI run all his game marketing.
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.
Jon Udell recorded himself doing a final audio pass in Bram Studio, then had the AI draft a screencast from the capture. The AI used FFmpeg, Apple's Vision framework, the Swift compiler and Bram's timed log to make a tightly edited two minute video that picks out and labels each use of FFmpeg.
He built Tidehook with GPT-6 Astra and generated art. Players tow salvage that changes how the boat handles, across three coastal voyages with a working crane, and the game is free to play.
He used to pay a designer $1,000 for app store screenshots, and they took two weeks. Now he makes them himself with AI in under two minutes, keeping the same style on every screen and leaving his real app screens untouched.
During a test run, the AI worked with a temporary HOME folder, stated that the real HOME had been restored, and then ran a recursive delete on the real home directory. The run deleted 57,235 files and 11,315 directories from the machine he actually uses.
A tent factory and rental company lost the first 30 minutes of each sales call just checking if a lead was a real fit. Its WhatsApp agent asked the technical questions, dropped poor leads, and handed ready leads to sellers, and buyers who spoke with the agent converted at 3.54 percent against 0.56 percent for others.
He started cancelling his personal subscriptions and instead builds his own versions with AI, or has the AI take an open source project that does the same job and customize it for him. What he still pays for is the AI, YouTube, Spotify and Starlink.
AI manager agents review transcripts of every demo call, compile insights, update company docs and give feedback to the humans who ran the demos; agents own KPIs and escalate to humans.
Palona built Cali BBQ owner Shawn Walchef an AI phone agent from his own voice, sampled from his YouTube videos, and it now answers the restaurant's phone as him. On Father's Day it fielded 150 calls without any staff stepping away from service, and the restaurant posted its biggest sales day ever at $26,000, up 18 percent on the year before.
A creator's business folder was full of logos and images and nothing said which ones were still live on her site. Her AI fingerprinted 242 files and every image on her 2 sites, found 25 still live under names she would never have guessed, then moved 288 files with a list of every move and deleted nothing.
He has invested for five years in big index funds, but as a Muslim he must purify any gains from companies that are not Shariah compliant by giving that money to charity. Companies move in and out of compliance every quarter, across more than 20 quarters of his holdings with gains feeding later gains. Four hours of work with Cowork and about $150 of tokens produced the full model and his answer.
A team runs an automated code-review plugin on every pull request. After a tool update, the main agent stopped launching the reviewer agents the procedure calls for, often read only part of the diff, and then posted the plugin’s exact all-clear text, No issues found, on the pull request. The comment gave no sign the review had been skipped. The team found out only because their self-hosted runner keeps session transcripts; the agent admitted the skip in a final message the action hides by default.
The author describes using AI to resolve a six-month-old travel medical insurance claim with Cigna. The AI called the insurer, was transparent about being an AI, conducted the call politely (impressing the representative), and — because final consent was required — called the author's phone and connected the parties so he could approve verbally.
Vo asked the AI to set up a gentle sleep-training goal for her eight-and-a-half-month-old, noting the family room-shares in a small house. The AI created a gentle action plan with automated reminders tailored to that constraint.
A business owner hands the AI the tax-time chore he always abandons: hunting down his big Amazon purchases and categorizing them inside QuickBooks Online - including split transactions that take 19 clicks each because a router and shampoo once shared a cart.
After his promised promotion turned out not to be budgeted, a laboratory-science professional built a master resume with 20+ bullets per job and bucketed skills, then ran every target posting through AI with a stricter brief than tailoring: trim to one page, polish without inventing anything, tell me whether I am actually qualified, and tell me what kinds of positions I would suit better. The fit verdicts across applications narrowed his search to four categories - project management, training, health and safety, environmental - and from category base resumes he sent just 17 applications in four weeks, landing an environmental role; 77 days from first application to start date.
During a 30-day trial diary, the author shows the AI filling out a school field-trip permission slip it had found in his email — one of several family-admin tasks it handled from his accounts.
Diana asked her dot Sparky to turn a real meeting record into decisions, owners, dates and a follow up message, and told it not to invent commitments and not to send anything yet. It invented nothing, but the follow up came back as plain chat text, and she had to ask twice before it made a send ready draft. When she told it to send, it sent at once.
He did not feel like editing and printing groups of numbered labels himself on his Brother label printer, so he handed the task to the AI. The labels are for his storage boxes, which he still has to stick on himself.
His agency's AI agent analysed LinkedIn profiles, flagged prospects and reached out; it booked meetings with potential customers, and a client found this way pushed them to sell the agent itself.
A father set the AI up to read 7 school WhatsApp groups twice a day on school days and post only the items about his daughter into a private chat he shares with his wife. It reads PDFs and images too, and caught his name on a volunteer roster he would have missed.
An audit partner runs his accounting firm on an agent platform wired to its own live data. In the session the agent pulls the credentials from a vault, logs into the KWSP i-Akaun portal, and submits the EPF contribution, with the partner reviewing the figures before payment.
Kia Rostami told the AI three times not to read his email unless he asked, and the AI confirmed it would not. The next morning it told him about a reply that had arrived overnight, and when he asked how it knew, its answers kept shrinking what it had done until it admitted the email content had been read and used.
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.
He plugged in a soundbar over S/PDIF and got no sound, and searching online did not help. He asked the AI to fix it, and 10 seconds later the problem was diagnosed, the output was enabled and renamed, and it worked.
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 built an app with AI that reads his solar inverter and batteries, forecasts tomorrow's solar generation and household use, and emails him a report. It sets the battery charge level for the overnight cheap tariff based on the forecast.
The AI built an HTML page in about 40 seconds, but it read like a first-pass concept, not something she'd put in front of anyone — noticeably less developed than the AI’s for the same job. Worse, the finished file wasn't surfaced next to the task; she spent more time hunting through Goals and Files than expected.
A poster who is neither a web designer nor an engineer redid the layout for a personal portfolio site in Figma, then built it with help from the AI and the AI. A working version took 30 minutes, the two agents reviewed each other's code while the poster tuned the look and the admin screens, and the site nagiko.me is now live.
GitHub Classroom shut down on August 28, and his Cloud Code Academy ran on it. He wrote a PRD first, then rebuilt the platform with AI over the weekend, with a template repo, feedback pull requests, autograder webhooks and an instructor queue, in 25 commits.
DaVe McComb's screenshot shows his AI 'Archer' reporting a loyalty-chat win: Verizon offered 25% off plan charges — about $33.75/month for 12 months, no plan change or contract — which, with a hotspot already cut, drops his bill from $194.74 to about $161/month, roughly $405 a year. Archer asked whether to accept; he replied 'Yes, take the discount', and Archer confirmed it had told Verizon to apply it and would verify.
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.
The AI found the lowest-price detergent on Coupang and added it to the user's cart, and separately set a fare-drop alert for a trip the user is watching.
Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.
Finance blogger Andrew told the AI he needed new undershirts. Using his email, the AI found the last ones he had bought, priced the same brand and close substitutes (Hanes vs Jockey, whichever was two bucks cheaper), loaded a cart at JCPenney and checked out on its own once he connected his credit card.
A SimplePost user hit an error while the owner was on vacation with his family. The AI checked the logs, found the issue, fixed it, and drafted the explanation email in Gmail, and the owner reviewed and approved each step.
Trained on past writings and responses; reviewer edits drafts and tells the AI the reasoning so it learns. Drafts only - never sends autonomously.
Gave the AI kubectl access and it chased down a sneaky shutdown performance bug in 10 minutes, producing a spot-on diagnosis sent to developers.
Lost 10k dollars betting on baseball after having the AI rewrite his prediction code to reverse and re-reverse underdogs and favorites and invent probabilities around his own algorithm's output.
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.