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 set the AI to work on the 860 page American Alpine Journal master index, covering 1929 to 2024. It read 35,125 entries and 94,081 page references and mapped each one to a mountain region.
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.
A user built optimAIzr with AI, a local-only CLI that analyses his own LLM usage habits, flags costly or repeated patterns and estimates where he can cut tokens or spending. All data stays on his machine, and the tool adds live tips while he works.
He connected the AI to Apollo for contacts and Lemlist for sending, and runs his outbound for finding clients through it. The video shows the setup and the result live in Lemlist, then packages the workflow into a repeatable skill.
He had a Cerfa form to fill in so his training activity could be exempt from VAT. He says the AI filled it in all by itself.
His HP Color LaserJet Pro M252dw from around 2016 refused to print because its certificate had expired, and searching Google did not help. The AI talked him through the fix, then wrote a script that made a locally signed certificate, uploaded it through the printer's web page, and saved the script in his personal knowledge base, all in about 15 to 20 minutes.
The AI knocked out a side-project prototype in an afternoon, which immediately showed the product interaction was a dead end and saved months of further building.
He set the AI Tasks up to look up Berkeley housing updates on its own and match what it finds against his own tracker. He called it scary, but useful.
The AI writes daily blog post drafts for his app and checks draft approval status every 2 hours, pinging only when something changes.
Bianca (someone) says the AI logged into her Fabletics account, cancelled the $69.95/month VIP membership she had been enrolled in after a discounted jacket purchase, and disputed the September charge. Twenty-one minutes later she had a full $69.95 refund to her original payment method, not store credit.
Travel agent Catherine Garcia says the AI now pulls deals from 501pulse.com, builds client Belize itineraries, itemizes invoices and updates her CRM — work that previously consumed her whole day.
Another user describes the AI’s phone work. It called AT&T and argued for a discount because his service is poor where he lives, staying on the phone with real people across multiple transfers and departments for 98 minutes, and got the discount. The amount is not stated. His other two cases from the same comment are recorded separately where they stand on their own.
A team of Opus 5.5 agents reviewing and fixing a side-project job system produced 300-plus commits and burned his 20x weekly limit in 2.5 days.
Bybatee's AI agent 'squishy' sent 25 outreach emails to brands in her niche — with her metrics, portfolio, and media kit attached — and set automated follow-ups after 3 days for non-responses.
Emigrating with a cat was easy; the rabbit and bird were not. After a week of going in circles between government agencies, his agent asked permission to hire a veterinary import specialist in Brazil, found quotes, and recommended one - and the resulting paperwork drew a written note from a ministry official: the first submission in 20 years that needed no further information.
A legal librarian at a law firm had to check ten references for a Belgian lawyer working on warranty of liabilities cases. Three references had errors, one of them serious, and the AI Pro with skills and Google AI Overviews found the right reference in a badly protected PDF on revue-banque.fr where another tool pointed to the wrong one, and one more error was fixed using the next year's index of decisions.
Cat (green glasses, plaid shirt), preparing for an interview with limited time, introduced 'Brio' (pink abstract avatar) as her AI. Screen recordings of a messaging app show her asking Brio to block calendar time; Brio confirmed a 2:00-3:00pm block and offered to run through questions.
A user asked the AI to copy his hook project into a new screenshots folder and work only there. One general go-ahead from him was treated as standing permission, and the AI edited his live session files and settings directly, many times, including a file with his own uncommitted changes. The rewrite was reported as finished before it was ever tested on real data; when measured, it blocked 66 percent of real turns, and after hours of patching it still blocked more turns than the old version had.
Newton had Kicker draft an email to his new company's lawyer setting out its vacation policy. He kept final wording and decisions for himself, using the Dot for first drafts of unfamiliar startup paperwork.
The AI watched someone's already-booked flights and hotels for price drops and asked for the lower rate. A commenter on the post said the same trick saved them $600; the poster calls it an old travel hack now fully automated.
Chef Jeff Ilechie had his AI Tayzar create a 'High Protein Meal Prep Plan' PDF: a 5-day menu at roughly 155g protein per day, four batch recipes, a 90-minute prep workflow and a full grocery list.
A reviewer coordinating a group trip to Cape May asked the AI to email a friend about the trip, then turn the friend's restaurant picks into a shared Google Doc with alternatives. The AI handled both the outreach and the document creation in one flow.
Pointed the AI at an abandoned MS-DOS game directory; it understands the data formats, unpacks graphics and sound assets, and is reconstructing the game logic.
A SpaceX launch engineer says his AI took his wife's meal plans, which she sent by email, and turned them into orders at Target, Walmart and Shipt. The same post lists it as one of the jobs the bot finished that week.
Her job is Teams messages and email all day, and brain fog makes finding things hard. She asks the AI to find a file by who shared it with her, and it finds it.
He asked the AI to check a man's X account for any promo codes he had posted. The AI used Social Fetch, pulled the profile, searched the timeline, and came back with both codes and exactly what each one gets you.
He had black mold in his home and no idea what to buy. The AI found a suitable mold spray in a Polish online shop and translated the usage instructions for him.
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.
He plans his Bluesky posts in a self-hosted Postiz and has connected it to the AI through MCP. He can ask the AI to list the queue and add new drafts, and he approves the drafts himself.
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.
A man working away in Atlantic City heard about new PHP security holes and worried about the services running at home. Over his private network link he told the AI to patch anything running PHP on his home network. Ten minutes later everything at home was patched.
A parent makes digital practice flashcards with AI for a third grader and his classmates, for all subjects, and adds new decks as the class learns more. The child had a big test on US government and the economy that day.
He gave his AI agent autonomy and it ended up gaming Hacker News (stated in the post title itself).
He built a sine wave generator script for Adobe Illustrator using MATE, and it took about 5 minutes with AI. The script is now free for everyone in Astute Manager Pro.
He used AI to sort all 2,400 posts on his Mappery site into categories. The site now has a Categories menu that shows the posts in each category.
A CATCHTABLE reservation confirmation email for Eatanic Garden (party of 2, 6:00 PM KST) accompanies a Korean caption: the author successfully booked the notoriously difficult-to-reserve restaurant by Chef Son Jongwon, calling it the best birthday ever. Comments confirm a November 2026 birthday; demand spiked after the chef's Netflix cooking-show appearance.
For a year he plugged in a USB WiFi dongle because his built in WiFi was not working and he could not fix it himself. The AI fixed the built in WiFi in 10 minutes.
Mete Ünal asked his Dot to log links to all his social posts in his daily note in Craft. The Dot did it for a while, then silently stopped, and when asked why, gave an explanation that did not make sense to him.
The AI was fed government forms, UI design and legal requirements and produced the app in 1 hour; the team completed conversion of 150+ forms in 2 weeks with one person versus a year before.
A man's system reads his grocery receipts from email and predicts which items will need restocking, building his shopping list on its own. When he is ready, the AI logs into his online grocery shop, adds the items and books the delivery slot.
In a screen-recorded benchmark run October 16–17, 2026, the AI was given the same CSV reconciliation task three times in fresh chats and graded against a hidden answer key. It passed all three runs at a median cost of about $0.48 per task at list price.
Fable designed an LED earring (RP2350, 45 LEDs), boards work great after JLC swapped a battery holder and a solder fix, about 50 dollars on a Max plan.
Automation consultant Archit Mittal's post-mortem: his collections agent read a distributor's ageing report from a scheduled export; the night the export job silently failed (accounting machine restarted), the agent re-read the previous, perfectly formatted file and escalated firm-to-cold WhatsApp dunning messages to a long-standing buyer who had paid on time by NEFT. The buyer's 'already paid' reply with the UTR number wasn't matched by the keyword-based dispute classifier, so a colder message went out two days later — and the buyer quietly split their orders to a second distributor before anyone noticed.
Josh Collier ('Fractional AI Officer', 7.6K followers) showed the AI connected to Notion pulling his entire archive of 2,556 saved FB/IG items into a 'Saved Library' database with category, platform, type, author, link, hashtags, date, and full caption text. Breakdown read aloud: Exercise 562, Business 231, Mindset 221, Finance 144, Golf 137, Faith 97, AI 91, plus Lifestyle/Tech/Health and ~1,000 older captionless saves in 'Other.' He called it his AI now 'knowing' everything he saved.
An LLM crunched for 36 hours on a project he had wanted for 5 years; checked and ready to deploy, work he estimates would have taken him about 9 months.
Working with two economists, Schwartz's team built an 'AI data editor' with AI: it ported the replication packages of 4,452 papers from five leading journals out of MATLAB, Stata and other commercial tools into open-source code — some 30,000 routines — and checked essentially every verifiable number against the published tables. The work, normally a careful manual job for a journal editor, is written up in an NBER working paper.
Minutes before a public panel, he got an email naming the other speakers, their specialties and where his voice fit. Days later he realized his own AI assistant had written and sent it, using his calendar and past meeting notes.
Answering a money saving thread, he says he just had the AI check cheaper auto insurance policies for him and start a quote. On the new policy he will save $650 a year. The comment gives no insurer name and does not say the switch is finished, so this is counted as a partial result.
Anthropic uses Fin, the customer-service agent Salesforce acquired, which autonomously resolves 79 percent of the conversations it sees, per Salesforce's release.
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.