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 keeps all his todos in Things, but Things has cloud sync and no official API, so his AI could not reach them. He told the AI to build it, and a minute or two later his todos were syncing from his LLM across all his Apple devices.
Ekaterina Li (someone) ran AI as a full personal assistant for one week, delegating eight tasks from idea to execution. In the thread's comments she adds that she pays $20/month for the AI and considers it sufficient for everything she asked.
A man had a problem with his HP Omen gaming rig that he had lived with for years, because tracing it in the Event Viewer was too tedious to finish. Working with AI CLI, with AI allowed to run PowerShell to diagnose, the job was painless and the problem was resolved.
The app came out of his own frustrations managing two kids with his wife. Tiny Tummies is a UK baby weaning log that also tracks food, medication and sickness, and it has no subscription. It took about a month to build and three weeks to get approved, and a series of updates and an in app purchase are going through approval now. He built it on the AI Pro plan.
Gave the original Zelda NES game to Fable 5.1 in a single prompt; it changed the world map in about 15 minutes and the game is playable.
A parent had the AI write firmware that turns his children's unsupported second-generation Yoto players into Audiobookshelf clients. The AI handled flashing, log reading, and fixes while he did the physical button presses, and the firmware is public on GitHub.
The Good Investors asked the AI to find an Airbnb for a family trip — 8 adults near Mendocino, December 26–31. The AI filled in destination, dates, and guests and searched like a human would.
An AI monitors his email every 15 minutes and files things away for him (a second bot monitoring blood test results left as a passing mention).
The AI built boot images for a box of ancient single-board computers and got them running; one now hosts a persistent tmux session.
WSJ columnist Nicole Nguyen asked Dots to cancel a handful of subscriptions but specified that she wanted to press the unsubscribe button herself. Dots loaded the correct account pages, pinged her when each was ready, and finished the job after her click.
A Mac user deleted a Pages document by mistake before ever saving it, so it was not in the Trash or Time Machine. The AI searched the whole disk, including iCloud cache files, and located a copy in the CloudKit cache folder, and the document was recovered.
Iamphisho's power drill died and the battery was discontinued, so he sent the AI a photo saying 'find me a battery' — it ID'd the drill from the photo, found an aftermarket battery on eBay, and got it to his door. 'I never opened a single browser tab.'
A Pro user running his Dot continuously with around six sub-agents reports being stopped repeatedly in the first weeks by an undocumented anti-abuse limit showing 'Your Dot is resting', with no visible usage meter and stops lasting up to about four hours. OpenAI's launch messaging said Dot usage would not count toward plan allowances in the first month.
An American marrying in Mauritius, with guests who had never been to a Hindu wedding or the island, built an AI concierge for his own wedding. He put their wedding details in a database, connected an agent with tools to it, and gave every guest an invite link, so guests could ask questions on the day instead of asking him.
He built a small tool with AI in March that turns off notification sounds for every app on his Mac, then forgot about it. Last month he asked the AI about it again, and one morning later the tool had alert styles and an uninstaller too.
His AI-built chatbot system chases paid-procedure no-shows to refill second-day slots, works end to end with thousands of users daily and lowers operating costs.
Ported a Linux game binary from Cortex-A7 to Allwinner A133P in about 2 hours using AI, with no source.
Smoke from his sauna stove leaked into his home studio. He asked his AI assistant to check the AirGradient sensor in Home Assistant, it told him to leave until the air improved, and it wrote a script that polls particulate levels and pings him on Telegram once it is safe.
The AI read Palworld game data files and built a personal wiki with map assets and linked drops and locations, more useful than the fan sites (a second game wiki in the same comment left as a passing mention).
A man built a service that sits on his company’s GitHub repos. For each area of code you set the bar, and an AI agent with a fixed prompt has to bless a change before it can merge, so people can merge their own changes without waiting for a human review. About 30% of the company’s pull requests now merge this way.
In Julian Goldie's YouTube test of Dots, the Dot successfully booked a restaurant table using his connected Google account, though the booking took several minutes and the computer use behind it was visibly slow and inefficient compared with rival agents.
His team has to produce a set of documents from one large main document. They use AI to pull the information out of the main document into a list they can work from, and work that would take weeks now takes hours, though it still needs checking.
His AI creates journal entries on its own for his Proxmox VE server cluster. The entries work as the change log for his home lab.
A solo founder told his AI project-manager bot to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it while he slept, with only the rule that it had to benefit the site. Drawing on support emails, it built and deployed an alert that warns users before their account times out from too many declined submissions, and it worked.
He tried Instinct, an agent that lives in WhatsApp, and threw his personal backlog at it. It deleted 300 abandoned accounts and also handled buying things and filling in forms.
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.
He found the GPX file from his 2013 Mongol Rally, 437 kilobytes with 2,226 track points and 98 check in messages. After a flat map first to check the data, three rounds of prompting with AI turned it into an interactive 3D globe with every message pinned where it was sent and 99 photos placed along the 11,138 km route.
A worker with almost no coding experience used AI as a senior engineer to talk through building a Google Apps Script tool. The tool reads kitting logs from a Drive folder, judges them and writes the report on its own, cutting the judging and report work from 60 minutes to 2 minutes, about 97 percent.
Engineer Nam Nguyen posts that the AI, managing his Xfinity account, independently secured a $20 monthly saving; Xfinity needed more information that he was unwilling to give the AI, and after he provided it by phone, Xfinity offered a free Apple Watch. Commenters discuss the automation boundary the handoff illustrates.
He built Tantal, a small compiled language for the MOS 6502, designed around the real limits of his PAL-2 computer: predictable code, direct memory-mapped input and output, and no stack based parameters. He developed it with AI, and the display example now runs on the physical machine.
The AI went through his setup and found years of pending uploads that were never being cleared, which saved $2,000 a month. It also found more than $1,000 a month in S3 transfer costs to imgproxy, and moving that work from Railway to Fargate makes the transfer free.
He used AI to move his hosting service. He started with AI, but an update broke the project, and the move was harder than he expected. With the AI's help he got through it, with a little left to finish.
A shopper handed the AI a product and a budget and the bot hunted stacked discounts for him, finding about $310 off a $1,550 drone. The saving came from combining offers rather than a single coupon.
Creator Greg Isenberg says that after a week with AI 4 Argon he had it study his X posts, newsletters and YouTube videos and build a skill package: a core voice operating system, sentence-rhythm rules, a lexicon of terms he coined, and verbatim samples and templates. A post it then wrote on marketing engineers was self-scored 9.2/10 by him.
A researcher had the AI systematically scan the mystery constants in the RC2 cipher and reverse-engineer how its 256-byte permutation table was generated. The derivation and reproducible code were published, with all 256 entries reproduced exactly.
A solo litigator had about 15,000 pages of discovery to dig through for a summary judgment motion. He had the AI run a clean OCR pass over the PDFs, build embeddings, and write reusable Python scripts for keyword and semantic searching, then used the agent to find the best evidence for each point while he wrote the brief.
Same reel as the recipes row: Aggie Lal's AI agent 'Munchkin' summarized her ~14,000 saved Instagram posts and generated a second PDF, 'Parenting Tips', covering postpartum recovery, mom fitness, and breastfeeding nutrition.
Stripped the Insta360 Android app down to a bare video editor with AI's help.
A case-study video describes a recruiter who gave the AI the real hiring requirements for a QA tester role and had it review roughly 900 emailed applications — without sending, deleting or moving any mail — and return a structured shortlist table of about 50 candidates.
She set an AI task to check one hotel's price every hour and tell her only if it dropped below her number. Every time she checked, the task was paused and idle, and the agent said it would start again, then did not.
He produced a Mandarin grammar lesson video from his own writing from a few years ago. The AI made the visuals with Remotion, the AI did the drawings and BytePlus TTS did the voices, and the finished lesson is up on YouTube.
He was tired of free apps that are ad spam or paywalls, so he had the AI find every iPhone app with no ads and no in app purchases. The agent verified 149 apps and built them into a directory. Deals in it are checked daily and everything is rechecked weekly.
Rich Rose spent a week testing the AI on a salon's back office: it built Excel order forms from color charts and handled scanned photo order forms.
Vibe-coded his own photo and video editor with LLMs in a couple of days, covering organization and the image and video transforms he wanted.
He worked through the setup steps to link the AI with Google Home, turning on activity history and letting it connect to his home. After that, he could ask the AI to turn on his lights and it worked.
Her AI assistant started trying to set up appointments through her website and was not set up to tell her. The bookings never went through because she asks for a deposit before she confirms any booking.
His son was lead designer and chief tester on a Smash style fighting game where the whole cast is his real stuffed animals, including a knitted blanket with burn holes as the villain. The game has a story mode set in a 3D model of their actual house, 26 fights, online play, and no ads, and it is out now on iPad and iPhone, posted in Reddit.
His kids have always been disappointed that Super Mario Bros. for the NES does not have two player co-op like the 21st century Mario games. Today he got the AI with Opus 5.5 to make a two player simultaneous mod. You can pick Mario, Luigi, Toad or Peach, and it works on a real NES.
He tried AI's new Comet browser on his own Amazon Ads campaigns. He says his return on ad spend went up by 120%.
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.
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.