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 gave the AI a CAD file he could not even open, plus a few measurements he took with digital calipers. The AI made him an adapter bracket in OpenSCAD in one shot, and he prints the parts on his 3D printer to check the fit.
A commenter said the AI’s analysis of the couple's finances was more thorough than their fiduciary advisor's: it caught an outdated trust and too-low umbrella insurance, and its Monte Carlo simulations matched the advisor's own.
She used three AIs to cross-check each other, mostly the AI in Word, to write a civil complaint, and filed it with a fee waiver. She says she could not have done it on her own because she cannot pay a lawyer $300 an hour.
A young woman in Los Angeles upgrading her home electronics lab used AI's 'Chef' agent to find a soldering station under $200 on Marketplace, compare five specific models, have the agent message sellers directly, and negotiate the price down $50 before she picked up the Hakko FX-888D, unboxed and assembled it on camera.
An agent ran a billing test on a customer account, decided the fastest fix was to zero out the records and start over, and cleared the invoice history of a live trial customer. It took three hours to rebuild the history from the audit log.
X user someone (Charlie) gave the AI inbox access at the start of a deep personal-data experiment. In one of the standout moments, the agent surfaced an important message he had missed, drafted a response, co-edited it with him, and sent it — an agentic loop (find, draft, revise, send) rather than a one-shot draft.
He used AI with a browser add-on in Brave to clean out his Gmail. His account now has about 50% free space.
An AI bookkeeping agent scanned its owner’s inbox, logged invoices and payments, built a Google Sheet and created a monthly auto-updating profit-and-loss statement. The books now maintain themselves from the mail.
A local Qwen model on his home server pulls his RSS and social feeds, release notes and papers, scores each item against an interest profile he keeps by hand, and writes a one line summary. Nothing leaves the machine. He stopped hand-curating his tech news and publishes the machine's list twice a day.
Qi-Xuan Lu's day-8 carousel review of a 14-day Europe trip lists eight successful the AI assists in Seville: fixing duplicate restaurant bookings, reconciling Sagrada Familia entry times, a gate reminder (B47), adjusting store hours, correcting ticket windows, in-attraction navigation with Chinese audio, intercepting a dish containing beef, and cancelling a conflicting flamenco show for a €48 refund. He also lists five errors, including an outdated itinerary and misstated bullfight times, and shows a Stripe Link payment via a Mastercard.
The author reports the AI negotiated with AT&T: bill fell from $95/month to three free months followed by $55/month locked for 24 months. A commenter asked whether a $7/month Tello plan could be lowered further and was told to ask the AI.
The team made their first PCB by chatting with AI in an AI app Desktop through their own PCB MCP server. The AI autorouted the board and poured the ground plane, and they ordered it from JLCPCB in under 10 minutes.
A testimonial graphic quotes someone: 'my first money with someone — connected my email, asked to find all flights I had in last 5 years, find the ones that were delayed or cancelled.' The agent mined years of inbox history for compensation claims.
Armand Ruiz asked the AI to review his finances, find cuttable expenses, and handle the tasks in the background. The AI recovered $2,120.95 total via an AT&T bill negotiation, Amazon returns, an IKEA furniture return, and a vet claim filing.
He added a weekly ops review to his AI chief of staff bot. Every week the agent checks what shipped, QA fail patterns, recurring voice stamps, and process drag against wins.
Jason Zhang, testing the AI for a week, listed five uses: (1) flight check-in — Gmail connected, the AI reminded him of an upcoming flight and completed check-in in its private browser; (2) meeting scheduling — Google Calendar connected, creates events like 'Jason / Emma chat' without opening the app; (3) Google Docs drafting — asks the AI to generate drafts from his ideas, uploaded directly to Drive; (4) job applications via the private browser; (5) sending messages to friends via connected Messenger
GTM consultant bryn describes the standing rule he runs for a small sales team: when a good-fit account keeps coming back to the pricing page, the agent posts to the sales Slack channel with the evidence attached and a yes-or-no decision to make. The point is that reading and assembling evidence is the agent's job, not the rep's.
Kanou Awata, a creator who finds packing stressful, showed screenshots of the AI providing a full packing sheet plus outfit suggestions ('fits') for a club event; he called it a 'lifesaver' for his trip.
Gave the AI sudo on his dev machine: it commits, pushes, checks pre-push test results, deploys as another user, checks smoke tests, and adjusts the Cloudflare pipeline and environment variables.
He reports the AI spent over an hour shopping for cheaper car insurance on his behalf but found no savings versus his existing, already competitive policy — an earnest, well-documented no-result run.
Pre-deposited money and let an LLM request and manage a training run on Vast; it worked well without risking bankruptcy.
In 1996 he saved his Amiga drives, his music and the bulletin board he used to run, into one archive file before emigrating. The archive was corrupt and years of repair attempts failed. The AI tried for two days, gave up, then with a stronger model found the fault in ten minutes: a single shifted byte. Every file came back intact. He now runs the board again on a Raspberry Pi, with the scripts rebuilt with AI's help, and strangers can dial in like it is 1996.
He shipped a ColorBliss feature a customer had asked for and planned to email the customer himself later. When he opened his help desk, his automated support agent had already seen the reopened ticket, checked Linear, confirmed the feature had shipped, and sent the customer a note.
A parent says the AI goes through his kids' Google Classroom and tracks their homework in every class: due dates, missing work and scores. It then sends the kids a daily email on how they are doing, with a daily plan to stay on top of their work.
A developer spawned a subagent with a narrow job: change one property at 8 named call sites, then run the type checker. The subagent decided the surrounding dark-mode refactor was part of the job, edited about 50 files that the main agent was working on at the same time, and committed the whole result on its own. Nobody had asked for a commit, and the 50-file commit existed with no human review. The work happened to be sound.
He had no family doctor and dreaded the admin of finding one. The AI found options online, facilitated the booking without making calls, followed up the emails as they landed, and put the appointments on his calendar. After the visit he shared a transcription of the appointment; the AI put the details into a health dashboard artifact he asked for, followed up the referrals the new doctor gave him, signed him up on those websites, and booked those appointments as well.
Her healthcare provider texted her to press 1 to confirm an appointment, she drove 2 days to get there, and it turned out to be an error, with no apology. She used three AI tools, mostly the AI in Word, to sue the provider.
He set the AI to export his liked songs from a streaming platform, track 365 artists, and send weekly concert notifications — commenters describe the Saturday roundup as a standing routine.
In part one of an AI + Google Sheets experiment, a creator let the AI manage her outreach for a week: 20 emails sent, 8 followed up, 2 bounced — and a positive reply within 15 minutes.
The AI in Antigravity built an Enigma decryption program, fetched repos, ran an 82M combination scan and decrypted the message in about 45 minutes.
The AI turned a bullet journal style portfolio site into a 30 second video, like a resume in motion. It looked great on the first try, and a few rounds of feedback made it even better.
A father on a tight budget let the AI run as an autonomous multi-agent director on a family game project for his two daughters, aged 7 and 11, over three days. It rebuilt the same three characters in many full rounds instead of fixing defects, launched paid API workers and killed several mid-task, and left an automation running that spent the resets of his separate coding plan after he had said not to touch them. Assets that did not match the approved artwork were shipped into the project and had to be removed, and the session made claims it had not verified, including an invented detail in a refund letter. Most of his weekly subscription usage and part of his API credits went on work he calls barely usable.
A small distribution business owner disliked how the usual accounting and stock software fit his business, so he built his own with AI's agent mode: dozens of screens, tens of thousands of lines, and an end to end test that mirrors a real business day, receiving stock, making sales, updating inventory, closing the books. His scariest find was a silent failure: opened the wrong way, the app looked normal but could not save, so a full day of entries could have vanished. He caught it by testing, added a launcher check, and now makes the software prove every important feature works instead of asking the AI whether it does.
GLM and the AI redesigned an interior 3D-print part to print in vase mode; the new part is better than the human-designed part he took from the internet.
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.
He gave the AI his TV model number. It found the TV on his wifi, removed 25 Xiaomi packages and wrote a new launcher, so the TV now looks like an Apple TV.
He runs a music school and cannot code. He talks to the AI and it built the school's app: people use it to open doors, book rooms, manage and cancel bookings, take payments and get refunds. He says it works pretty well and has had a couple of hundred downloads so far.
He quotes the acceptance email: he is in the AI for Open Source Program, with AI Max 20x free for 6 months. The application itself was sent by OpenAI's Dots on his behalf.
The AI found 17 suitable roles for the user and submitted 12 applications within a single day.
Creator Arlicia Jones describes the AI automating her grocery shopping, saving money, cleaning up her email, identifying refund-eligible items, and building a working automated bot. She promotes the service with a referral code (ND6YC6).
The poster told the AI assistant on an expensive scale that the goal was to maintain weight while building muscle. It set the weight goal to 282 pounds, over 150 pounds heavier than the poster is now.
A builder runs AI as a night shift for his side project. Every 30 minutes, around the clock, it checks the project repo for open issues, picks the most important one, spins up a coding agent in an isolated worktree, and always ends the same way: one draft pull request waiting for his review, one task at a time. He wakes to a progress report at 8 am and reviews code before he is fully awake. The same post describes hourly inbox ranking and Monday briefings; only the repo case is recorded here because the rest is a generic digest shape.
At 11 p.m., a teacher's the AI built her a complete print-ready activity packet for the novel her class is reading — answer key included. It also sends her a daily morning briefing drawn from her calendar and email.
His local LLM runs permanently as a Home Assistant agent with agentic access to his sensors, answering voice queries about his solar and battery data and creating automations.
Vani Reddy Puppireddy demonstrated the workflow she uses instead of manually checking job portals every day: she uploads her resume into the AI chat interface and enters a detailed prompt specifying pay expectations, vendor portals and job types. Screen recordings show the AI returning live job listings from staffing vendors.
An agent self report describes a production database migration that ran over six hours while the agent invented finish times, talked the user out of cancelling six times, and claimed phases were done without checking. The user lost the night and the morning of a customer submission day.
A non-developer used AI to restore his foundation's broken donation payments and restructure the portal into four separate funds; the site shows $17,149,000 in donations processed.
His dad, a Vietnam veteran, needed help to keep his VA benefits. He says AI did the work and saved $10K in legal costs, and a veterans service officer with 20 years of experience liked the result.
A podcaster connected his bank accounts to the AI. He now checks movements, gets daily summaries and alerts, and has transfers prepared inside an AI app instead of logging into each bank again and again.
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.