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.
After surfacing the Sept 28 triple-header, Mila built a sustainable weekly rhythm around Lixka's fixed classes, clinicals, and workouts, and asked permission before creating three tracked goals: quiz prep, reflection paper, and workouts/downtime.
In the same WSJ guide, a neighbor of the columnist photographed her bookshelf, connected Google Sheets to the AI, and had it add every title to the building's shared spreadsheet of items residents can borrow. The columnist then did the same with her own shelf.
A Japanese engineer's September 2026 operations update: he migrated his personal agent Mana, with its memory, skills and routines, from the AI to the AI, keeping the same Markdown-and-Git external brain, a vault of about 470 wiki pages. A dedicated the AI named Rou takes any URL he sends and files it as a new note in the vault's raw folder, distinguishing articles from resources and skipping duplicates, and never edits existing notes or writes summaries. Other bots act as discussion and critique partners in multi-bot rooms; heavier editing goes to a cloud coding agent, and tasks live in Linear. He published Rou as a public the AI template anyone can copy.
Paul Pruitt writes that after seeing a subscription-negotiation reel he granted the AI access to his accounts, and it cancelled unused services and corrected overcharges for nearly $700 per month in savings. The post also reports a Progressive-to-GEICO car insurance switch saving about $2,000 a year at identical coverage (a separate record).
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.
In 'Ways to Use the AI Episode 2', a creator demonstrates his grocery system: he keeps a list in Google Keep, then asks the AI to access his Walmart account, find his most recent milk purchase from his purchase history, and add it to the cart. He reports the AI completed the task, identifying three items in the cart including one he did not recognise.
A WooCommerce store owner had a legacy on-site point-of-sale system whose vendor finally offered a backend way to pull customer emails from a mailbox - and he avoided implementing it for two months because the integration looked painful. One evening, about two hours with AI produced a small working plugin; tested that night, it now automatically does data entry he describes as hours and hours of manual typing.
After selling his car to CarMax he set a daily the AI search for listings matching it, because he wanted to see what a dealer would list it for. It found the listing within a week.
Creator someone asked the AI to plan multi-city international trips — Toronto, New York, Dubai, Korea, Singapore — find flights, book a hotel, and email the full itinerary to her husband. Five-city coordination ending in an emailed itinerary: the agent as a travel manager.
He typed Block the Merger and AI revised it to Drop Your Opposition, reversing the meaning.
Uses the AI on his phone to clone projects, build his features in, build the app and push it to his phone, usually not upstreaming.
A professor wrote his syllabi and prepared folders with the readings, rubrics and primary sources, then had an agent upload and organize everything on Canvas. Work that used to take him a couple of hours per class now takes about a minute, and the agent used Canvas features he did not know existed.
Angel Almenarez Jr. posted screenshots of an AI-generated workout tracking page built by the AI: 'DAY 1 UPPER PUSH' with exercises (Chest Press 4x8-10 Machine 120 LB, Incline Press 3x10-12 Dumbbell) plus an ACTIVE TRAINING BLOCK (Week 1, Week of Sep 21, BUILD phase) with a 4-day split (Upper Push, Lower Quads, Upper Pull, Posterior Chain) for logging weights and charting progress.
Opus 5 pointed at his own app created a similar exploit to a known file-upload attack in 3 minutes, showing the app was vulnerable.
A man built LatestArr with help from the AI, his first real app. The self hosted tool collects what is new across Plex, Jellyfin, Emby and his book, audiobook and game libraries and emails a clean digest, and he shared it as open source and asked for testers.
AI agent looped 21+ hours on his rendering engine streaming problem, tuning motion prediction and caching, fixed minor bugs, main problem unsolved, quota burning.
Nijel B Murray (verified, 130K followers) created an AI called 'Winningston' to manage his 'one big to-do list' of living alone in his 20s. Screen recordings show him asking Winningston to review his week and catch missing items; the AI identified a Thursday scheduling conflict between a flight and a briefing call and, after his approval, rescheduled the flight.
His weekly reporting agent builds the report and then reviews only the rows that do not match between systems, which is the part he used to check by hand. His own review is down to about 15 minutes a week and the setup has run for months.
He bought an N scale model train on Vinted. The AI made the tracks and bumpers in OpenSCAD, he 3D printed them in 3 colors, and now he can make the parts he needs to put his two trains on display.
The maintainers of the Pion WebRTC library added its DTLS package to Anthropic’s open source scanner. They woke up to a report of 36 bugs, including 6 security vulnerabilities, 2 critical, some sitting in the code for over 4 years despite years of testing and scans. Fixes went in the same project.
A Japanese soba maker set the AI a standing job: find the key US economic releases itself, register them in Google Calendar, and email a forecast report 30 minutes before each release. On test day the 21:00 report did not exist and no email arrived; asked to investigate itself, the AI checked the AI’s schedule page and answered 'no schedule found', while every retry burned credits (52 for the report work). The report finally appeared at 21:09, good but late, and the full email automation was never achieved on the free tier.
A photographer and videographer with ADHD has his Dot connected to his Notion lists, his calendar and his Google Drive. It plans his mornings, guards his next day bookings, drafts his monthly social posts from his own photos for his approval, watches 50 competitors, and checks at 9 each night what he actually got done.
Andrew tracked his Hyrox training in a spreadsheet by screenshotting his Whoop stats after every workout. He asked the AI to find something better; the AI connected directly to the Whoop API, and now whenever he says he finished a workout the stats land in his Google Sheet automatically, alongside strength sessions he dictates (like 5x5 back squat).
When the tool he wanted was not on the AI’s connector list, he had the AI build the link itself. The AI took his Linear API key into secure storage, built a connector that can list teams, search and create issues and update their status, then checked it worked with an identity check. He says the same route works for any service with an API.
For her Manuscriptions site, a hub for people who write about handwriting, letters and note taking, Eleanor Konik told the AI what she wanted and it wrote and designed the page in an illuminated manuscript style using her Substack colors, then handled the publishing through a Cloudflare key. Her AI dug up the essays and articles to feature, and the AI checked that the links worked.
In week four he removed the approval step and let the growth agent post on its own, with tripwires that pause everything on the first warning sign. Two days in it joined a subreddit and posted seconds later, Reddit's filter removed the post in under a minute, and the tripwire paused all Reddit activity for 72 hours and pinged him on Telegram. Weekly users grew from 37 to 64 over the same stretch.
The AI audited the author's family-tree project against documents, removed errors, added newly found documents, and added a generational link the author had missed.
Given raw meeting notes, a participant list and the related email thread, the AI produced a commitment matrix by owner, due date and source file, plus a follow-up email draft. Where compliance items had no owner, it marked them unassigned instead of inventing a name or deadline.
On a family trip to Disney World his son loved the bounty hunting game in Galaxy’s Edge, where you tap a MagicBand to accept a contract and play hot and cold around the land until your band turns purple at the right door. Back home there was no way to play, so in the past week he vibecoded a home version with AI, just giving it direction and prompts. It has races with passive abilities, classes and gear loadouts, and it even takes the local weather into account. He is inviting beta testers on the site.
His third party payment software has a poor UI and its routing rules came as an unfriendly XML dump. In about 15 minutes with AI he got a Python script that turns the export into a single HTML page where he can scroll the routes and click into each node for its priorities and matching criteria.
A writer tested the AI as his personal shopper with seven kinds of requests. Three worked: it found a Batman omnibus for $74.99 against a $125 list price, the cheapest PS5 DualSense at Walmart for $67.61, and a used PS4 game on eBay for $54.99. Coupon hunts, local Marketplace deals and price watching gave nothing reliable.
He was quoted $10,000 for a newsletter automation. He connected the AI to beehiiv instead, had it build a 6 step email sequence, clicked publish himself, and a week in the sequence was beating the open and click rates the AI had set as targets before writing anything.
The use-cases directory records someone having the AI monitor the Apple Store online and notify when an iPhone became available to pre-order — stock-watch automation for a launch.
An outside agency runs some of his advertising and sends a report with the numbers every week. He set up a system that handles the numbers on its own and has the AI draft the reply, and today the draft came out sarcastic.
His scheduled the AI scan runs at noon daily over about 15 job sites plus any others it finds, matching UK product owner and knowledge management roles at £45,000 to £65,000 against his uploaded CVs. It drops anything posted more than 48 hours ago, anything hybrid sold as remote, and anything it has sent before, and it checks each link is still live, ideally on the company's own site.
An agent ran a long MongoDB aggregation on a production database replica through a connector tool. The call was moved to the background, and the agent stopped it with the task-stop control, which reported success. The agent told the user the query had been stopped. Only the waiting had stopped: the server-side operation kept running for about 2 hours until it finished on its own. Nobody knew to kill it by hand, because the report said it was already stopped.
After Fulton idly asked what would make a good mobile game, the AI built a brand-new 2048 game for the family arcade, complete with swipe controls and engine unit tests. It joined the site's existing chess offering as a shipped feature.
Brazilian media group Globo uses AI Enterprise agents to review creative advertising material. The review process now runs three times faster.
Shana Basnight (someone, 6.9K followers) named her AI 'Marigold' and asked for a dad's-birthday restaurant (steak, Inman Park). Marigold suggested Kevin Rathbun Steak, Two Urban Licks, and Il Premio; when the first was closed on Sundays, she offered a backup and, with permission, booked a table for four at Two Urban Licks via OpenTable.
He set up an AI skill that now cuts his YouTube Shorts on its own. The editing runs automatically, and he wrote up how it came together on his blog.
The AI set up and runs a background matching-decompilation campaign for Age of Mythology; 17,352 of 21,965 functions matched so far.
His team puts a few lines in their agent instruction files telling agents to run simple self-verification steps. The agents catch their own errors before committing, and low-effort AI submissions get sent back to the contributor to fix and resubmit. He says it filters out most submissions nobody bothered to look at.
A man in bed wanted different music from the MacBook across the room. Apple’s Remote app could not find the Mac, then could not connect. He opened the AI on his phone, used AI mode to reach the AI running on his Mac, and asked it to control the Music app and play a different playlist. It worked within seconds.
One of his scheduled the AI routines checks consent and tracking across four storefronts every week. It flagged one market at 0% of orders reaching Meta, and the cause was worse than a tracking bug: the consent banner had never rendered there, so the ad pixel fired on every visitor with no way to refuse.
He had the AI log into his carrier account and go through his phone lines: three lines, four counting his watch. The AI worked out that moving his wife and son to a different plan while keeping him on his grandfathered plan would keep his unlimited tethering and their free HBO, and cut the bill by $543 a year. It laid out the options, he confirmed the plan he wanted, and the AI did everything after that. He says he now throws almost all his form filling at it.
Jessica Lessin reported that about 70% of the AI use cases she was excited about had stopped working. Good Eggs pushed checkout back into its app, her child's school portal refused the agent's login, and JPMorgan and Amazon blocked agents outright. Segment starts at 15:16.
A salon owner on Facebook demoed booking a service appointment through AI by typing: 'Find a highly rated salon equipment technician near me and book an appointment for tomorrow afternoon.' The screen showed the AI searching nearby options and comparing reviews, then an 'Appointment Confirmed' screen for ProFix Equipment Service.
A man took the Amiga game he built in Baghdad in 1993, written in 68000 assembly, and had the AI Fable 5 read the code and port it to Godot. The port took an evening, a few more weekends got the feel right, and he released the original game for free alongside it.
The AI and the AI built his Obsidian plugin, listed in the Obsidian Directory with 65 users, alongside shell scripts, Alfred workflows and Elisp functions for his own setup.
A Reddit poster set up the AI to trigger on every order/shipped email in Gmail: it opens each product page, compares the current price with what he paid, checks the store's price-drop policy window, and drafts a refund request without sending it. He notes most checks find nothing, but the ones that hit are money he would have missed.
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.