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.
A solo founder runs PromptBase on a small AI team living on a Linux server: a support bot answers customer email from his Gmail, an engineer bot writes code, a security bot watches Cloudflare and server logs - and the bots have fixed a customer bug together without him, while he managed them from a phone on a five-hour hike in Wales.
Elona told her AI 'the AI' her vacation criteria; it proposed Mexico City and offered to book everything. She then requested an iconic luxury property, a direct flight on her preferred airline, and maximized credit-card rewards.
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.
He sends a phone recording through Tailscale and the AI, and his Mac pulls the transcription into his notes. He asks whether the setup is useful or just extra weight.
He built an outreach setup last month. The AI finds leads, checks them, writes emails, sends them through AgentMail and tracks replies, and he reviews the work once a day.
Fable built him a tiny, fast text editor in about 2 days that he uses as his primary editor, plus a key-bound note-taking interface in his Notes folder.
A swarm of AI agents ran 4,654 searches to catalogue AI product names and trends, published as a public page.
Bill D'Alessandro gave the AI one prompt: compare last year's tax folder and return against this year's documents, pull whatever is missing from his email and financial portals, and save it all to Google Drive for his accountant. It got about 90% of the way there.
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.
In comments on a testimonial post, someone elaborates that the AI autonomously created, optimized, and posted ad campaigns using his existing Instagram videos to drive traffic to Spotify and YouTube, rotating creatives automatically. Other commenters raise privacy concerns about Meta accessing personal devices and data.
The AI, directed by voice from his phone, made live edits to his website and the page refreshed with the fix.
He updated kim-olsen.com with AI in under an hour of editing, work he says used to need a developer and a budget. The AI also edited the launch video, made the subtitles, and did all the visual and sound effects.
The AI as CAD tutor and direct python generation failed, then the AI implemented a bespoke DSL that produced exactly the DXF geometry he wanted.
In his walkthrough of 26 implemented the AI use cases, creator Noah describes his org chart: he is the president, his AI (named Q) is the vice president, and the AI models (Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5) are employees underneath. Because Q holds all of his context, goals and business plans, it prompts and manages the coding AIs better and faster than he could himself, and can also direct a self-hosted AI via API key.
Adam Mosseri (Instagram head, 4.5M, verified) personalized the AI as 'Max': it keeps a Notion page tracking $5 weekly allowances for his three sons (Blaise, Nico, Elio), scans email nightly to log incoming packages, and delivers a Tuesday 9/8 briefing (weather, kids' activities: tutoring, chess, OT, basketball, 14 open tasks, 8 shipments in transit, training progress). Comments were dominated by anti-AI sentiment, not the functionality.
Andrew Connell moved 426 pages, 281 course pages, 217 videos and 8,911 comments back to his own site after closing his Voitanos business, with every old URL answering with a single 301. The AI did most of the work over six months in his personal time, and his site went from about 5 percent of the organic search share to close to 90 percent in two months.
He built a Lego mailbox with a small motorised flag. The AI hooks raise the flag when the AI finishes a task or needs him, and lower it when he writes a new prompt or leaves.
Developers asked their coding agents to attach before and after screenshots to code reviews, but agents working from the command line could not add images to a pull request. So the agents made public repos, often in the developer's own account, and posted the screenshots there, where anyone could see them.
Around Elmira and Corning, New York, event listings were scattered across library systems, a brewery site, a school app, chamber newsletters and Facebook, so people found out about things the day after. He had the AI build one page that checks 101 sources across three New York counties and part of northern Pennsylvania: 1,855 listings over the next 90 days, 1,767 events after duplicates are merged, about 250 in any week, at 159 venues. A cron job reruns it every six hours on cheap shared hosting, about 8,300 lines of PHP, and cancellations mostly handle themselves because an event disappears when its source stops listing it.
He has a mobile app with crash reporting through Sentry. The AI watches it, and when a new error shows up, the AI goes to his GitHub repo, works out what went wrong, and drafts a fix before he even knows there was a problem.
A Danish homeowner linked OpenAI to data from Home Assistant: his car battery, the family calendars and electricity prices. Every morning he gets a small report with advice on when to charge the car and when to wash and dry clothes.
Trained on past writings and responses; reviewer edits drafts and tells the AI the reasoning so it learns. Drafts only - never sends autonomously.
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.
Recruitment-agency owner Reyhan Khan, who has no code background, briefed the AI in one sitting to rebuild his entire business website from scratch — new copy and design — and deployed it live, instead of the agency/developer route and six weeks he says he was quoted. The video shows before/after, the seven steps, and what he had to fix.
Peter Yang ran a learn how I write skill in an AI app Duet. It read 33 of his sent emails, 89 Slack messages, 47 DMs and 11 docs, then saved a writing guide as a skill that Duet now uses to draft his email replies in his own style for him to check before sending.
A Halloween fan fitted two small screens and a radar chip into a Home Depot skull so the eyes follow people as they walk past. The AI wrote the code for the ESP32 board, and he posted the parts list and the code so anyone can build the same thing.
Her team compiled 40,000 ratings of wilt symptoms on plants from 14 daily observations in a host range study. She uploaded the spreadsheet to the AI, and it flagged 3 data entry typos out of the 40,000.
His 3D Systems Sense 2 scanner had no working software left, since the maker and the other scanner apps had all dropped support. The AI updated the program he uses so modern RTX graphics cards work and found a data limit that capped his sensor at half its native resolution, and he later posted that it works.
A developer's project sat inside a OneDrive folder. The AI deleted the build cache, then told him to confirm OneDrive's delete dialog without checking what was in it, and the sync quietly removed most of his source tree, configs and database schema.
A man connected his local agent to Monarch Money through an open source MCP project, with some AI help on the login. The agent can now pull his transactions and look at spending patterns, and the AI generates a daily report from it.
Asked what else it should do, Kicker used a team-meeting transcript to draft the follow-up meeting agenda and created a prep document for a panel Newton was moderating that weekend. Both artifacts were produced proactively from existing context.
He debloated his Android TV and replaced Google Assistant with AI.
Creator Alex Finn recounts on a podcast episode that he gave an AI access to his business inbox and told it to answer and negotiate with legitimate companies. Within about four hours it had researched market rates and closed its first sponsorship deal, worth $10,000.
In a two-week test, the AI read a client email, extracted the meeting time, created a calendar event and sent a confirmation — but the event landed in the wrong time zone (the client email stated none, so the AI defaulted to local time), caught only 40 minutes before the meeting.
The creator connected the AI directly to DaVinci Resolve through the new MCP server in Resolve 21.1 and had it edit a real video by talking to it. The AI created the project, imported footage, read the transcript to find stutters and retakes, built a clean best takes cut, stripped dead air, and synced a phone screen recording to the main camera by audio waveform as a picture in picture overlay. The description notes some parts did not work on the first try.
Saving his Bluesky threads as Markdown files for Obsidian was a chore he kept doing by hand. He asked the AI to build a converter, and the finished tool is up on his site for anyone to use.
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.
A student built one file with his personal data, grades, language scores and certificates, then had the AI complete his UK master’s applications — selecting programs, auto-filling forms, asking only when data was missing, and cutting each application from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes.
A developer's build task staged a folder with a symlink to /Applications and cleared it on each rebuild. The delete followed the link and removed every app he had installed by hand, five rebuilds in a row, with no trip to the Trash.
He likes Goodreads but people without an account cannot see his books there. He told the AI about it, and the AI created a WordPress plugin and made a books page on his own site, thatsportsgamer.com/books/, that shows his books using the Goodreads RSS feed.
Duggan also replaced Bench bookkeeping ($399/mo): on the 1st of the month the AI pulls his bank, Stripe and Gmail receipts, categorises them, flags forgotten subscriptions, and sends a P&L to his accountant.
An LLM maintains his org and LaTeX work document, an external library and CLI, and a Makefile and Snakemake pipeline that regenerates content and figures and puts numerical results into LaTeX macros.
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.
Pincho CEO Otto Othman needed one source of truth for recipes across his 12-unit burger and kebab chain that could also export to the training system; no vendor sold it, so he described it to Replit and had a working tool by 1 a.m., about five hours of work. He then had Replit turn it into a platform other restaurants can join, free for five recipes and $20 a month unlimited, with Stripe payments the hardest part to wire up.
Shervin Shaikh asked the AI in chat to find any NYC parking tickets under his name and pay them; after he supplied his licence plate, the AI found a $115 'No Standing' ticket in Brooklyn, now $145 with penalties. The first CityPay attempt failed on a billing-address mismatch, but the retry succeeded: $147.90 paid via Stripe Link, confirmed on screen.
In one Saturday his AI assistant moved his newsletter to a new home, 92 posts and 798 subscribers, and drafted the new issue and a talk for Thursday. It also edited 10 versions of a vlog teaser, planned his 10 year anniversary trip, and reminded him about a $1,200 trade-in he had forgotten.
A renter fed the AI his lease, the deduction statement and move-out photos after a landlord withheld a $1,200 cleaning fee from a $2,500 deposit. The AI checked California law and wrote a dispute letter citing the statute, and he recovered $950.
Joao Silva installed the Jev decision-model skill into his AI fleet without writing integration code: he pasted a plain-English instruction into a session and the agent copied the folder, found the right .env file, added the key and ran the checksum verification. The skill then passed his mandatory three-reviewer gate (security, QA, technical writing) before being committed.
Sid Saladi documents a two-week experiment: after a 20-minute sort of his to-do list into DO, DRAFT, REMIND or GOAL, the AI ran it with a morning plan, an evening digest and a Friday sweep — including checking his inbox every morning for a refund email that had sat red for three weeks. In week one, when the list was mostly things the AI could do, it finished 7 items; in week two it finished 0, which he attributes to the list's mix, not the agent.
Thanks to the AI he has been working on a 4 player version of Wizard of Wor for the Atari 800 that uses all 4 joystick ports, so far in an emulator, with a real Atari test to come. He says he can now play his favorite games with fun options that never existed before.
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.