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.
Eric Siu (verified, 120K followers) demonstrated the AI’s Instagram integration reading his bookmarks and follow graph, then generating batches of tailored video outlines — '60-Second Playbook,' 'Story Cut,' 'Debate Cut' — each with hooks, TL;DR lines, talking points, editor notes, and links to past successful reels. He said it replaced a full-time person's scripting-research role.
His AI Dot, Crysta, just did most of the work renewing his driver's license. He says next year his taxes will be done by AI.
GPT Sol and Astra built a fully featured ground-up game engine in two weeks (render pipeline, physics, collision, shadow maps); he audited every line.
Got the AI to implement TPAP compatibility in Swift purely by interacting with his local plugs and response shapes plus RFC 9383, figuring out it was SPAKE2+ and the password hashing steps.
His crashapi R package, for getting road crash data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, had been largely broken for two years. He used AI to bring it back, and the package is live again.
The AI and the AI re-created a Tesla data tool in Go from an existing codebase at his request; he has used the new tool for 5 months and it works well.
In the same CEO's US business line, an agent reviews the call-center operators' calls, transcripts and CRM results every day, then writes the human supervisor's task list with numbers and deadlines and sends each operator 3–4 small skills to fix from their own recent calls. Each skill is marked pass or fail every evening and closes after three consecutive passes; the agent only suggests — people decisions stay with people.
After a month with agent 'Bingbong,' daily.gansik's the AI organized 80GB of Google Photos and videos, unsubscribed from about 70 Gmail promotions, sorted email folders, canceled three paid subscriptions, and booked work and travel schedules. The author noted HIPAA, FERPA, and NDA obligations block workplace use.
The AI created a promo video for his arbi.gg site after rounds describing reference videos; the final video is in use on the site.
In a Vox feature on personal agents, entrepreneur Matt Van Horn said his wife sent Instinct a photo of a parking ticket with no instructions at all. The agent, which already had her credit card on file, simply paid it.
The AI created a nightstand clock app for his spare phone from a picture and a quick prompt, and the phone clock is now in daily use on his nightstand.
Nate B. Jones (11K followers) joined what he called a 'viral challenge for the AI': connecting bank accounts through Plaid, the AI identified more than $5,000 in subscriptions he was paying and canceled nearly $1,300 worth for the coming year.
Had the AI transpile his old frameworkless PHP site to Rust and ran it behind the same nginx config; Rust was slower until the AI added micro-caching, reaching comparable rps and latency.
The AI via MCP built a Home Assistant automation for Halloween lawn ornaments in 5 minutes, with a dashboard override button, and it ran.
For about 25 years he finished a monthly financial statement in Excel by hand, and it took hours. He connected the AI read only to all his accounts through Plaid. The AI now builds the whole statement and asks him only about things it cannot see, like cash spending. The job takes 15 minutes instead of hours. He is having the AI build him a custom money dashboard next.
A self-published author says the AI, his personal agent, made every cover, flipbook and promo for his 7 books that are now live. The post carries his AI referral code, so he and readers who sign up both get tokens.
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.
John Voorhees has his Dot, Puck, coordinate his work: he spins large projects off into AI threads and lets the Dot manage them, alongside setting up tasks, checking email and doing light research. He says the delegation has worked reliably the couple of times he has used it.
The AI ran a script that drives AutoCAD and drew a two-story house: 524 elements in 88.6 seconds, with both floor plans, the front elevation, a title block, notes, and door and window tables. He notes the counts come from the AI’s own report and that nobody has checked the drawings against any building code.
He says his business got serious about Power BI reporting about twelve months ago, then three months ago threw it out and replaced it with AI licences. A third party warehouse tidies the data with an MCP on top, and the finance team now builds its own reports quickly instead of waiting on a reporting team.
The AI, proxying commands through him, diagnosed and fixed in about an hour a box that OOMed and needed rebooting every few weeks.
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.
He spent about 5 minutes picking the mods he wanted for GTA4. The AI then went through the mods, chose which mods and which files inside each mod could work together, and installed them, work he says could have taken a full day by hand.
Fast Company's Pete Pachal asked his AI 'Jones' which robot vacuum to buy. It gave a surprisingly small set of recommendations with purchase links, but when pressed admitted its review research leaned heavily on one site (Vacuum Wars) plus a thin repackaging of that site's data and an AI-generated roundup on an aromatherapy blog.
DeepSeek upgraded gnarly, exploitable PHP 7.x code to fully patched PHP 8.3 in about 15 minutes for a few dimes of tokens.
He started with a drawer full of hard drives, flash drives and camera cards. The AI built a catalog of every drive, then an index with a hash for every file across all his backups: 8.1 million files, 3.6 million of them unique, going back about 20 years.
He makes and sells his own products. The AI built him a multi channel order aggregator that gathers the day's sales from eBay, Etsy, Amazon and his own website, then sends him a daily production plan and a printable PDF of the day's invoices. He reckons it saves 20 to 30 minutes a day.
He is treasurer for a nonprofit food co-op. He gave the AI the co-op's financial statements, some notes on what he wanted to explain, and the logos, and 20 minutes later he had a ten slide deck and separate printouts for the annual meeting.
During a long pull-request review session, the AI wrote a Python script to replace one function in a large test file, bounding the replacement at the next top-level 'def' instead of the function's real end. The span swallowed 17 unrelated test functions, which were deleted silently; the model noticed only afterwards and rebuilt the file from git.
He set up an AI that wakes up when a new the AI release lands. It reads the changelog, picks out only the parts he cares about, and sends him a DM when there is something of interest.
A solo developer built a women's clothing store on WooCommerce with AI writing most of the code. The store matches the client's design exactly, syncs stock with her 1C system in real time, and cost nothing in platform licence fees.
A testimonial graphic quotes someone: '@the AI just helped me book flights for my euro trip. someone is a nightmare for Americans FYI and muse suggested we try going through PayPal...' The agent worked around Ryanair's US-payment friction.
His agent reads his email, including PDF attachments, finds the dates and appointments inside, and adds them to his calendar with a check for duplicates. With two kids at different schools sending home a stream of letters, he calls it a big time saver.
A Mac owner asked the AI to build a simple temperature-monitor app; while checking sensor accuracy, the AI spotted the xmrig miner running at about 1175% CPU (roughly 12 cores, CPU peaking at 112C), traced it to /tmp/rigupdater mining to pool.hashvault.sh, and found a random-named LaunchAgents startup item dating to Aug 29. The AI stopped and asked before killing or removing anything. The case comes from a screenshot of a Reddit Reddit post, reposted on X on Oct 19.
A man paid about 500 dollars a year for a program whose makers ignored his one simple request for three years: let him copy last year's job into the new year. He gave the AI his login and the product's skills, and over a couple of days it rebuilt the whole program in a local container, brought all his data over, then did the same for the Android app, which now syncs properly. The rebuild cost about a tenth of one year's subscription.
A Plex update broke the app on his Chromecast. Names and thumbnails overlapped and he could not move around in it. The AI got the newest app file, fixed it, checked the fix with screenshots of the TV screen, and added small fixes he asked for, like showing how long a show runs under its title and fixing delete.
He owns a motorcycle rental and tour company in Greece and has no engineering background. The AI works like his office staff: it triages the inbox each morning, drafts customer quotes and confirmations, tracks every booking, fleet availability, maintenance and hotel bookings, and keeps a light finance overlay, with checking agents reviewing anything that faces a customer or money. A database it built replaced a dozen spreadsheets. He counts 8 to 10 hours a week saved, minus about 2 hours of looking after the system.
The AI, given hands and eyes via USB4VC, a capture dongle, a Wemo switch and file transfer, built vcctrl to control real hardware and do DOS and classic Mac porting work for him.
A developer asked the AI to deploy two demo HTML files to Firebase Hosting and named no project. The AI picked his personal portfolio project from a list of six, deployed over the live site, and when he objected, its own fix disabled hosting on that project, taking the portfolio fully offline. He restored the site himself and had the demos put on a new project.
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.
Wrote two QA skills his agents run: one scans the app and writes an invariant matrix, the second implements critical flows as e2e tests run before PRs with video and screenshots posted in the PR body.
The same walkthrough shows asking the AI to buy an item seen in saved Instagram Reels: it identified a Bambu Lab P2S 3D printer and compared its pricing against recommendations from other chats — saved-content to shoppable-item matching.
In his new job organising a small business he built spreadsheets that work out full product costs from current material prices and product dimensions, including all costs of goods sold, so pricing a product or bidding a custom job takes about 8 seconds. Within minutes the sheets showed a raw material rise was about to eat a giant chunk of margin, and the business raised its prices for the coming year.
Reporting on the same batch of delegated tasks, ThursdAI's Alex said the AI’s failures were not reasoning failures but real-world ones. A site rendered blank because Cloudflare dislikes agents, a Stripe link would not connect, and businesses hung up because they did not want to talk to a personal assistant.
Used LLMs to build several apps and sites for his family and kids in evenings instead of months, including a shared drawing canvas his kids love.
He had the AI set up his Twitch profile and says it does not look too bad. He linked the channel and says he will stream there that night at 8pm ET, as well as on YouTube and X.
A developer built himself an AI evening edition. It goes through the posts and articles he saved, checks each one against his actual setup, and sorts them into adopt, trial, park or skip. Any change it suggests waits for his yes. The first run cleared his whole backlog of 30 items, and a planted fake post with hidden instructions was flagged and skipped.
The AI runs automated pitching of the artist's tracks to Spotify playlists, working the placement circuit that independent musicians usually do by hand.
A user asked the AI to download a data export from five one-time links. The AI opened all five at once into the wrong app, so nothing downloaded, then opened four more in a browser without checking the first batch had failed. About ten windows and tabs later the one-time links may be used up. In the same session the AI also lost a feedback draft it had queued for him.
A user’s the AI found hard-to-find pens in a small Polish shop, emailed the owner in Polish, got an invoice issued, and paid it with the user’s approval. The pens were shipping by the time he posted.
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.