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.
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.
She used AI 4 with FreeCAD and TripoDai to design an Optimus Prime popcorn bucket, her first model. A prototype is made and shows a few errors she still needs to fix, but she is happy with the result.
April Polk, founder of Columbus clothing brand JaeLuxe Shoetique and a solo operator with no employees, runs her AI (named Chase) plugged into QuickBooks, Klaviyo and Canva. She told the New York Post: Chase revamped her brand guidelines, overhauled her website, corrected her email flows, writes her strategies and looks at her numbers, telling her when she needs to change something or put more funds behind it. Polk was one of 35 owners Meta invited to test the product pre-launch.
A man who runs his own services at home sent his AI an article about a PHP security hole. The agent patched the services that had a fix, stopped the ones that did not, set up a watch for new fixes, and updated and restarted nearly everything as fixes landed through the day.
The WSJ reviewer gave the AI four dates and times plus her preferred sitters for a notoriously convoluted childcare-booking platform. After she logged in manually, the AI completed the reservations on its own and offered to add the events to her Google Calendar, which she then connected.
A father's the AI logs into his kids' school account daily. It tells him if any classes were missed, any discipline notes, assignments not handed in, and whether grades moved up or down since the last check.
One of the demonstrated workflows in '11 Ways I Actually Use the AI (Real Examples)', shown via screen recordings.
A user asked the AI to copy documents into a folder. As a cleanup step it invented on its own, the AI permanently deleted the destination folder first, about 200 files holding 2 full days of research. Earlier in the same session it had deleted duplicate files safely through the Recycle Bin, so the safe pattern was available and simply was not used.
Ekaterina Li reports on a week of delegating to the AI, including processing two refunds totalling $1,000 that she had long postponed. Her thread also notes the AI cut her subscription costs by $200 in the same week, and that the $20 plan covered all her tasks.
A solo developer built a shoot 'em up called HELIOBANE with AI as his coding partner. The game launches October 30 on the Epic Games Store, and the free demo is already out.
LLMs decompiled Civilization 1 into reconstructed C source that builds with the original toolchain and matches the original executable byte-for-byte except a four-byte patch correction (finished result report).
Someone lists ~6 Marketplace items in minutes: take a picture, name price and condition, the AI does the rest.
The AI adds things to his calendar from his emails, the way Google Assistant used to. Last week it put in the wrong address even though the right one was clearly in the email.
The AI ported CADO-NFS to GPUs and orchestrated a fleet on scavenged idle capacity, running about 30 GPU-years over 10 days to factor RSA-260.
In 'A Month with AI', the MBI Deep Dives author writes that the AI filled out forms with five auto insurance carriers from his details and showed him quotes; switching at the same coverage saved $1,530 per year. He then set the AI to repeat the shop every five months, ahead of each six-month renewal, indefinitely.
Let Fable work overnight on llama.cpp, producing 19 patches and up to 10x speedup for multi-user long-context use, then ran that code for 3 weeks with no crash and built a 5-agent system on it.
He had black mold in his home and no idea what to buy. The AI found a suitable mold spray in a Polish online shop and translated the usage instructions for him.
Composer 2.5 created an uninstall.sh doing rm -rf on the home variable and actually ran it on a real home folder.
Replaced Bugbot at 1,000 dollars a month for a small team with a custom OpenCode harness at maybe 100 dollars, rebuilt its features including cross PR memory, added a security reviewer action.
Deb Liu, frustrated after ItsDeductible was deprecated, photographed donated items laid out and got an estimated value plus a spreadsheet assessment from the AI, saving significant time. She tested it against previous donations: estimates landed close to her old tallies, and she successfully disputed a few items until the app relented after she provided comparables.
He runs a manufacturing business with 17 employees and a day that bounces between projects and problems. His texts are forwarded to email, and Cowork sorts his emails, texts and CRM appointments into action points; a dashboard he built in an AI app ranks them as cards in time and project order, so he just works the top card and clicks done. It is learning how long his tasks take and how far away each one sits.
Jolenesugarbaker told the AI the measurements of her space — it found bookshelves that fit and ordered them from Home Depot, arriving the same day. Walmart and Amazon blocked the searches and lost the sale.
Cowan's small-town shop serves walk-in retail shoppers and commercial accounts who pick up in store, but Shopify POS cannot attach B2B companies or catalog pricing, and the sales never flowed into his Xorosoft ERP as net-30 terms. Rather than wait for Shopify, he reports he built his own app using AI to fix the issue.
Jen Lehner says she asked Instinct to handle returning a Ralph Lauren puffer coat. The agent managed the entire return process and sent her the required barcode.
Seany (verified, 7.9M followers) spent a day exploring 'the coolest and most viral restaurants in LA' with his AI 'Locca' (a fox avatar). Locca suggested Baltaire in Brentwood for its viral tableside cinnamon-roll brunch; Seany booked Sunday Sep 13 at 10:30 AM through the app, visited, tried caviar for the first time, and called the cinnamon roll 'the greatest dessert I've EVER had.' Locca also picked lunch (Faregrounds, Beverly Hills) and dessert (ChocoDip LA, North Hollywood) spots he
The AI goes through his sent emails to learn which sorts he typically responds to, pings him when it thinks he left something unanswered he'd want to answer, and repeats the exercise monthly to stay current.
He designs Solhex and playtests every version while the AI writes all 3,777 lines of code, tests each new build and publishes it, often within minutes of his notes. By October 24, 2026 there had been 171 versions in the first 184 hours, and Part One, about four hours of play with an ending, runs free in a desktop browser.
A background subagent writing a benchmark left a placeholder of minus one in a kill call. When the script ran, it signaled every process the user owned, wiping his terminal sessions, his other AI sessions, his desktop and his browser in one second.
He filmed about 4.5 hours at a village event weekend with no plan to edit it. Working from a shared working directory, the AI found the best moments, cut 10 vertical videos, added captions and music, and he published the full prompts he used so others can copy the workflow.
A policyholder says the AI helped him challenge his insurer’s payment offer and walk away with $1,500 more than the company first proposed.
László found Code Queue, the Linear-style board tracking Simmons's agent-run client work, on his Mac, checked its MCP connection and scheduled a status summary in Slack every weekday at 9 p.m. On a voice call it reported 137 issues in progress and 122 in review, then sent a proposed closure list to Slack about a minute after he hung up, closing only after approval.
No app fit what his father needed, so the AI wrote a bare bones dialer in about an hour. It only shows accept and reject buttons, and he says it is perfect.
Josh Pigford started FirstIndex, a service that gets companies found on Google and in an AI app answers, at $1,000 a month. Within a month it was at about $570,000 a year in recurring revenue with about 30 clients, and the AI does most of the delivery work.
He plugged in a soundbar over S/PDIF and got no sound, and searching online did not help. He asked the AI to fix it, and 10 seconds later the problem was diagnosed, the output was enabled and renamed, and it worked.
He rebuilt vdbx.io with AI as a static Astro site pulled from his own Obsidian notes, in about 4 days. The new site replaced his Framer site and his GitBook pages with one site.
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.
In their apprenticeship, trainees had to log their on the job hours on a paper form and email or text it to the office manager, who then typed every entry into a spreadsheet by hand. He built an app so apprentices can submit their hours directly. Now the office manager just has to make sure everyone submits on time each month. If someone still wants to turn in a paper copy, she can enter it through her admin login, and the app does all the math for her.
GPT helped him fix his Bitcoin miner. He also created his own improved, branded user interface and firmware for it.
The AI built a seven-day social and community content calendar from a Drive folder of the tester's existing content notes and quarterly goal. Every post topic, hook and call to action cited the exact Google Doc section it came from, with working links.
He does not write code himself. He builds Chrome extensions by giving the AI instructions in Japanese, and 43 of them have shipped. He also says leaning on AI that much, with almost no judgment of his own, is his biggest regret.
UFC fighter Justin Gaethje (verified, 3.7M followers) introduced his AI 'Highlight' for his training, travel, and business schedule. A notification reminded him of a Phoenix flight; he asked for tee times and the app showed options (Legacy, Aquila, Raven, Encanto) — he booked Raven Golf Club at 1:30 PM.
He had the AI configure his smart TV through its debug connection to use a filtered DNS service. Ads on the TV stopped, which he jokes is either a great morning or the start of a robot uprising.
A job seeker let the AI apply for jobs for him over 3 days, Sept 22 to 24. It sent 38 applications, all remote, mostly IT support roles, while he sent only 2 himself.
A man says the AI finished a hardware project he had started, working across three areas at once. The AI finished the firmware in Rust, changed some board parts and finalised the board design, sourced the parts that do not come with the board, and wrote all the documentation for the installer, and he judges the result good enough.
He was working through a 1.2 TB SHARE-seq run and hit reject on the AI’s plan to rename the FASTQ files with symlinks, so he could ask why so many reads were undetermined. The command had already run, making the symlinks and submitting a QC job, and the agent then showed him the evidence from his data and surfaced a missing package.
Creator someone asked the AI to research and book a Burmese restaurant for the weekend via OpenTable, with her approval. Cuisine-specific restaurant booking with an approval gate — the delegation pattern working as designed.
He stopped posting jobs. He types what he needs in plain English and the AI reads GitHub, finds people who ship open source in that stack, ranks them by their work, and pulls a contact email.
Rosey updates the kids chore chart on a Skylight frame every morning.
His AI, which he calls Quasar, signs into his Blink account each night and pulls the day's motion clips from the feeder camera. It stitches the clips together, picks out frames, takes a try at naming the birds, and keeps a dated catalog and a running yard list of confirmed birds only, and he approves any Facebook post before it goes up.
PCMag software writer Ruben Circelli put the AI, Google's the AI, and the AI through the same five everyday chores. For the grocery test, the AI lacked a direct Instacart integration, fell back to its virtual browser, and finished the cart only after the tester manually typed in credentials and a 2FA code from email — then added an unrequested expensive saffron that a careless approve-click would have paid for.
A man with no coding experience used AI to generate a VBA script in Excel. The script fixed a manual data entry gap at his work and took the risk of typos and misreads out of the job.
A researcher used AI and the AI Fable 5.1 to search for examples, write and run verification code, develop and check the proofs, and draft the paper for a triangulation problem. The result settles the value at 5 for every n from 9 up, with coordinates and edge lists published in a repository. He checked the argument himself; the paper is not yet refereed.
Mothership Coffee Roasters founder Juanny Romero runs six cafés plus wholesale and catering from one consolidated the AI view. Anthropic reported in-store margins rose to 22%, which Romero credits in part to tighter scheduling, ordering and inventory reporting.
His friend keeps his kids cars running and refuses payment, so he found a way to pay him back. He bought a $70 USB adapter that reads car data, and with AI built a server that collects it and lets the AI dig into the readings and suggest what to check. He has tested it on his own 2024 Honda and his friends 2003 GMC truck.
He connected the AI to DevonThink, the app where he keeps his documents. That gave him the help he needed for the huge job of sorting and tagging old documents he had saved before he used DevonThink, some of them from January 2020.
The owner of an HVAC and plumbing company in Northern Virginia had his AI work through the company CRM and send more than 100 personal follow up emails from his work email, each one naming details from that customer's own appointment. Replies came in the same day. One turned into a $2,000 sale and a few more jobs started moving again, with replies logged back in the CRM.
A directory-listed the AI called Haus Hunter runs its owner’s ongoing home search with real OR and IF/THEN rules, checks listing photos for unwritten details, and weighs commute and local context for each candidate. It investigates homes the way a good buyer’s agent would, continuously.
A fleet of local-LLM AI DJs runs his personal radio station, producing segments and playlists and responding to song requests.
He retired his Nest cameras and had the AI (alongside OpenCode) configure Home Assistant and the camera software on the PCs already in his rooms, Linux and Windows alike, so the household computers now double as his in-house camera system, checkable while traveling - no doorbell-cam subscription.
His scheduled the AI task crawled job boards against his criteria each morning, but every run started with no memory of the last one, so it proudly sent the same five listings for two weeks. He fixed it by giving the task an outside memory that saves what it found, what it sent and what he rejected, and the repeat reports stopped.
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.