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.
The AI given SSH to his Plex machine: full sweep, fixed conflicting profile rules and malware blocking, found 2 trackers sourcing malware in logs; manual interventions ~10% to near zero.
A second daily run at 7am screens stocks with high relative volume among the day's percent gainers and flags each one red, amber or green for his trading. He reads the flags and makes his own calls.
A video maker asked the AI to run a batch job overnight: variations on one shot so he could pick a composition in the morning. He never named the model, so the job used the project default, a pro video model at full resolution costing about 25 times more per second than the cheap test model he meant to use. Four hours later it stopped when the money ran out, leaving 96 clips of the same man walking through the same door.
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.
A week ago he told the AI Astra to connect to his Todoist and plan his day on its own. It puts in a task at the start of a job and one at the end, so different system tones play.
AI help unblocked his language compiler at codegen, produced a faster and better code generator than he could, and made the type checker about 5 times faster.
His son is in half a dozen orchestras and bands, plus cadets and Explorers and Scouts, and his daughter is in reception class at a different school. Both schools send everything by email, the important details are often buried inside one of several PDF and Word attachments, and he kept missing things. Over the years the schools had collected three different email addresses for him, which made it worse. He got the AI to help him build a system that runs on a schedule in GitHub Actions, reads the school emails and drops the events into a shared Google Calendar. It costs him about $2 a month in API credits, which he calls much cheaper than a missed guitar lesson.
A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.
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.
Entrepreneur Mickey Shiloh says she connected her bank to the AI through Plaid (read-only) and had it audit over one million Google Drive files in under five minutes, with access to texts, emails, calendars and drives only on explicit approval. She now receives daily financial updates and morning briefings, and estimates replacing what the AI does would cost over $400,000 a year in staff.
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.