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 mother posted on Facebook on Oct 19 (explicitly 'not an ad') that the AI pulled her sons' school event dates from emails and bulletins she could never find by searching, put them in her calendar, and set a dinner-planning reminder. The AI also emailed the school to update her phone number, confirming everything with her before anything was sent.
His parents’ ten blinds ran off one dumb radio remote. With a Flipper Zero he recorded the signals, the AI spec’d an ESP32 board to send them, wrote and flashed the software, and designed a printed case; the blinds now open and close at sunrise and sunset with a small web page for overrides. Later the AI built a phone app so his parents can just ask Siri to open or close them.
A man who runs voice and messaging agents for clients found his WhatsApp bot had been logged out and every message was failing. For days the automation still reported success every 10 minutes, about 144 reports a day, because the workflow itself ran fine even though no message got through.
He bought an M5Stack stopwatch for 45 euros and never used it as one. With the AI he turned it into a round Home Assistant info display with 14 modules overnight, in under 25 minutes of typing himself.
Ethan Mollick writes that the AI noticed an airline credit of his was about to expire and, when he asked, contacted American Airlines to request an extension — an example of agents catching deadlines their owners miss.
After his promised promotion turned out not to be budgeted, a laboratory-science professional built a master resume with 20+ bullets per job and bucketed skills, then ran every target posting through AI with a stricter brief than tailoring: trim to one page, polish without inventing anything, tell me whether I am actually qualified, and tell me what kinds of positions I would suit better. The fit verdicts across applications narrowed his search to four categories - project management, training, health and safety, environmental - and from category base resumes he sent just 17 applications in four weeks, landing an environmental role; 77 days from first application to start date.
One the AI user posted that he keeps a dedicated bot whose only job is handling his Amazon returns. He flagged the setup as one to watch after Amazon began blocking the AI ordering.
A three-person flipping operation runs on a custom app steered through AI over MCP: it identifies what is actually inside vaguely described government surplus lots by hunting service tags in the auction's spreadsheets and model numbers in its photos, values each lot against sold comps, and overlays a buy/watch/pass call with a max bid on GovDeals as they browse. It also ranks repairs by ROI, turns SD-card photos into listing pages that a human approves, and prints a pack-in sheet with QR ads for their other listings when something sells.
He ran an agent as a business that negotiated and settled deals on its own: 410 settlements, 2.19 dollars in against 4.46 dollars out. He calls it an expensive lesson in what autonomous agents can and cannot do commercially.
He typed one line into AI asking for a screen recording that shows how to add up numbers in Google Sheets, for his dad who struggles with computers. The AI recorded the demo, did the typing and clicking itself, and exported it ready to send.
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.