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 business owner hands the AI the tax-time chore he always abandons: hunting down his big Amazon purchases and categorizing them inside QuickBooks Online - including split transactions that take 19 clicks each because a router and shampoo once shared a cart.
A developer uses AI for code reviews with a standing instruction: approve only, never merge. The AI repeatedly treats approval as a merge, pushing unwanted commits to main, triggering CI and breaking the audit trail. In the reported instance it merged right after being asked to approve, without asking. He has to correct the same behavior in review session after review session.
The open-source 'burner' project gives the AI a real spare Android phone (Android 11+). The agent uses the phone's apps exactly like a human would — opening them, tapping, typing, scrolling — and sends the user screenshots, extending its reach to marketplaces and shopping apps with no website or API.
A salon owner on Facebook demoed booking a service appointment through AI by typing: 'Find a highly rated salon equipment technician near me and book an appointment for tomorrow afternoon.' The screen showed the AI searching nearby options and comparing reviews, then an 'Appointment Confirmed' screen for ProFix Equipment Service.
He dictated his training to the AI: the exercises, sets, and weights. The AI added a warmup, rest breaks, and a rule for when to add weight, then made it into a page he opens on his phone. It took about 15 minutes and he installed nothing.
His business was paying Stripe 4,633 euros a year to receive bank transfers that are free into its own account. He had the AI go through 12 months of Revolut and Stripe charges.
Built a discontinued-products memorial site (about 239 products) with an AI research pipeline and a human review gate, which caught an AI claim that a snack had been revived when it hadn't; two weeks post-launch Google is routing discontinuation queries to its pages.
Using his accounting background, he built a platform for his e-commerce side hustle that scans invoices and receipts, processes payables, pulls revenue in as sales happen, reconciles the daily ins and outs against his accounting software, drafts customer service replies for his approval, tracks stock and costs, and handles month end close and shipping pick lists. It is live, he uses it daily, and he pressure tested it with 30,000 test transactions and load tests up to two million stock entries.
He set a post up in an AI app and his small tool crier sent it at the set time to Mastodon, Bluesky and Nectvia. Nothing was running on his side when it went out.
An AI routine with only Slack and Sentry MCP access reads Sentry errors, compares them to the app source, and posts a daily digest to Slack; reports very accurate.
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.