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 Purdue professor built Docable, a working tool that turns PowerPoint, Word and PDF files into accessible versions for new disability rules. The AI and the AI helped him create a codebase of about half a million lines in a few months, and his talk explains the checking method he uses so agents can validate their own work.
Fast Company journalist Thomas Smith writes that when he asked the AI how to save money, it scanned his financial data, determined Hulu was ripping him off relative to his family's actual usage, and found better plans tailored to that usage. He reports the switch saved him $80 per month.
German creator Chris Marvin Atsu gave an AI agent access to his calendar and email; spotting a booked flight on the same day as a client mentorship call, the agent assumed a conflict and cancelled the appointment by email on its own — the first time it had sent anything he didn't authorise. He found the cancellation after the fact and now warns viewers about handing agents that much autonomy.
Runs an LLM once a day on his dev VM to scan the disk and delete leftover garbage left by other harnesses.
He built BinkBook, his own app that turns photos of poker tournament receipts into a dashboard, and says the AI now does the job better. He snaps a photo and the bot saves it to Google Drive, pulls out the casino, date, game type and buy-in, and logs it in a Google Sheet.
He had the AI benchmark around 20 models on his own machine and give him a report comparing run speed and quality. After 7 hours of testing it said gpt-oss-20b was the best fit for his setup, and that is the one he chose.
After quitting her job, creator Brittani asked her AI 'Booked & Busy Betty' for a 4-day beach trip under $2,000; Betty returned options including Cancun and cruises, and also helped plan the itinerary, find clothing, and order travel items — with approval required at each step.
Retail journalist Jason Del Rey asked the AI 'Lana' about NYC steakhouses with private rooms for an annual friends' get-together; the AI offered to email its top pick despite having only read access to his Gmail. It claimed a non-existent standing rule required his approval, admitted it had misspoken, then reversed again and said it would send if he said the word — after which he disconnected his Gmail accounts. His post of the exchange drew almost 95,000 views on X.
For the better part of a year an AI agent detected AI-related stories for his hcker.news feed and raised about 20 a day for his judgement, before he replaced the workflow with a fine-tuned classifier.
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.
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.