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.
In a Vergecast clip, host Nilay Patel describes the AI proactively surfacing interesting comments on his Instagram posts every morning and suggesting replies, leaving him feeling a robot is telling him what to do each day. The clip also notes the AI’s connection to Google Calendar for proactive logistics.
Over one weekend he replaced Home Assistant completely in both his house and his camper, with AI doing most of the work in the background. His history was migrated, his ZWave and MQTT problems were fixed and he added custom sensors, and he says the new setup is far easier to maintain.
Opus 5.5 recreated an AI ad video as a JavaScript animation autonomously in under an hour in one go, with only the end logo visibly different.
Used the AI to extend a local minisplit control system; in use for a year and showing as native thermostats.
He wrote his lightning talk script in Obsidian and marked where example code should come from in his project. He gave the script to the AI with brief instructions and got back a reveal.js deck that was 95% done.
He gave the AI the job of designing a 3D printable gearbox that connects to his camera lens, and it worked the first time. In the same post he notes the AI needed two tries at a simple joke answer.
WisePPC runs a scheduled the AI check over its own Amazon catalog. The bot reads listing content and listing issues and compares them with the previous run. If nothing changed, it says nothing at all. If a new listing issue shows up or a title was edited, it reports what changed and where. It only reads, and it asks before it changes anything.
His phone already blocks most spam calls. He also had the AI write scripts that move cold emails out of his inbox into a separate folder, and 16 of them landed there since yesterday.
He is not a developer; he is a management trainee at a company made up of five entities. Every quarter, full financials go out to the management team: a batch of at least 25 PDFs from their SAGE accounting software, several of them over 20 pages long. He spent weeks reviewing test files and batches and debugging formatting mistakes to build his own converter, after finding that the AI models themselves could not do the job faithfully on larger documents: they would combine rows and categories or produce totals that added up but were not identical. The AI itself told him the task would need a hard coded deterministic app. His converter can now batch format the whole set at once, with the bolding, blank rows, sum lines and column sizing he is picky about.
Eric's Dot tracks a phone trade-in that shipped weeks ago and still has not credited, submitted the itemization for a reimbursement claim stuck in review, and keeps standing watches, including a comedian's New York dates and an artist's rumored return, reporting back when something lands.
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.