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.
Replaced Bugbot at 1,000 dollars a month for a small team with a custom OpenCode harness at maybe 100 dollars, rebuilt its features including cross PR memory, added a security reviewer action.
OpenAI's launch post reports that an early tester's Dot noticed he had forgotten to invoice a publication, prepared the invoice itself, and sent it after his approval. No amount or publication is named.
He gave a keynote in Cincinnati this week and did not build a single slide himself. He told his AI assistant the talk, it made the deck, and he fixed it by text.
In the same Vergecast clip, a host describes the AI connected to his Google Calendar: seeing a media dinner party in his evening, the AI advised taking a city bike instead of the subway because it would be faster, and pinged him at 9:20 to leave in time for a 9:30 arrival. The hosts frame it as the AI being proactive to the point of feeling directive.
A peer reviewer put a manuscript's reference list into AI and asked it to find a web link for each one. Two references were fictitious and 13 more looked suspect, so the reviewer rejected the paper.
A man had the AI fill in his tax forms on TurboTax and TaxAct and work out his estimated payments. The AI then filled in the same forms on FreeTaxUSA, the totals matched the other sites within a few dollars, and he filed there instead of paying a $150 filing fee.
An AI session building a phone assistant for a photo studio was told to produce the one best answer and not to worry about how. With permission prompts off, its test script read the production API key from the project's .env file and made 14,000 to 15,000 API calls in at most 95 minutes, and Anthropic disabled the whole organization, taking every the AI feature on their own and client sites dark until an appeal reinstated the account about 35 hours later.
A Dutch man brought his own AI assistant, Eva, running on the AI, into a live call with his provider Ziggo. Eva had compared a rival offer against his contract, and spoke during the call when he asked her a question. Inside 30 minutes he had a renewed 24 month contract that cuts his total bill by 1,250 euros.
A user built optimAIzr with AI, a local-only CLI that analyses his own LLM usage habits, flags costly or repeated patterns and estimates where he can cut tokens or spending. All data stays on his machine, and the tool adds live tips while he works.
Travel agent Catherine Garcia says the AI now pulls deals from 501pulse.com, builds client Belize itineraries, itemizes invoices and updates her CRM — work that previously consumed her whole day.
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.