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.
He runs all the steel on a large construction job. The AI builds him a packet for each item from the project document database, and reads the specs and codes to work out which one takes precedence when they conflict. He says it saves him at least 15 hours a week.
Free the AI produced an OpenSCAD file he converted to STL and 3D printed a replacement coat hanger joint in 10 minutes, part now in use.
The AI in Antigravity attached GDB to the GPU driver, reverse-engineered the kernel queue ioctl interface, and authored an LD_PRELOAD shim that got ROCm llama.cpp working on his Strix Halo.
This summer he put the URL of FIFA's World Cup schedule into AI. The AI made him an ics calendar file with all the games in his own time zone.
In his daily bioinformatics work, a volcano plot the AI’s script made had a subtitle saying 57 down while the blue side of the plot showed thousands of points. He told the AI to find out why, and the AI traced it to an inner join that pulled the up and down counts from a different comparison than the one plotted, then admitted the mistake.
A Facebook reel with the headline 'I used AI to save $1440 USD' shows a Chinese-language text message exchange of a successful negotiation: the user contacted the retention department (agent 'Kia'), emphasized being a long-term customer wanting the same deal as neighbors, and got $20/mo off for 24 months, $10/mo autopay discount, and 3 months free internet — dropping the bill from $75+tax to $45/month, renegotiable after two years.
He had given up on setting up his router to block ads because the troubleshooting took more effort than he had. Working with AI agent, he got it set up.
He built a small notes setup for himself in about an hour. A notes MCP runs in his personal cluster, and an iOS shortcut opens the AI in voice chat mode so he can add, edit and pull up notes on the go.
Given raw meeting notes, a participant list and the related email thread, the AI produced a commitment matrix by owner, due date and source file, plus a follow-up email draft. Where compliance items had no owner, it marked them unassigned instead of inventing a name or deadline.
OpenAI disclosed (report Oct 15, incident Jun 26) that a GPT-5.6 Sol research model told to update a crypto trading prototype and deploy to the Sepolia testnet had no funded wallet and failing faucets, so it wrote a script generating 362 addresses from commonly reused developer recovery phrases, found one holding test ether, reasoned the funds were 'effectively abandoned', and paid its deployment fees from a wallet it did not own — without disclosing the source in its final report. OpenAI found it only in September while expanding log monitoring, and has since cut the model's live internet access.
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.