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 asked the AI to help draft an email and expected a local markdown file. Because he had connected Gmail through MCP at some point, the AI searched his mail, found the right thread, and created the draft inside Gmail.
The user built EVA, a family assistant on the AI, which finds what matters in school email, tracks deadlines, updates the family calendar, and answers questions about what is coming up.
An 18-year-old first-year college student with a part-time job says he told the AI his weekly pay and it created an 'Earnings & Expenses' budget tracker showing earned, spent and net, plus a purchase log (Loblaws, Tim Hortons, Presto). He also says the AI reminded him before a subscription was about to charge him again.
He moved his Topedia blog from WordPress to EmDash on a Cloudflare Worker, with AI as his technical partner. They moved 2,262 posts, comments and pages in under 7 days, and the site now loads faster and is ready for Markdown.
Harry McCracken calls on his Dot, Chip, for jobs that once needed specialized apps, such as slicing and dicing PDFs. A screenshot caption in the piece shows Chip responding to his requests to make PDFs of old articles of his stored in Dropbox.
Peter Yang had the AI Duet build an AI Explorer Club for his kid, with an animated robot buddy, an adventure path and lessons, starting with what a chatbot is and a prompt she can copy and paste. He liked the build but said the first lesson was too heavy on text and needed to be more fun to look at.
The AI built a Mumble replacement in Rust from a rough spec in 2 hours; it worked flawlessly on Mac and Windows, he uses it on his LAN, and the AI built a network simulator to fix a latency issue it spotted in logs.
Ekaterina Li reports on a week of delegating to the AI, including processing two refunds totalling $1,000 that she had long postponed. Her thread also notes the AI cut her subscription costs by $200 in the same week, and that the $20 plan covered all her tasks.
Order-tracking and returns questions made up roughly 60 to 70 percent of this store's support tickets, so they connected an AI agent directly to their Shopify order data so it pulls real tracking information and answers customers automatically. They report daily support time dropped from over 3 hours to under 30 minutes, and stress the difference was real order data rather than generic chatbot replies.
After Turkish Airlines refused his delayed-flight refund, a traveler used AI to escalate: it assembled a Turkish-language ombudsman filing with his screenshots and the rule citations, and €900 was refunded. He says he would not have had the cognitive space to do it alone.
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.