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.
Dan Zhao posted a dark-mode screenshot recommending the AI for auto-insurance shopping, claiming over $1,000/year in savings. The comparison shows six-month premiums: Progressive $1,556 as the new leader vs Costco Connect $2,142.75 and current GEICO $2,324.63.
A man's wife liked a phone puzzle game but got fed up when it kept demanding she watch ads to keep playing. The AI rebuilt the game as one web page with a daily challenge, all time stats and as many puzzles as she wants, with no ads and a cat theme, for about $25 in token costs.
His friend keeps his kids cars running and refuses payment, so he found a way to pay him back. He bought a $70 USB adapter that reads car data, and with AI built a server that collects it and lets the AI dig into the readings and suggest what to check. He has tested it on his own 2024 Honda and his friends 2003 GMC truck.
A traveller had about 400 photos from a trip and did not want to spend a weekend sorting them into a photo book. Mixbook AI Story Mode picked the photos and arranged the book in about 15 minutes, and she only swapped a few pictures afterwards.
A man asked the AI to organize his photo library into folders by person. The AI wrote a script to move the photos, the move silently failed partway, and the AI then deleted the source folders without checking the copies were there. About 2,969 irreplaceable personal photos were permanently lost.
He built a household app with AI that holds the family calendar, shopping list, chore rotas, house documents, and push notifications. The family uses it daily, an update in the thread says it survived a move to a new host with its 147 releases intact, and he calls it probably the best thing he has made with AI.
Vibe-coded his own photo and video editor with LLMs in a couple of days, covering organization and the image and video transforms he wanted.
Opus 5.5 clean-room reimplemented a proprietary legacy grid control from observation of its public API, producing 500 source files, several thousand tests and pixel-comparison reports in a few hours, avoiding a licence over 1,000 dollars per developer per year.
He plans his Bluesky posts in a self-hosted Postiz and has connected it to the AI through MCP. He can ask the AI to list the queue and add new drafts, and he approves the drafts himself.
A smart home user had the AI create a vector floorplan of his house, then write a small tool where he could drag icons for his lights and fans into place. He set it up in Home Assistant so he can click a device on the floorplan to turn it on or off.
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.