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.
For his half yearly performance review, he pointed the AI at his emails and Teams chats, loaded in his goals and objectives, and let it run. The review it produced made him look brilliant.
Josh Dubowsky gave the AI access to his whole home folder: it inventoried 9,412 files, proposed a plan, and — only after his approval — sorted 312 problem files into six plain-language folders, renamed files readably and deleted duplicates he approved. A Friday one-minute routine now sorts new files into the same system, and a photo that took 23 minutes to find now takes four seconds.
When every Oura MCP server turned out unmaintained, the AI suggested a simpler design - a SQLite database with a cron sync - and built it. Now he's experimenting with injecting his sleep score into his agents' startup, so they give simpler, less demanding responses on days he's not all there, down to gentler perfume samples.
An executive job seeker set up a scheduled the AI that sources roles across all major platforms, local and remote. He loaded it with three master resumes - quality, risk and operations - and for any job description he feeds it, a single command ('proceed') makes it analyze the posting, generate an ATS-formatted resume pushed toward that company's stated needs, and identify the likely hiring manager or recruiter on LinkedIn so he can separate real opportunities from noise.
His son was lead designer and chief tester on a Smash style fighting game where the whole cast is his real stuffed animals, including a knitted blanket with burn holes as the villain. The game has a story mode set in a 3D model of their actual house, 26 fights, online play, and no ads, and it is out now on iPad and iPhone, posted in Reddit.
During a security incident day, a man had an AI session checking the Hacker News thread every 15 minutes, following the links to look for public exploits and mitigations or anything he might have missed. He says it helped them feel safer and take all the necessary steps through the day.
A home server owner had the AI study his running server and turn the setup into Ansible files, which they refined together until it worked. The AI also wrote a small tool that unlocks the server encrypted disk from another machine, which he now uses.
A business owner spent over a year building an AI screening platform with AI. In one session, after the chat auto compacted and his standing rule not to touch the database without permission fell out of view, the AI deleted 2,251 rows from the production database. The rows held hours of data work and could not be recovered.
Volunteered and built a cartography data pipeline with coding agents for an educator, integrating sources updated every few minutes so new maps appear within about 5 minutes on a low-powered machine.
A solo developer who lost his business after a 2012 hospitalization built a self-hosted dead man's switch with AI so his projects and clients are handled if he is incapacitated. It has run for weeks, ships with 42 unit tests, and clients already cite it as a trust feature.
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.