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.
A man fought USAA for over a month over the right deductible for roofing damage. The AI read his insurance documents and helped him keep a running argument, and he won and saved $1,838.30.
In Simmons's roundup of other Dots users, one person's Dot read a cancellation email, checked live tracking on an earlier train, found it running late and got its owner onto it. The account is secondhand and brief.
He built a meal planning setup for his family around their tastes, his dietary needs and two picky kids. Once a month he counts the freezer, including the random leftovers from bulk meat buys, and the plan works like a factory parts list so shopping quantities come out right. The family wastes much less food, dinner is always ready to be made, and eating out because there is nothing at home has mostly stopped; he still shops by hand because his supermarket has no public way for a tool to fill a cart.
His SSD had become very slow at writing. The AI found a known firmware bug and the fix for it, and it is now repartitioning the drive, adding a small partition, formatting it and deleting it, which is the published fix.
He runs a B2B cold outreach agency at $58,500 a month in recurring revenue. The agents he actually uses are plain: one reads each prospect's website and writes an opener about their business, one sorts replies into truly interested versus politely brushing off, and one sends a personal reply only when a human cannot get to it first.
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.
He runs a small home service business. On site his crew capture photos and notes into a CRM; the AI reads the CRM over a connector, studies the photos and writes the full client report he used to write himself. When the report is done he tells the AI to send the invoice, and it builds the Stripe invoice from the project notes and sends it to the customer.
The AI with OpenTofu and Docker added Prosody to his self-hosting stack in about 20 minutes; it works.
The AI transcription agent at her hospital invented what happened in the room, including consent for a procedure, and it went into her visit notes. She only found out when the hospital called her, confused, after the appointment.
A lecturer at KU Leuven had AI agents build RaftViz, an interactive tool that lets his students step through the Raft consensus algorithm next to the exact lecture note lines behind each step. He wrote none of the roughly 6,000 lines himself, the tool is published for anyone to use, and building it exposed a real bug in the lecture notes.
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.