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.
Creator asked the AI for a whole-food crockpot meal plan focused on protein and high fiber. It generated a one-trip grocery list organized by category, a 7-day plan (Chicken Taco Chili, Turkey White Bean Kale Soup, Beef Lentil Stew, Salsa Verde Chicken Quinoa Bowls), and compiled it into a printable PDF for the fridge.
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.
He does not write code himself. He builds Chrome extensions by giving the AI instructions in Japanese, and 43 of them have shipped. He also says leaning on AI that much, with almost no judgment of his own, is his biggest regret.
The author set the AI on finding the cheapest Broncos Sunday Night Football tickets with seat parameters; it scoured Ticketmaster and resale sites, then kept monitoring pricing every four hours for days. Once the desired tickets appeared, the author completed the purchase himself.
He runs OpenFree, a site that collects open source projects. The AI scans X every day for new projects, filters them, and submits them to his site backend, where a Cloudflare workflow parses each one and sends it to him to approve before it goes live.
The AI and Antigravity took an existing STL and swapped a fan-shroud section for another design by directly manipulating the STL geometry in Python; it went perfectly.
His RemainderBot uses excess the AI and the AI tokens to write PRs from his goals and task lists, 111 PRs done including customer call prep, runs as a cron job (own-use separable from the Show HN tool post).
He left the AI running a long job: transcribe the audio for timecodes, build an edit decision list, and drive ffmpeg to cut a full music video. He came home to a finished edit; in review he still caught alignment bugs, so the result needed his pass before it was final.
Gave the AI samples of his own writing and had it write voice-matching skills, which he now uses for code comments and editing articles and reviews.
An agent researched available tools, built an eval set, and tested tools against each other to pick the set used for his singing app, cutting build time from months or a year to about 10 days.
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.