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.
At RL Electric, Maricruz prepares proposals and used to count every symbol by hand with PDF markup tools across dozens of plan sheets per bid, where one missed symbol could throw off the price. Quotr.ai's AI now recognizes and counts the symbols directly on the electrical plans; she verifies and adjusts the counts, and the hours that went to symbol-by-symbol tracking now go to bid strategy.
For the better part of a year an AI agent detected AI-related stories for his hcker.news feed and raised about 20 a day for his judgement, before he replaced the workflow with a fine-tuned classifier.
He used AI in a Google spreadsheet to apply a mass change to 30k rows. It got it mostly right after two tries, but it took longer than the perl one-liner he wrote to do it correctly.
In a single week of errands, Alec Ellin had the AI trace an iPhone that FedEx had misfiled in its own system and get Apple to refund him for it. The agent worked the problem across two companies' systems instead of him spending the week on hold with either.
He runs his own small businesses with AI agents. Each job has its own agent with its own instructions file: one triages the inbox, one handles outreach, one prepares quotes. The agents only draft; he approves every email and quote from his phone before it goes out. A brief arrives at a fixed time every morning with the overnight replies, what is waiting on him, and the follow-ups for the day, and it replaced his own daily check-in. When he corrects something, the correction goes into a shared notes file that every agent reads, so he only has to say it once.
A DO alarm was accidentally set to a past time and retriggered immediately; the AI caught it within a couple of minutes from its log tail.
A 7-figure Amazon seller growing a Shopify store (300 orders/month, fulfilled in-house from the east coast) hit his limit on slow, expensive west-coast and Florida shipments. Shopify's native routing couldn't see order-level detail and Functions needed Plus, which he doesn't have - so over one weekend he built a custom app with AI: it checks each incoming order's zip code, and if it falls above a USPS tier threshold and every line item is in FBA stock, it silently reassigns the order to Amazon MCF. He added a vacation-mode switch (everything routes to MCF while he travels) and stuck-package alerts; shipping time fell from up to 7 days to a max of 5, hosted for $5/month instead of a $99/month order-editing app.
He asked the AI for ways to make free money, and it searched his name in his state's unclaimed property database. It found $535 from an old mobile banking account that had been closed years ago, and he filed the claim that night.
An interiors company runs 13 the AI on 46 routines. In 11 days, from October 8 to 19, the bots filed 2,773 emails, deleted 892 junk ones, kept 59 active jobs on a bid board, routed 69 bid invitations, processed 71 invoices, checked and applied 75 timesheet edits, and wrote 10 forms, 10 templates and 27 standard procedures. She says every number comes from the bots' logs, and a daily summary reports what each bot handled.
WSJ columnist Nicole Nguyen asked Dots to cancel a handful of subscriptions but specified that she wanted to press the unsubscribe button herself. Dots loaded the correct account pages, pinged her when each was ready, and finished the job after her click.
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.