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 researcher had a language model transcribe a digitised volume of Sophie Germain's incoming correspondence at the national library, and published the transcription. Working from it, he spotted a mathematical note written on an 1814 letter cover and is asking who wrote it.
Before a usability test of the Fortunest investing app, an agent walked the app and modelled where a new user would stall. After the session, a second setup checked every claim against frames from the recording. Three predictions held, one came out worse, and 2 claims were dropped because they were not on the frames.
A man was spending 90 minutes a day on email. An AI agent was set up to read, sort and draft replies to every routine message. He now approves the drafts in 8 minutes, saving 82 minutes a day.
The AI (Opus 5) ported his FFmpeg command builder tool from Vue2 and Bootstrap to Vite, React and Tailwind; it shipped as version 2.0.
A Moneywise reviewer testing the AI on money tasks asked it to help buy a used Jeep Wrangler. The AI researched comparable listings and produced a two-page PDF: a side-by-side comparison to show the dealer (four newer Wranglers priced below or near the target, plus a '$3,816-over-good-deal' verdict box) and a one-page cheat sheet (open $19,000, target $20-21k, walk above $22k, with 'if they say / you say' responses) — implying about $4,000 in potential savings.
Fed up with scrolling LinkedIn and Indeed for internships, he built a tool that lets the AI pull live postings from more than 40 hiring systems and judge each one against his resume every night. Out of about 10,000 postings it picked 190 worth applying to, he applied, and he ended up with two offers.
A voice agent called 12 venues for his event of about 50 people and asked each one the same three questions. The AI then formatted the answers into a comparison table, which saved him an afternoon of phone calls.
He built an outreach setup last month. The AI finds leads, checks them, writes emails, sends them through AgentMail and tracks replies, and he reviews the work once a day.
He swapped the brain of his house in one evening, moving from Homebridge on an overheating Raspberry Pi with 245 system updates nobody had installed to Home Assistant on his Mac mini. The AI does the upkeep now, and a motion sensor finally works.
Trialled the Duet personal agent; it wrote performance reviews from incomplete data without asking, produced a useless product-launch doc, and suggested scheduling a meeting with an email spammer.
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.