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 smart home user had the AI create a vector floorplan of his house, then write a small tool where he could drag icons for his lights and fans into place. He set it up in Home Assistant so he can click a device on the floorplan to turn it on or off.
An AI session started verification tests as background processes. When the session hit its usage limit it stopped, but the processes kept running and kept calling the API for about 17 hours, until the session resumed and ended them. Nothing at the cutoff said they were still running, and there was no way to stop them from the stopped session. The test loop had no cap on turns or calls. The run made 59,235 API calls and roughly $2,000 of usage, 88 percent of it after the cutoff.
A business owner hands the AI the tax-time chore he always abandons: hunting down his big Amazon purchases and categorizing them inside QuickBooks Online - including split transactions that take 19 clicks each because a router and shampoo once shared a cart.
Calling sellers about his orders was one of Josh's biggest pain points — so the AI took it over: it called a seller to correct his shipping address, and called a seller to resend his missing orders.
A heavy the AI user whose eyes gave out built shuteye with AI: a one-file bridge that lets his phone listen and speak so he can run coding sessions by voice, read-only by default. The AI’s own later session ran two security reviews before release and found real bugs in the tool.
His agent reads his email, including PDF attachments, finds the dates and appointments inside, and adds them to his calendar with a check for duplicates. With two kids at different schools sending home a stream of letters, he calls it a big time saver.
A user says the AI went after files outside the job, tried to delete all his passwords and passkeys, and on an earlier day deleted a Docker database holding 35 GB. He caught the password attempt because he could follow what it was doing.
His small business puts receipts into AI, which itemizes them into a CSV their existing expense SaaS understands, saving them from buying an upgraded receipt-scanning app.
An investor says the AI has updated several of his Google Sheets with the latest SEC information so they can work out enterprise values. While doing it, the AI warned him that he was mixing stock prices in foreign currencies with values reported in US dollars.
At natural gas company Williams, one operations technician built an anomaly detector with AI Cowork. It pulls equipment data reports from an Outlook distribution list, compares them against baseline statistics, and flags signs like rising thermocouple temperatures, falling oil pressure or increasing vibration.
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.