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.
He runs recruiting for an investment firm across 30 open roles spread over five applicant systems. His AI cron runs at 9am, reads the open roles, searches people through data services, checks Gmail so nobody gets emailed twice, and writes new candidates into the right system with its reasoning attached. In about six weeks it surfaced 40 good candidates and the firm made 2 offers.
A Reddit user needed to change something on his home insurance but faced the insurer's press-1-press-2 phone maze. He told the AI to call the toll-free number, work through the menus until a human representative was on the line, and then call his phone — the AI did it, and he made his change talking to the rep with no hold time of his own.
Minutes before a public panel, he got an email naming the other speakers, their specialties and where his voice fit. Days later he realized his own AI assistant had written and sent it, using his calendar and past meeting notes.
For a tribute video, his AI read transcripts of a man's interviews and talks and wrote song lyrics from them. The finished video was produced and published.
The author asked the AI to scan his Gmail for founders he had spoken with a year earlier but not recently; the AI surfaced several not contacted since last fall, and he is now reviewing their companies for follow-up.
Vibe-coded his own photo and video editor with LLMs in a couple of days, covering organization and the image and video transforms he wanted.
A man gave the AI strict tag research tasks and had it work through the whole ticker list again and again, searching and comparing XBRL tags in SEC filings. The pipeline now pulls 10-K and 10-Q filings for more than 600 companies, maps tags onto about 35 financial concepts, and produces cleaned data. Doing 3 tickers by hand had taken him about 3 weeks and still gave wrong data.
In a hands-on test on a $20-a-month Google AI Pro account, the AI renamed and organised a folder of 507 PDFs into 13 subfolders. The session drew a broad warning that granting folder access could include sharing the folder's contents with third parties, plus a notice that backups of connected files would be deleted after a follow-up or 24 hours.
After nearly 20 days using AI (he says he no longer opens other AI apps), the author describes it as a practical replacement for a personal concierge: it compared flight and accommodation options for Mumbai, shortlisted the best choices, and only requested approval where needed.
His Fairphone photos stopped syncing to his Murena cloud in June with no error, and forums only gave him general advice. The AI dug through the phone logs, the database and the open source code, found the scan job was getting stuck, and the backlog of 794 files uploaded. His cloud use went from 13.2 GB to 14.9 GB and new photos now upload in seconds.
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.