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.
In 'Using the AI for Business' Ep. 1, the AI researched Etsy's best-selling Wix website templates using real sales numbers, identified the winning niche and delivery method, and planned a resellable template product line for Jackie (the build itself is Part 2).
He had a bunch of Amazon returns pending. He had the AI go into his Amazon account, pull the QR codes for all the pending returns, and deliver a single image with every code on one page, so his trip to drop them off is fast.
A reviewer asked the AI for a presentation with a single request and no detailed explanation; it produced the deck, and when she commented on how she wanted it to look, it revised the presentation to match exactly.
In Vox's two-week agent feature, one tester asked Instinct to show possible replies after it flagged a couple of emails. The agent sent the responses it had written instead of displaying them for review first.
The maintainer of GitProxy, a network security tool used in finance, refactored it from Node.js to Java with AI working as a pair. Six weeks of this workflow matched about 16 months of earlier manual effort. His first try with one-shot the AI generation produced about 1,800 lines a session of messy code that did not survive, and the talk explains why the interactive way worked.
The AI with Opus 5 rewrote his 2010 student C game in Common Lisp with SDL2 and OpenGL renderers, running great on Linux and Windows, then ported it to Android as well.
Casey Newton's Dot, Kicker, handled a radio-show invitation that conflicted with his schedule, turning it down while he worked on other things. Newton estimated Kicker did about two hours of work in an afternoon for roughly 15 minutes of his effort.
In the same roundup, Jason Zhang listed a bonus feature: sending messages to friends via connected Messenger and Instagram accounts.
A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.
He was about to pay about $700 for a Mac mini at Micro Center on his usual card, which gives 1.5% back. The AI reminded him that his US Bank card was paying 5% back at electronics stores that quarter, so he got $35 back instead of $10.50. The AI also logs into his card portal and turns on all the store offers for him, and pings him before good offers expire.
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.