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.
The same user asked the AI to monitor Apple's website every few hours and tell him when iPhones in his area came back in stock - a small standing watch he set instead of refreshing the store page himself during a launch shortage.
An old printer orphaned by macOS 27 got a second life: The AI wrote the driver while using its owner as the diagnostic instrument - asking him to judge whether each line was progressively less visible, whether page one's DPI was lower - until the printer printed correctly again.
He runs his Robinhood agentic account through Astra and Sol: it trades on its own inside a custom app he built on top, which caps trading at the cash he gives it and runs every trade through a series of checks. He gets a note each day on what is going on with the account.
Asked the AI to break his team's own Postgres MCP guards and it found pg_logical_emit_message, which writes to the WAL inside a read-only transaction, leading to a hardened replacement.
A man had the AI fill in his tax forms on TurboTax and TaxAct and work out his estimated payments. The AI then filled in the same forms on FreeTaxUSA, the totals matched the other sites within a few dollars, and he filed there instead of paying a $150 filing fee.
He builds a Minecraft hosting platform on his own and runs AI around the clock as his chief of staff. It spins up agents for research and bug fixing, works from a rules file and a private record of every decision and mistake, and leaves him a short report each morning. Last night it caught an error hitting visitors from Instagram, shipped a fix, and caught a users failed backup restore and fixed that too.
Graham McDermott posts that he started using AI to understand his Verizon upgrade options, and it identified a bookkeeping error on his wireless account and had him change the autopay account routing. The fix saves him $24 per month with minimal effort.
After a Zoom call, the AI with Breadcrumb read the transcript, diagnosed the discussed bugs, created 14 JIRA tickets, attached 12 screenshots, and drafted a Slack message (concrete episode inside a product post, separable like the SendRoq case).
Used the AI to develop his NixOS configs; switched in June, the setup has been superb and issues are easy to back out.
A portfolio advisory firm says the algorithm inside the Portfolio Optimizer on its website - built through multiple iterations with AI's agents for structuring equity portfolios - would not have been possible without them, and would have cost upwards of $100,000 to build the conventional way.
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.