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.
Claire Vo ran AI for several weeks and shut down every the AI she had. Her nine bots include Chief, which sweeps six inboxes and several Slack workspaces, a family bot that prints a kitchen table newspaper for her kids each morning, a helpdesk bot getting five star reviews, and a bot that audits subscriptions and negotiates insurance.
A genealogist handed his AI an anonymized GEDCOM with about 3,000 individuals. The AI wrote a Python program drawing 300 frames into a 10-second MP4 animated pedigree (ancestors fade in by birth order, glow while alive, dim at death, living shown as 'Living'), then produced an 11x17 300-DPI print from a single frame.
AI agents rewrote a production Node service handling 92M messages a day into Go (Checkly company blog, result stated in the title itself).
A man's system reads his grocery receipts from email and predicts which items will need restocking, building his shopping list on its own. When he is ready, the AI logs into his online grocery shop, adds the items and books the delivery slot.
He now uses AI for design work and for putting print plans together. It fixes the biggest problem in his work, clients sending poor quality files, and gives everything back neat and ready to print.
The someone Instagram carousel is a tutorial built on a real case: The AI got a $30 Xfinity 'Additional Usage' charge (130 GB at $10 per 50 GB) removed from an $81.50 itemized bill. Screenshots show the original bill and the reduced $50.86 balance after the courtesy credit.
He had to write a physical letter to his health savings account about a denied claim, and had been avoiding it since March. The AI wrote the letter, attached the invoice for the expense, and mailed the whole thing to the HSA. His only job was taking over for the $2.31 payment. Whether the claim was then paid is not stated in the comment.
The maker of a small game viewer tool had the AI play the game with scripted commands and write playtest reports. One report, from a manifest file the game loaded, documented a crash on exit, a bad default window size, dead inputs, and several rendering bugs.
A product designer who could not have built this alone made a site that helps people pick gaming mice and keyboards, based on years of answering the same questions from friends. He built it in an AI app and keeps improving it from reader feedback. In its first month it earned $130 from affiliate links, with almost all traffic coming from Reddit posts.
He set up a chain from his phone to the AI to his Windows PC and a background browser. The PC published a post to Bluesky and checked it had gone up, while his other screen work kept running separately.
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.