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.
Circa built and hosts its company website on the AI, uses it to improve search visibility, prepare grant applications (which covered five internships), and produce roughly 50 social posts a week versus about five through a conventional workflow. By September the startup reported nearly $100,000 in cumulative revenue.
Andrew asked the AI for the cheapest price on a new iPhone and AirPods, the best trade in value for his old phone, and whether a new model was about to drop. The AI found Amazon beat Apple by about $50 on the AirPods and a trade in worth about $200 more, and he bought on Amazon himself in the end.
He connected the AI to DevonThink, the app where he keeps his documents. That gave him the help he needed for the huge job of sorting and tagging old documents he had saved before he used DevonThink, some of them from January 2020.
One itemized line in Armand Ruiz's September 15 errands post credits the AI with recovering $836 of his unclaimed property during a background finance sweep. The sweep's $2,120.95 total is already recorded from press coverage; this record isolates the unclaimed-property component that coverage did not itemize.
Built with agents over about a year: a production billing system for his small telecom company, a multiplatform app, internal tools in use, and a coding agent harness now used by non-technical colleagues.
He says he used AI to call SiriusXM and negotiate a better deal. It saved him $30 a month for 22 months. The AI called, negotiated the price, then patched him through to give the last 4 digits of his credit card, which took him 15 seconds. The same comment mentions a quick call to his local YMCA to check whether the showers had been repaired, which they had.
Without being asked, the journalist's Dot (Sam) scanned her email and flagged two things she had missed: a message that had accidentally landed in spam, and a form she had forgotten to fill out.
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.
His old Tuneshine display for album art sat unused because it kept losing its connection and depended on a cloud service. The AI identified the display, ran pin tests, and wrote new firmware, and now a small program on his NAS shows album art or a world clock on it.
He had never written Swift. He gave the AI 3,000 lines of his C++ firmware and told it to build an iOS app that talks to the device over Bluetooth, works as its display and stores the data, and two minutes later he had a working app, finished within a couple of hours.
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.