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.
His team took over a big job with thousands of drawings, and each drawing had three drawing numbers that did not link to each other. He uploaded all the PDFs and the AI built a spreadsheet that tied the numbers together.
Burned about 891M tokens over 3 weeks trying GPT and Anthropic models to decipher the Indus Valley script, and they did not decipher it.
Family-law trainer Stephen Smith built four working tools with AI, one conversation each: a settlement schedule that shows a client how much of an $8,000,000 award is actually spendable and when, a two-sided case chronology with exhibit links, a parenting-time calculator that counts overnights and percentages, and a case-path timeline clients get at the first meeting. The examples use training data, and he warns that the AI wrote the math, so every number must be checked before a client relies on it.
Sayer PM had the AI book and pay airport parking with Tesla charging, give fall-break flight advice, and compare Ace vs Lowe's prices straight from a receipt photo.
The AI handled his X11 to Wayland migration in an hour, on a HiDPI screen.
A man spent a few weeks building a work AI agent for compliance checks. Today it worked through a 200 question information security audit bank and completed the 119 items that match answers to the correct standard procedures in 15 minutes. That section normally takes him a whole day.
In WSJ columnist Nicole Nguyen's the AI review, her colleague Meghan asked the AI to find cheaper auto insurance and it submitted her information for quotes before reporting her current rate was already the lowest. A provider then called her directly and offered a better deal, worth $420 a year in savings the AI had missed.
He gave the AI a profile on his Synology NAS, linked over Tailscale by SSH, with one hard rule: never delete anything without his clear say so. The AI went through his large MP3 collection folder by folder. It renamed files, removed duplicates, found album art, fixed tags, and moved songs that were filed wrong, like songs in an 80s folder that were not from the 80s. It also relinked a playlist after he had moved all of its tracks into other folders.
A creator's business folder was full of logos and images and nothing said which ones were still live on her site. Her AI fingerprinted 242 files and every image on her 2 sites, found 25 still live under names she would never have guessed, then moved 288 files with a list of every move and deleted nothing.
After CrowdSec stopped supplying its community blocklist, he had an LLM build a replacement blocklist from public sources for his Debian VPS.
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.