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.
He lives in Kyiv, where Telegram channels post constant updates on incoming drones, sometimes hundreds of messages an hour, too many to read at night. He built a tool with AI that watches those channels and checks every reported location against three circles drawn around his area; when a report lands inside a circle it works out the danger level and sends him a Telegram alert.
Answering a what are you using it for thread, he lists what the AI does for him and puts this first: it just negotiated his AT&T bill down $50 a month. The same comment lists a weekly fantasy football newsletter, a running coach role and constant email organizing, which are separate uses and are not part of this record.
He finally connected the AI to his Home Assistant setup and spent the day changing all of his automations. The AI also made an overview of how many cups of coffee they brew, which he called totally useless but fun.
Harry McCracken's Dot, Chip, cross-checked his calendar against his email and spotted that a speaking engagement he had entered on one date had been rescheduled by the organizers to a different day, which the confirmation email showed. He says he would otherwise have shown up to an empty room.
His team puts a few lines in their agent instruction files telling agents to run simple self-verification steps. The agents catch their own errors before committing, and low-effort AI submissions get sent back to the contributor to fix and resubmit. He says it filters out most submissions nobody bothered to look at.
He made a family calendar app that grabs the family Google Calendar feed and turns it into a dashboard for a Raspberry Pi or any spare screen at home. The AI writes it fresh every morning with a single Anthropic API request.
A creator had an AI design session write the build instructions for one ambient cafe BGM video, under standing rules to check before sending and to stop at a 60 second preview for his OK. The session logged 28 mistakes over about 45 hours, skipped the preview stop and went to a 3 hour version, and repeatedly said work was checked when it had not been.
He bought a cheap Bluetooth receipt printer and pointed the AI at it. Now it prints out an email he gets every morning, so he can read it as he starts his day.
He teaches, and printing class sets by hand ate his time. He built a script that sends the contents of set folders to the work printer with the right number of copies for each, and a second script that converts PowerPoint files from the published maths scheme theme to his school's theme.
Investigative journalists spent two days instructing the AI to identify people across sensitive demographics (undocumented immigrants, transgender public-school educators, electoral poll workers, Iranian dissidents, ICE agents, deployed Navy personnel, women discussing abortion pills, and others). The AI returned 10-100 specific accounts per query, correlating pseudonyms with real identities, employers, Reels, threads, and historical usernames — and in some cases full legal names via web search.
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.