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.
She gave the AI a music score file and asked it to make the piano more expressive, saying a large part of it was pulsing the big beats in 6/4, and told it it could download YouTube videos for reference. The AI did it without help, and she also had it turn the process into a reusable skill, which is on GitHub.
Ethan Mollick writes that the AI noticed an airline credit of his was about to expire and, when he asked, contacted American Airlines to request an extension — an example of agents catching deadlines their owners miss.
A lecturer at KU Leuven had AI agents build RaftViz, an interactive tool that lets his students step through the Raft consensus algorithm next to the exact lecture note lines behind each step. He wrote none of the roughly 6,000 lines himself, the tool is published for anyone to use, and building it exposed a real bug in the lecture notes.
The AI compared 25 breast pump models from six brands against the user's insurance coverage, narrowing the choice to pumps that would actually be covered.
Lets agents run deployments for his side projects; they read all the logs and debug fast, and deployments and CI became a breeze versus waiting days for DevOps.
Adam Mosseri (Instagram head, 4.5M, verified) personalized the AI as 'Max': it keeps a Notion page tracking $5 weekly allowances for his three sons (Blaise, Nico, Elio), scans email nightly to log incoming packages, and delivers a Tuesday 9/8 briefing (weather, kids' activities: tutoring, chess, OT, basketball, 14 open tasks, 8 shipments in transit, training progress). Comments were dominated by anti-AI sentiment, not the functionality.
Polish marketing freelancer Damian Nowaczek runs AI agents on his own server: every day at 06:00 one pulls data from his Google Ads accounts, compares performance and sends a report with conclusions to the company chat, so he never opens ad dashboards to spot a campaign burning budget. A second agent scans new public tenders daily and picks the marketing-related ones.
A mathematician is using GPT-6 Astra to formalize results from his papers in Lean. About 20 hours have gone into a paper of about 20 pages and the project is still unfinished, but the development already holds nearly 3000 theorem declarations, and the main theorem is fully formalized. Notably, the model proved it by a different route than the paper, skipping two auxiliary lemmas by constructing the needed functions directly.
The AI rebuilt his website, his point of sale, and his online storefront. He no longer pays Shopify $40 a month, his site works better, and payments run through Square.
He had given up on a years old problem getting Roon to play music on his PC. He put the problem to the AI, which read the log files, ran a test script, and fixed it in a few minutes.
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.