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.
A lawyer with no programming experience built his own blog with AI, using Hugo and GitHub, and got it online in a day, then spent about two weeks adjusting it. He also set up a flow that shares each new post to his Mastodon and Bluesky accounts on its own.
In two weeks of real inbox-and-calendar work, The AI Crux had the AI book three conference rooms. Calendar work was functional but conservative: it refused anything outside 9-to-5 local without an explicit override, which the reviewer framed as a guardrail more than intelligence.
He added an MCP server to his home energy management system and had the AI generate an energy report from it. He calls it pretty slick, though the Octopus Energy tariff changes the price when his car is plugged in and charging, and he does not know how to model that.
Worried by the day's PHP security news, he told the AI before bed to look into it and report in the morning. The AI read up on the flaw, checked what his hosting provider was saying, then logged into his WordPress blogs and checked them herself instead of taking the provider's word for it, with a backup already staged and ready in case a fix was needed.
He took an ESP32 board out of its bag and, with AI setting it up, had it sending his van's battery, charging, and solar data over Bluetooth and MQTT to Home Assistant in 5 minutes.
He used AI to create a small tool on val.town that automatically syncs his GoodReads updates to BookHive. The val.town blog featured the tool as one of his experiments.
AI agent Rosey in a family iMessage chat does meal planning and Walmart grocery shopping via BrowserMCP.
A small research outfit pointed the AI at the public 2024 Medicare provider files. It flagged one wound dressing code whose national billing jumped from about $23 million a year to $650 million in 2024, with one Florida supplier taking 62 percent of it, and a pattern of hundreds of family doctors each ordering ostomy supplies for about 175 patients across 40 states while only 15 colorectal surgeons appear in the same data. Some flagged companies have already been caught; others with the same shape are still billing, per the July 2026 enrolment file.
The AI produced a thirteen-page strategic assessment of Fulton's father's retirement community. Its pickleball court count was verified from satellite photos — eight dedicated courts, checked, in his words, from orbit.
To mark the start of the semester, he asked the AI to build a macOS widget. It counts down how many weeks are left until the last class, and how many of those weeks are real teaching weeks.
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.