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.
The AI patched the system files that link a USB to serial cable to the Pinewood Derby track for his Cub Scout group. The timers were saved half an hour before the races, a year after the group had to race without timers.
He drafts in an AI app, and the AI itself sorts each piece, tags it, and moves it word for word into his Obsidian vault using a skill he built. The filing runs as part of how he writes.
Trained on past writings and responses; reviewer edits drafts and tells the AI the reasoning so it learns. Drafts only - never sends autonomously.
A man set up his agent setup so the AI could ping him on Telegram when it needed hands. Working on hardware together, he got a message every 5 to 15 minutes telling him to move a resistor or patch cable in a set way, and following the instructions they got the hardware working the way he wanted.
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.
A father bought an old Pentium machine partly for retro games and found a childhood favourite, a 1991 learning game, froze the whole PC every time it loaded on the real hardware. He handed the AI the original game files. In five minutes it had taken the program apart, traced the hang to a sound check that waits forever on modern sound cards, and written a three byte patch into a copy of the file. The patched game worked on the first try, ready for his son.
He runs Svippit, a small shop platform for creators. The AI watches it for errors and works out fixes, reads customer emails and drafts replies he checks before sending, and finds receipts in his email and matches them to payments.
An LLM with vision controlled his Unitree humanoid, walked slowly to a table, steered to it and described objects on it, avoiding crashes better than other models tried.
He had the AI answer a Slack notification from a Datadog monitor. The AI checked the issue through Datadog MCP, found the right Slack group to ping, and sent a summary of what needed fixing.
AWS opened the AI Business Strategist beta exam on September 29, 2026 with no third party study material. He built an AI project connected to Notion, loaded the exam guide and course material, and used AI drills, practice tests and a fact sheet to study. He sat the exam on its first day and passed.
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.