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.
Working with two economists, Schwartz's team built an 'AI data editor' with AI: it ported the replication packages of 4,452 papers from five leading journals out of MATLAB, Stata and other commercial tools into open-source code — some 30,000 routines — and checked essentially every verifiable number against the published tables. The work, normally a careful manual job for a journal editor, is written up in an NBER working paper.
X poster someone had the AI do doctor's-office admin in about 5 minutes: it emailed the doctor's office, left a voicemail, filled out new-patient paperwork, and created a calendar entry.
A nightly coding agent works his backlog and never merges.
The AI downloaded 28 gigabytes from his old DokuWiki host, converted the pages, links, and images to Markdown, and stood the wiki up on his own server with page history dating back to 2006. The job ran under light supervision while he was out.
He teaches part time at a private school. Lesson plans go in six weeks ahead, and every student now gets a personal differentiation plan, which used to be done per group because per student was not feasible. The Sunday session that took four to six hours now takes fifteen minutes, plus short daily reviews of content and parent comments.
Engadget reporter Karissa Bell spent a few days testing the AI (naming her agent 'boo') after connecting it to her Meta accounts. As one of her first tasks she had it mine her large backlog of saved Instagram and Facebook posts for recipe videos and posts, returning an organized list grouped by type with ingredients, steps, and links back to each original post — a searchable personal recipe book.
Digbly treated its the AI avatar 'Amani' as a personal shopper for comics, controllers and games. The baseline-plus-deal-hunt prompt surfaced the Batman omnibus at $74.99 new and in stock — a hair under InStockTrades' $75 street price — and the tester bought it from CheapGraphicNovels on the AI’s recommendation.
Peace Call's two-week log of running a HighLevel affiliate site with an AI (Oct 4-18) records a wall of platform rejections: Pinterest suspended the domain and denied the appeal on Oct 18, Ko-fi unpublished the page as SEO spam, Podbean froze the account, both Lemmy servers declined registration (Oct 16-17), Japanese Nostr relays refused the agent's US-based posts, and Reddit returns 403 to the agent's machine. The site's income after two weeks of multi-platform agent publishing: $0.
The AI interfaced with FPGA boards over USB, set up UART, created an on-chip logic analyzer, and troubleshot a synthesis problem to a workaround.
After the AI started managing his home systems, he gave it control of Home Assistant too. It proved good at writing automations and doing the setup, and he later moved Home Assistant into a Docker image.
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.