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 ran Geico quote flows in parallel across three virtual computers and found coverage saving about $2,000 a year. The poster disclosed that he works as a Geico designer.
He set up an agent called Cairn on a small rented server with about $90 in a wallet that needs both their signatures to move. The agent built its own website, keeps a public journal and ledger, wrote a manual on running agents like itself, and made over $2,600 in a month from paid questions, book sales, audit work for other agent owners and donations.
Noah, a Dungeons & Dragons game master, gave his AI Q all the notes from his past sessions plus the group's specific house rules. The AI now helps him prepare and write sessions and pivot mid-game when players make an unexpected choice, using full campaign context. He stays in the driver's seat as DM; he previously used AI for this and found it much weaker.
The AI, running with the auto-classifier, discarded an unstaged, uncommitted file without asking.
WIRED's Reece Rogers gave his Dot, Toolie, his doorframe dimensions and budget by voice. Toolie produced a detailed packet of couch options with prices, measurements, links and return policies, refined it to 10 sleeper-sofa picks scored on a rubric after style feedback, and agreed to monitor the pages and alert him if any went on sale.
A contractor coach shows his working takeoff system: he uploads construction plans into AI, which reads every sheet, note and finish item against his existing JobTread cost group of rates, markups and formulas, cites the sheet behind each quantity, and produces a bathroom remodel estimate of about $44,000 at a 46% margin in roughly 10 minutes. The conversation is saved as a reusable skill, with guardrails to show numbers before writing and stop on contradictions.
Wesfarmers retail brands Kmart Australia and Officeworks deployed the AI Enterprise shopping agents. They report higher conversions and basket sizes, with growth up to three times.
Reporting Anthropic's September 23 engineering post, this analysis describes the AI running a two-week performance sprint from a Slack channel: 150-plus threads, benchmarks built for each bottleneck, and more than 3,000 merged changes with no customer-facing incident. Time to a typeable page at the 75th percentile fell from 3.1 seconds to 0.55, with a human approving every pull request.
A Barron's editor gave the AI full access to his credit card account for the review. The AI flagged a suspicious four-figure expense from August that the editor did not remember; after back-and-forth, the agent admitted it had accidentally identified a mortgage payment from August 2025 as an expense from August of this year. Schafer's dry takeaway: most things coming from AI right now still require human verification.
A developer tired of managing terminal windows one way and other windows another way grew his own replacement with AI over the course of a few months, one that treats graphical apps as part of the session too. He uses it now and says he has never looked back.
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.