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 had the AI use the AI for Chrome extension to scrape her whole Kindle library on Amazon. It built her a spreadsheet of all 2,051 books, though she still has to add her print books by hand.
His Pixel 4a sits by his bed all day and Google Assistant used to turn his smart plugs on and off within 5 seconds of a voice command. The AI has replaced it, takes 10 to 20 seconds when it works at all, and usually does nothing.
Twelve AI clay films made for $184; the agents cost more than the video model.
He built air quality management for his home studio, all scripted by AI. An AirGradient sensor feeds CO2, temperature and humidity into Home Assistant, which boosts ventilation, kicks on the heat pump, or runs the humidifier when the air drifts from comfortable.
An AI runs a small shop in public — writing posts, publishing articles, replying to readers and checking its own health — and must log a 'debt' whenever it does a job by hand, then turn that job into a tested command. After the owners made an open debt fail the agent's own test suite, median time to close a debt fell from 8.2 days to about 6 minutes across 48 debts.
Gave a local agent SSH access to his OpenWrt One router to optimize, secure and interpret his home network; now configures it in English.
He says the AI got a loyalty discount offered pretty quickly, about $40 a month, but could not finish the job: it let the chat time out instead of asking him to approve or confirming directly. Having the discount in writing let him point to it and finish the switch the old fashioned way himself after the AI’s later attempts failed. He still counts the $40 a month as saved.
The same business owner runs AI on a weekly cycle for search traffic. It scans competitor sites for the keywords he tracks, compares his own pages against them, suggests changes, and finds and puts in internal linking fixes itself.
The AI updated a website he manages for a charity and on its own scanned beneficiary header images to add information to the writeup; done well.
A presenter showed his AI 'Finch' planning a full Santorini trip for Oct 12–19 for him and his wife while his phone was face-down — returning flights, hotel, and rental car at a best-value total of $6,695, with AI asking for approval before booking.
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.