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.
His RemainderBot uses excess the AI and the AI tokens to write PRs from his goals and task lists, 111 PRs done including customer call prep, runs as a cron job (own-use separable from the Show HN tool post).
Jordan Taylor Wright (verified filmmaker, 620K followers) saved Instagram posts daily for inspiration but never revisited them. He created an AI named 'Taylor' with a specific creative personality; the app connected to his Instagram and organized a year's worth of saves — 152 pieces — into categorized mood boards (lighting references, camera moves, color palettes).
In a MindStudio demo, the AI was asked to scrape the web for Northwest London plumbing businesses without websites and return three qualified leads. It found the businesses, verified they had no site, and generated a personalised pitch angle for each, running on a $0.24/hour CPU instance.
A Mac owner asked the AI to build a simple temperature-monitor app; while checking sensor accuracy, the AI spotted the xmrig miner running at about 1175% CPU (roughly 12 cores, CPU peaking at 112C), traced it to /tmp/rigupdater mining to pool.hashvault.sh, and found a random-named LaunchAgents startup item dating to Aug 29. The AI stopped and asked before killing or removing anything. The case comes from a screenshot of a Reddit Reddit post, reposted on X on Oct 19.
Rosey adds calendar events and reads credit card balances for budgeting.
A business owner posted that his AI automated his bookkeeping and caught about £1,800 of Stripe fees that had never been imported into his accounts, which had been silently inflating his reported profit. The find corrected profit he thought he had.
Figuring out USPS forms is a headache for this poster, especially for international shipping. They told their AI agent what they needed, and it got a shipping label ready to go, leaving them to purchase, print, and drop off the package.
A 37-year-old who suspected his big-firm advisor treated his roughly $800,000 portfolio as an afterthought uploaded his statements, gain/loss and trade history to the AI. The audit found two years of S&P underperformance - and the real problem: when he asked the firm to extend a successful Roth IRA strategy to his taxable individual account, they copied the exact same asset ratios across, so dividend-heavy holdings now throw off ordinary-income tax every year, a non-issue inside the Roth. Confronted, the advisor called it a known model limitation. He is firing the firm.
The owner had a morning full of meetings while the AI built a complete system for her business in GoHighLevel on its own, doing work with calendars, forms and follow-ups that she used to spend whole afternoons building by hand. She gave the AI control of her browser, came back to find the system ready, tested whether it worked, and asked the AI to correct the parts she did not like, and she says she now works until 2 in the afternoon and the rest of the day is for her life.
He had his agent migrate his machine from Ubuntu to Omarchy with a backup taken first and a restore tested. The switch took about an hour, and he says he is not going 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.