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.
Tech executive Matthew Simari posts that he asked the AI to add his frequent-flier number to an upcoming trip on a partner airline. The AI located the confirmation number in his email, navigated to the booking, added the number, and confirmed completion with him.
He gave the AI a profile on his Synology NAS, linked over Tailscale by SSH, with one hard rule: never delete anything without his clear say so. The AI went through his large MP3 collection folder by folder. It renamed files, removed duplicates, found album art, fixed tags, and moved songs that were filed wrong, like songs in an 80s folder that were not from the 80s. It also relinked a playlist after he had moved all of its tracks into other folders.
The same job seeker (Business Insider essay, via B17 News) asked permission to record interviews, then ran the notes through AI for sentiment analysis — where she hesitated, used filler words, or where the interviewer leaned in. She also built an AI skill that takes a pasted LinkedIn profile and finds genuine similarities with her own background; one shared cheese-club membership with a recruiter carried her further than any cover letter.
His family of three uses a local assistant called Sadie, built on a home server so their calendar, photos and messages stay off cloud services. Sadie runs their shared calendar, sends location based reminders, answers texts and emails, searches family photos, and sorts household mail, flagging bills and school deadlines.
A senior engineer keeps a daily devlog file that is only ever added to. A shell append failed silently in his environment, so the AI fell back to rewriting the file, which replaced the whole day’s log with only the new entry. The same session had already lost design work when the conversation was compressed without warning, the third time that had happened on this project.
A triathlete uses a Garmin MCP through AI Desktop - forked because the stock version couldn't build his workout types - so the AI creates and schedules his swim, bike, run, and gym sessions, pushing them to his Garmin calendar, which syncs straight to the watch on his wrist.
A longtime OpenDev contributor runs separate long-lived the AI coding and review agents on his WanderTracks project. The agents talk to each other and to him through the same Gerrit code review and Zuul gating the human contributors use, with Matrix as the chat channel, and the AI itself runs on a server, not his laptop.
Emigrating with a cat was easy; the rabbit and bird were not. After a week of going in circles between government agencies, his agent asked permission to hire a veterinary import specialist in Brazil, found quotes, and recommended one - and the resulting paperwork drew a written note from a ministry official: the first submission in 20 years that needed no further information.
Pulse Research Lab sells to government and prime-contractor buyers who must ship orders on their own UPS/FedEx accounts through a $0 Ship Collect option, but Shopify disconnected the store's UPS account without any notification. After Kan set up a custom app granting the AI permission to edit theme code, the AI restored UPS in 10 minutes, rewrote the collect-shipping pre-checkout cart flow in under an hour, and the store now uses Shopify Flow to store each customer's carrier, account number and service level, pre-populated on new orders.
The AI filled out his car insurance application for him. Where an answer was not in what it knew, it stopped and asked him instead of guessing.
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.