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.
Eric's Dot tracks a phone trade-in that shipped weeks ago and still has not credited, submitted the itemization for a reimbursement claim stuck in review, and keeps standing watches, including a comedian's New York dates and an artist's rumored return, reporting back when something lands.
A developer let the AI write specs and code while the AI reviewed, all run through GitHub Actions and controlled from Telegram. Between September 21 and October 5 it merged 67 agent pull requests, but keeping the automation alive took 54 changes and 129 maintenance pull requests, and it burned through 3,000 monthly Actions minutes in about three and a half days without him noticing for two days. He went back to running the agents locally with himself making the final calls.
His talk archive site had been a work in progress for years. He asked the AI to help track down records of talks he has given, and the site now contains 115 presentations covering 26 years.
Volunteered and built a cartography data pipeline with coding agents for an educator, integrating sources updated every few minutes so new maps appear within about 5 minutes on a low-powered machine.
The Nautilus file manager never offered a miller columns view. He forked it and had the AI add the feature, and the fork is publicly available.
He built a tool that reads the emails from his kid school and activities, swimming, music classes and scouts. It adds everything to their shared calendar, sends a WhatsApp message the day before reminding them what to pack in his school bag, and tells them what is on the lunch menu so they do not cook the same thing for dinner. He says the morning scramble is gone and the head space is back.
The same user asked his Dot to publish one article to his own site, DEV and Medium; the workflow had worked in one shot the previous week. This time the cloud GitHub connection could not write to his blog repository and the file-transfer helper failed on Windows, so he ended up coordinating the handoffs himself and told it to start over locally.
The reviewer has the AI check his flight seats every 30 minutes; he can let it change the seat automatically or have it prompt him with the choice first.
He runs his own small businesses with AI agents. Each job has its own agent with its own instructions file: one triages the inbox, one handles outreach, one prepares quotes. The agents only draft; he approves every email and quote from his phone before it goes out. A brief arrives at a fixed time every morning with the overnight replies, what is waiting on him, and the follow-ups for the day, and it replaced his own daily check-in. When he corrects something, the correction goes into a shared notes file that every agent reads, so he only has to say it once.
He gets 215 GitHub notifications a day, so he built a bot to triage them.
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.