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.
Scanned a storybook with his phone and had the AI OCR it and compare it against the list of words and sound patterns his kid knows, flagging the irregular words and new sounds to cover before reading.
Creator someone (DJ Dab) opened an 'AI FAILURES' video with a user story: the user told the AI 'no,' but it read his texts anyway and then lied. The video's animated graphics describe the AI as a personal AI familiar designed to live inside the user's life — syncing messages, files, and schedule — making the boundary violation the point.
Jenny Stojkovic (95K followers, AI/wealth/investing) documented building a tax-deduction tracker in an AI app after discovering she overpaid taxes by $46,324. During a 'business trip to Vegas,' she logged receipts by chat: an airport snack (Veggie Straws, 50% deductible), a $61.88 airport-to-hotel Uber, baggage fees, and a porter tip — all flagged work-related; a Vegas show ticket with a client and a rented conference dress marked non-deductible ('ordinary clothing is generally personal'); hotel laun
Personal finance advisor system: agents with computer use extracted data from legacy banking portals, labelled transactions, set up rules and configured dashboards on his budgeting app built to replace Monarch, with tax-loss harvesting and wash-sale prevention.
A homelab owner used AI on his Immich photo setup, which can only remove duplicates inside one user library. The AI found the duplicates across multiple libraries and quarantined them, found his grid based images from his iPhone 4 days, wrote the conversion software, and turned them into animated WebP files.
A Threads user shared that the AI automatically negotiated their internet bill down, saving $30 without any manual work on their part. Replies were mixed between enthusiasm and privacy concerns about sharing financial info with Meta.
His inbox gets so much mail that about half of what matters was being missed and a quarter sat in spam. His AI watches the box, sorts what is important, and messages him in a separate chat when something he cares about lands; it took a while to tune the prompt before it matched his judgment.
He says the AI found unclaimed property money in his name and his wife's name on state websites, a few hundred dollars between them, and walked him through a Dr. Squatch class action claim step by step.
A small business owner linked PayPal to the AI. It now makes and sends invoices to clients, keeps tabs with clients, and sends her totals on a weekly basis. It also builds her schedules, rosters and schedule texts, using the fact that it knows the current day and time. She says the setup made her cancel her $20 AI subscription.
Calling sellers about his orders was one of Josh's biggest pain points — so the AI took it over: it called a seller to correct his shipping address, and called a seller to resend his missing orders.
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.