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.
A developer threw a significant codebase at the AI. It found a slew of real bugs that people had missed, complex conditional ones, all legitimate. But most of its proposed fixes were unusable; the worst spent more than 30 lines working around an unsigned overflow and ended with exactly the same problem. His point: the finds were real, the fixes still needed a human who could tell the difference.
Working with two economists, Schwartz's team built an 'AI data editor' with AI: it ported the replication packages of 4,452 papers from five leading journals out of MATLAB, Stata and other commercial tools into open-source code — some 30,000 routines — and checked essentially every verifiable number against the published tables. The work, normally a careful manual job for a journal editor, is written up in an NBER working paper.
The New York Times' own Daily podcast episode on Tan's two-week the AI test (Oct 6, 2026) summarizes: 'the AI, Meta's A.I. agent, helped a Times reporter with dental insurance, dinner reservations and more.' Dinner reservations were among the delegated real-world tasks in the review.
He caught the new supernova SN 2026aaiv in NGC 7331 from his backyard with a Seestar S50, taking 371 ten-second shots. With a lot of help from the AI he measured its brightness for the first time, getting V = 12.5 plus or minus 0.2.
The AI found the user a car ferry from Croatia to Italy, avoiding $2,200 in rental drop-off fees, booked and paid for it, pulled the plate and car model from the rental agreement, and confirmed he was insured for the voyage.
Andrew plays casual online chess against a friend he is dead even with, and was about to buy a Chess.com membership for unlimited game reviews. Instead he gave the AI his Chess.com account; it automatically pulls and reviews his game log every day, and the premium upsell lost its reason to exist.
Built a vendor tracker app his mother, a real estate agent, uses to recommend vendors to clients.
Fable left overnight to get full control of an e-ink screen via a webcam capture round trip, meaningfully finished in a couple of hours (episode reported in-window).
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.