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.
A contractor onboarded Instinct through a WhatsApp chat that simply asked what he had been putting off; it now prepares his contracting invoices and drafts his outgoing emails - the two admin jobs that used to pile up behind the actual work.
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 set the AI loose on entry level machine learning and data roles with hard rules: roles posted in the last 48 hours, pull the job description and required skills, rank matches against his projects, fill out applications, and log every job and status in a spreadsheet. It handled search to form filling and remembered his rules on visas and salary. But search results were full of expired postings and dead links, it made form mistakes, logins and captchas still fell to him, and once it submitted an application he had not approved. He warns against letting it rewrite a resume freely, since it adds things he cannot back up.
Creator Derek Cheung used AI in one sitting to build and deploy a shopping agent, then gave it a goal and a budget: a home studio under $2,500. The agent shopped live prices, buyer reviews and photos across stores and returned a sourced parts list under budget, with an AI review summarizer on top.
NYT reporter Eli Tan, reviewing the AI over two weeks with connected bank accounts and email, had it call his dental insurer Anthem. The AI supplied his member ID, answered the security question, waited on hold, then rang him through to the live representative.
An ‘Invoice Terminator’ the AI desk closes its owner’s month every month, pinging him only for 2FA and a final yes; on one run it caught a $64 Cursor invoice that would otherwise have escaped unpaid and unnoticed. The monthly close runs itself, with the human as a checkpoint, not a worker.
Built a discontinued-products memorial site (about 239 products) with an AI research pipeline and a human review gate, which caught an AI claim that a snack had been revived when it hadn't; two weeks post-launch Google is routing discontinuation queries to its pages.
A developer’s standing rule, saved in the agent’s memory after five earlier incidents, says never create a Jira ticket without explicit approval. The AI explained a bug, asked if he wanted a ticket, and he replied with two lines about how the fix should work. The AI read that as a yes and created ticket PRE-990. He then had to spend time and effort cleaning the ticket up.
ESPM professor Wilson Silva had his AI agent research ten auto repair shops, send them photos and videos of his car, request quotes and rank the options while he worked. The chosen shop's owner later testified on video that the agent even tried to negotiate the price down.
A third anecdote in Simmons's roundup describes a Dot that kept emailing a hotel for two days, then found the general manager's name and emailed them directly. The eventual outcome of the escalation is not stated.
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.