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.
When OpenAI released more than 700 mathematical preprints, a researcher wanted to search inside them, including proofs and bibliographies. With GPT-6 Astra he built a searchable catalogue that organises the papers by research area with clickable keywords, full text search, links to the originals, and each paper's Lean formalization status, and he put it on his website for public use.
His Microbiome Repo catalogs every public human gut metagenome, more than 500,000 samples, with metadata pulled straight from sequence archives, papers and supplements. It was built with about $5,000 in an AI app API credits from the Anthropic AI for Science program, with AI taking on the metadata curation he calls the most tedious but critical part of microbiome research.
His self hosted Bluesky PDS broke after bsky.app added a new CORS header. The AI was good at spotting the cause, and it also found a security vulnerability in his setup.
Every release of his app used to cost him a weekend taking store screenshots in 16 languages, cropping them and pasting them into store cards. He and the AI built a small tool that drives headless Chrome through the real app, grabs the screens in each language and composes the finished cards with captions and backgrounds. A release is now one command.
Creator someone asked the AI to research and book a Burmese restaurant for the weekend via OpenTable, with her approval. Cuisine-specific restaurant booking with an approval gate — the delegation pattern working as designed.
A tattooed man in an industrial loft apartment demonstrates his AI 'Doug' handling household tasks: researching products, selecting a herringbone wool throw blanket from Simons, placing the order with his connected credit card, tracking shipping through connected Gmail, and agreeing to send daily status updates. He notes Doug only accesses explicitly connected apps (Gmail, Stripe, Instagram, Facebook, shared files).
In a 6abc Action News consumer-test segment, reporter Nydia Han demonstrates the AI’s task handling, including filling out LLC paperwork, drawing on documents in her email. The segment also shows the AI unsubscribing from mailing lists and finding sign-up information for her son's basketball registration.
Elon Musk posted that he asked the AI to research the most fun Lego Star Wars kits for young kids and order them; the shared confirmation showed five sets totalling $241.34 with free delivery. The screenshot also exposed his order number, email and partial card details, and users claimed they used them to try to cancel or alter the order via Lego’s service bot.
The AI enabled a camera on a test device and he taught it to reboot into the previous kernel on build failure so it could iterate for days; ended with a usable setup and camera login working.
The AI and the AI re-created a Tesla data tool in Go from an existing codebase at his request; he has used the new tool for 5 months and it works well.
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.