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.
CData's Dot pulled monthly invoiced totals from Xero for one business unit and QuickBooks Online for the other, checked currencies and invoice statuses matched, and returned one combined table for November 2025 to August 2026. March 2026 was strongest at $28,000 combined; the post notes the test account held demo data.
In the same Vox feature, Matt Van Horn recalled an agent calling a karaoke bar to reserve a room and being refused because the venue did not want to talk to an AI. He completed the reservation through Fo, a service that adds human help.
A podcaster connected his bank accounts to the AI. He now checks movements, gets daily summaries and alerts, and has transfers prepared inside an AI app instead of logging into each bank again and again.
He runs Svippit, a small shop platform for creators. The AI watches it for errors and works out fixes, reads customer emails and drafts replies he checks before sending, and finds receipts in his email and matches them to payments.
Made an AI sysadmin bot with root SSH that runs hourly health checks, Monday 6am updates with rollback, firewall, nginx and site fixes he triggers from his phone.
Opus 5.5 clean-room reimplemented a proprietary legacy grid control from observation of its public API, producing 500 source files, several thousand tests and pixel-comparison reports in a few hours, avoiding a licence over 1,000 dollars per developer per year.
Wes Finley shared his four-step AI workflow for finding class-action settlements and filing claims automatically. Commenters chimed in with their own results, including $400 payouts.
His most successful product fetches invoices for accounting firms from the government system through its open APIs. Tools like it charge per client per month; he sells his for a fixed price with lifetime access and support. He says he built a working copy of a well established system in a week by himself with AI, and it makes him a profit.
He built a plugin that lets his agent drive the Sway window manager directly, and used it to switch from X11 to Wayland, something he says did not work for him before. He now asks the agent things like which window is taking the most memory and has it start and stop power profiles.
Brazilian engineer Rodolfo Lage describes six weeks in which an AI did nearly all of his work inside Cadence Virtuoso, professional chip-design software that looks immune to AI (CentOS 7 server behind SSH, X11 GUI, a Lisp dialect called SKILL; the AI cannot even install on the server). Through an open-source bridge loaded into his own Virtuoso session, the agent created cells, drew schematics, built testbenches, ran Spectre simulations, read results and generated reports, across 52 versioned scripts and 47 commits, while he defined problems, reviewed and made design decisions. Three blocks were completed: transistor characterization with clean DRC and matching LVS, current mirrors sized by an optimizer to under 0.005% current error, and a common-source amplifier reaching 26.8 V/V gain and 109 MHz gain-bandwidth. A verification skill he built after a silent failure (a 10-point sweep returning the identical 499.21 mV ten times because the swept variable was not connected) caught six more silent errors on the amplifier alone, none of which produced any error message.
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.