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.
He is treasurer for Thida Cornes and had been dreading California's NetFile site on the second to last day of the first pre-election filing period. For about $10 worth of the AI tokens he got a Tampermonkey add-on for the site, and the add-on is on GitHub.
Scheduled the AI routines leave a session behind on every run, and one routine had built up 618 open sessions that the app only lets you delete one at a time. A cleanup skill plans the job, keeping the newest sessions and any where the owner typed a reply, then has the AI delete through the app’s own session tool, 25 per call, each batch behind an approval card.
Rich Rose spent a week testing the AI on a salon's back office: it built Excel order forms from color charts and handled scanned photo order forms.
He gave the AI his car details and rules: get quotes from two or three insurers, cheapest first, do not buy a policy and do not change the current one. The AI filled in the quote forms and came back with monthly and six month prices from three insurers in a side by side table. Geico would not complete the request at all. He says it saved him time filling in forms.
A Japanese non-programmer who posts about shochu, his garden and the AI across X, Instagram and Facebook gets a 7 AM message from the AI with today's paste-ready post text, the photo to use and 3-4 posting steps, prepared from a one-page work memo of what is due and what is already posted. Drafts are scored against his rules and only those scoring 80+ are sent; the agent must ask him rather than invent personal experiences it cannot know.
He needed an app on his QNAP NAS that only existed as open source Linux code, with no NAS package. He gave the AI the model, the AI searched the web and gave him a downloadable package in about ten and a half minutes, and he installed it and it works.
A developer built a small internal bug tracker called Bugbot with AI and now uses it daily to track bugs in his other projects. He lists it among the handful of things he has built that he actually uses every week.
Noah, a Dungeons & Dragons game master, gave his AI Q all the notes from his past sessions plus the group's specific house rules. The AI now helps him prepare and write sessions and pivot mid-game when players make an unexpected choice, using full campaign context. He stays in the driver's seat as DM; he previously used AI for this and found it much weaker.
His order was doubled, and the company support bot closed his ticket. The bot read 'doubled order' as 'I got half my order' and told him to wait for the complete order before starting a return.
The AI built him a Bluesky bot that posts HN Wikipedia articles and posts an archive pick after 48 quiet hours; it is live and posting.
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.