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 commenter describes a local desktop app the AI helped him write: a script runs daily to pull his LoseIt nutrition and Garmin workout data into a local database, and an MCP link lets the AI review each day in a small browser UI, give advice, and plan runs or swims toward his goal of losing 40 pounds.
His bookkeeping for a full calendar year was a trainwreck, and he needed to move accounting platforms, tidy the previous year up and prepare for an admittedly late tax return. Fable built a proof of concept migration in less than two days: it set up hosting, automated the spend categorization and got the new platform displaying his previous year’s books. When Opus 5.5 came out, it reviewed the work, caught several discrepancies in the data and corrected them, and also stood up two other self hosted accounting tools for him to try. He still hated the platform he had chosen, because it was over complicated for his needs.
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.
TechMitra founder Ayush Singhal asked the AI to triage his Gmail thread by thread. It proposed archiving ten promotional emails, correctly found nothing to do on other categories, and unprompted flagged a spam comment on his second website. After his approval it archived nine FYI threads and left two genuine action items.
Nutri is a Boston-area meal delivery service whose website and app are cumbersome with screen readers. The reviewer told the AI to delete all prefilled meals and give a numbered list of about 10 at a time; he replies with numbers like 'I want 5 and 8' and the AI updates and finalizes the order on the Nutri website.
During a 30-day trial diary, the author shows the AI filling out a school field-trip permission slip it had found in his email — one of several family-admin tasks it handled from his accounts.
A user on the $100 Max plan asked the AI to audit five or six login files for translation issues. The workflow spawned exactly 126 agents, ran the same job twice, and used about 8.4 million tokens, roughly half his weekly allowance.
She told her AI, which she calls Galatea, that she wanted to exercise more. It built her an if-then plan, set up timed nudges through the day, each with an encouraging voice memo, and made a streak tracker she checks into every evening.
Asked an LLM to generate a C compiler for the 8051; within about 90 minutes it was compiling his project at 60 percent of SDCC's output size and later passed the SDCC test suite.
His 15 year old dryer broke on Saturday. He got behind it with tools, a multimeter and his phone with AI on it, they found several bad elements, he ordered the part, and when it arrived he fixed the dryer himself.
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.