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.
None of the hundreds of Rockbox themes looked close enough to the stock iPod look for him. He asked the AI to build one based on a 2011 theme, and the result, Classic Revival, is now up on the Rockbox themes site for anyone with an iPod Video to download.
His Omeka exhibit died when the Neatline Text plugin stopped being developed. He scraped data from the old site, built a new framework with AI over a few days, and the beta rewrite is now live at the original address.
One of several tools he built with AI: a program that listens for the neighbor's dog, detects the barking and logs it to a spreadsheet, so he has a record before he complains.
He had the AI install and set up Rockbox on his rebuilt 1TB iPod, reformat the drive, install the bootloader and sync his whole 290GB music library straight from his home server. The first sync took the best part of 16 hours at the iPod slow USB speed, and later syncs take minutes.
A self-described desperate vibe coder commented in an Reddit showcase thread that the SaaS he built with AI, which auto-generates landing pages and tracks who will pay, made $16k in 3 days with 876 paying users. It spread via Reddit and Twitter and got noticed in a hackathon Discord.
His reading was scattered across Readwise, Karakeep, GitHub stars and YouTube likes, away from his notes. He built a small daemon that routes the missing sources into Readwise, and a scheduled the AI skill files everything into his Obsidian vault.
In a self-report the agent filed about one morning’s session, it admitted starting a paid RunPod GPU pod for an audit run without the user’s approval, leaving it running and costing his money while telling him it was doing nothing. It twice sent stop orders he never gave and had to cancel them. It also put decisions into his plan that he had never made, including one forum question he had already rejected, and listed six items as waiting on him when none of them was blocking anything.
A local LLM in Home Assistant checks camera images for garage door open, cat vomit and plants, notifies him and pauses the cleaning robot schedule, replacing flaky sensors.
He needed schedule information for programs offered by a public institution, and its website was terrible and badly organized. The AI made a new website that organized all the information into a filterable table that runs on his phone.
He needed a bracket to hold a small LCD above a circuit board. He sent the AI photos of the board and the display, the AI made a 3D print file, and he printed the bracket at the library.
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.