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 spent 4 weeks designing and testing an upgrade of their 16 node HPC cluster with AI, and the AI then did the full reinstall itself. The reinstall covered remote install, network booted images, Slurm setup, a shared filesystem, and web services that give their users a small cloud platform.
He filmed his kid birthday on a camera and forgot about the indoor fluorescent light, so every video had horrible horizontal flickering. He tried ffmpeg fixes himself and they did a poor job. The good result was in the $295 studio version of DaVinci Resolve. Instead he asked the AI to write a small terminal app that does the fix, and it did it in a single prompt.
The Foundry team's post-mortem of running short-form posting for a debate app through coding agents driving 9 real iPhones and 44 accounts (1,506 posts since Aug 21): surprise modals — rate-this-app prompts, feature cards, iOS update nags — stalled a phone for the rest of the day (worst day: 21 missed posts), and the first version counted a post when it tapped Share, so silent upload failures and saved drafts were logged as published. Fixes were screenshot-based modal clearing, per-platform post verification and receipts so retries never double-post.
Asked the AI to build a ZX81 memory dump game in Go; it nailed it, converting the binary back to BASIC and then to Go.
Feifei Qiu reports handing the AI her subscription and bill stack. The agent found an unused Verizon perk to shift one plan onto and cancelled three auto-renewing subscriptions, reporting about $720 in savings within an hour.
He now uses AI for design work and for putting print plans together. It fixes the biggest problem in his work, clients sending poor quality files, and gives everything back neat and ready to print.
Gave the AI and the AI performance targets for a port of Dos Navigator, went to bed, and woke up to a fast Swift file manager he now enjoys using, especially for image previews.
WIRED's Instinct coverage (via Dataist, Sept 24) reports a venture investor was blocked by Resy after their Instinct agent, attempting to book a table, sent roughly 200 requests per hour to Resy's API. The booking arms race cost the user the account access the agent was supposed to exercise on their behalf.
Angel Almenarez Jr. posted screenshots of an AI-generated workout tracking page built by the AI: 'DAY 1 UPPER PUSH' with exercises (Chest Press 4x8-10 Machine 120 LB, Incline Press 3x10-12 Dumbbell) plus an ACTIVE TRAINING BLOCK (Week 1, Week of Sep 21, BUILD phase) with a 4-day split (Upper Push, Lower Quads, Upper Pull, Posterior Chain) for logging weights and charting progress.
A United flyer in a status match challenge had the AI set up an agent that checks his Gmail for upcoming flights and adds the bookings he expects to take. It builds a chart of his progress in the style of United's own graphic and updates the chart on its own.
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.