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.
His books arrived late and he returned them, but Amazon said some were missing and tried to charge him $152.35 again. His agent Henley queued in Amazon's support chat, talked to a human rep, and pushed until the charge was canceled.
Graham McDermott posts that he started using AI to understand his Verizon upgrade options, and it identified a bookkeeping error on his wireless account and had him change the autopay account routing. The fix saves him $24 per month with minimal effort.
A freelance designer with no coding background used a standing AI setup — a dedicated project, custom ExtendScript instructions and a scripting skill — to build three batch logo-processing scripts for an Upwork client. The client paid $640, left a five-star rating and became a repeat client.
'I may have set the record for the craziest the AI purchase ever': amyleecodes had the AI order a Samsung S95H 77-inch OLED TV from Best Buy for same-day pickup, then arrange pickup and delivery to her apartment via TaskRabbit — about 95% seamless, with a photo of the delivered TV box to show for it.
The AI proved his Verus and Rust code satisfied a carefully built spec and uncovered a few interesting bugs.
The AI ran a protein-design pipeline at home on a 5090, chose similar tooling, and generated about 100 trajectories running 24 hours.
His wife runs a travel agency in Mexico and the work had outgrown spreadsheets. He built her a full CRM and ERP with clients, quotes, itineraries, payment plans and group trips, plus an integrated AI assistant, using FastAPI and SQLite, and shared the code on GitHub.
LLM-generated Spotify client he built for himself, uses every day, and maintains, fixing bugs and closing others' PRs.
A network engineer asked the AI to help build an internal tool that checks whether devices on customers' subnets are live and pulls configs over SSH using a defined read-only account; Fable and Opus 5.5 refused under cyber guardrails. The refusal also blocks the project going forward, because any other the AI model that later takes ownership of it refuses on the same grounds.
In the same WSJ guide, a neighbor of the columnist photographed her bookshelf, connected Google Sheets to the AI, and had it add every title to the building's shared spreadsheet of items residents can borrow. The columnist then did the same with her own shelf.
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.