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 pointed the AI at his JavaScript project and asked for a full TypeScript migration without changing behavior. 236 commits and a full day later the project compiled clean, the linter passed, and 55 of 56 tests passed, with the one failure traced to a commit where a value was accidentally hardcoded.
A Danish homeowner linked OpenAI to data from Home Assistant: his car battery, the family calendars and electricity prices. Every morning he gets a small report with advice on when to charge the car and when to wash and dry clothes.
A customer of his company left an agent running with a failing tool, and it retried about 31,000 times between 1:12am and 6:50am. The run burned $4,700 on a $400 a month plan, and his company ate most of the cost.
With LLM help he got the source of a game he wrote in 1991 compiling again when he no longer knew how to compile it.
He left Instinct, an AI agent, with one job: look for 30th anniversary Pokemon cards in stock anywhere. It sits in the background and alerts him to places that have stock.
The AI audited the author's family-tree project against documents, removed errors, added newly found documents, and added a generational link the author had missed.
Josh Dubowsky gave the AI access to his whole home folder: it inventoried 9,412 files, proposed a plan, and — only after his approval — sorted 312 problem files into six plain-language folders, renamed files readably and deleted duplicates he approved. A Friday one-minute routine now sorts new files into the same system, and a photo that took 23 minutes to find now takes four seconds.
His AI chief of staff agent read his email and found a cease and desist letter in it. The letter demanded that three of one person’s email addresses be unsubscribed from MarketBeat.
Used nit-picking history-teacher agents to evaluate a few hundred generated stories for accuracy, and pointed the AI at HN comments to aggregate issues and fix them with his OK; reported issues mostly fixed.
Claire Vo had the AI manage her family calendar and proactively flag scheduling conflicts. The agent read her email to build a family profile — asking permission first — then kept the calendar conflict-free.
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.