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 small business owner gives the AI access to his email accounts and phone lines, with a Notion table as its memory. Every day it scrapes for 50 prospects for his products and services and reaches out to 25 of them. He also sells parts of the same setup to his own clients.
For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.
She has been using AI on her health insurance claims, even though she is wary of sharing health info. It found a lot of mismanaged claims that Cigna owes her money for.
Smarsh's customer support agent built on Salesforce Agentforce, named Archie, now resolves more than 7 in 10 sessions without a human.
The same setup reads his incoming email and texts, builds his weekly to do list, sends him a digest every morning with the list and any scheduling clashes he might miss, and adds events to the family calendar on its own. A spreadsheet of every house appliance and its service schedule feeds the list, and it drafts the messages to repair firms for him to send.
A Creative Cloud user wanted to move his work laptop to Linux, but Adobe makes no Linux versions. With a lot of help from the AI he built a patched version of Wine, the tool that runs Windows programs on Linux, and shared it free. On his laptop, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Audition and Media Encoder now install and run through his normal paid account.
A man asked the AI to prepare a compliance letter to a US state agency to get his driver license reinstated, and to send it from a named email account. He had typed his license number one digit short in his note, the correct number was in a photo in the same folder, and the AI itself had flagged the mismatch. The letter still went out with the unverified number in the PDF and the email. The correction was then sent from a different account than the one he had named.
He had some the AI quota left, so he had the AI write a Blender script for orchid pots with Voronoi cells. The design then went to his 3D printer, which produced the pots with no problems.
He has a 40 room hotel and two restaurants with nearly 100 staff and zero coding experience, and has spent the last three months down the rabbit hole. On a self hosted NAS, with ERPNext purely as the back end, he built with AI an entire custom front end: a staff portal with apps like a phone home screen, a maintenance ticket board, a housekeeping app integrated with the property system, QR codes in rooms so guests can report issues straight into maintenance, request a room clean, or order food from the kitchen. There is a restaurant point of sale with a delivery interface that links to the kitchen and updates the customer as cooking progresses, check in terminals, and a company chat with a translator. Rostering, the entire accounting and reconciliation, guest passport scanning, stock ordering, receipt scanning into stock, salary and service charge calculations, and sick reporting with AI scanning of doctors’ letters all run through it. Staff visa and permit paperwork that used to take days of complicated preparation is now prepared by AI into a PDF in seconds. About 140,000 lines of unique code, not counting ERPNext.
A genealogist handed his AI an anonymized GEDCOM with about 3,000 individuals. The AI wrote a Python program drawing 300 frames into a 10-second MP4 animated pedigree (ancestors fade in by birth order, glow while alive, dim at death, living shown as 'Living'), then produced an 11x17 300-DPI print from a single frame.
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.