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 mathematician with more than a dozen finished but never submitted papers pulled out four of them and shared them with AI. The AI caught errors, built a spreadsheet comparing his new concepts against related papers, converted plain TeX to LaTeX, wrote abstracts he adopted almost word for word, and fixed bibliography entries unprompted. All four papers improved to the point where he submitted them.
A parent of three was copying school, cram school and nursery dates from paper prints, LINE and email into Google Calendar by hand, and nearly missed a field trip lunch. He built Hanamaru: the family posts a photo of a print in Slack, the AI pulls out the dates, and it registers them on the right child's calendar, asking in the thread first when it is not sure.
Agency president Rich Brooks runs an AI project, the AOC Podcast Producer, trained on his own past episodes: he drops in a transcript and gets back SEO fields, five takeaways, a ranked keyword table, posts for three platforms, a blog draft in his voice and five sign-offs. Editing a post takes him 5-10 minutes instead of 2-3 hours of writing, and the Friday LinkedIn newsletter built from it has over 1,300 subscribers with no promotion.
Broke copy protection with GPT 5.6 and has a forked Hatari that boots and runs Notator and Creator by emulating the dongle.
Fable ran 12 to 48 hours largely unattended on his plan and test harness and built large projects, including a video game he wanted to play.
A travel creator challenged the AI with the goal of visiting every country. Because the AI connects to his Instagram, it already knew how he likes to travel and built an ambitious personalized schedule around that taste, presented as an interactive map.
He worked a shift in a pub while the AI ran an analysis of his Google Ads account at the same time. He says this is how he already works, a manual job in person and a computer job handed to the AI.
Lulu (mom, holding her young child on camera) set up an AI avatar named 'CB' in an AI app: she shared her weight (237 lbs) and goal (180 lbs), answered questions about frequency (4-5 days/week) and location (home/mix), and got a personalized Mon-Fri strength and cardio plan. She logs 'Workout complete' and gets confirmations back.
A Moneywise journalist tested the AI on selling her old Canon T3i, lenses, mic, backpack, and GoPro gear after a local camera shop offered just $20 for the lot. The AI found exact-match eBay sold comps ($220-$225), located a Foto Care cash-buy event in NYC, and wrote a negotiation brief with opening, target, and walk-away prices to counter lowball offers.
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.
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.