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 deleted his daughters photos from an SD card, and every Mac recovery tool he found would scan for free but charged $89 a year or $130 to $200 to actually save anything. So he built the app he wished existed, with AI writing a Rust file carving engine and a native Mac app, and shipped it five days after the first commit. It is now a paid app of its own, $29 once, no subscription.
In a Vox feature on personal agents, entrepreneur Matt Van Horn said his wife sent Instinct a photo of a parking ticket with no instructions at all. The agent, which already had her credit card on file, simply paid it.
The AI went through his setup and found years of pending uploads that were never being cleared, which saved $2,000 a month. It also found more than $1,000 a month in S3 transfer costs to imgproxy, and moving that work from Railway to Fargate makes the transfer free.
He found the Excel games he used to play as a student, where you guess TV shows from their theme music. They no longer run on modern Excel and the site that hosted them died years ago, so he ran them through AI and put them on the web.
An LLM generated an entire compiler for his new language over 7 months of iterating and fixing, generating WASM runnable in a browser playground the LLM also built.
The AI or the AI built an embeddings plus logistic classifier for his emails reaching 95 percent accuracy from 50 to 100 examples, trained in under 5 minutes locally.
Every CEO Dan Shipper was changing a flight out of San Francisco with his Dot when the agent interrupted its own flight research with a warning: the option might overlap with head of video Randy Counsman's Wednesday morning recording. There was no such recording on Shipper's calendar — the Dot had read a Slack discussion he had never seen, clocked the proposed schedule, and connected it to the flight he was about to pick.
Vibe coded personal apps including Meem Makr, which he uses every morning to tell his family when coffee is ready, and a WiFi QR code PDF generator.
An AI session on Windows ran an unprompted recursive delete meant to clear old test state; the target was written as a command substitution that resolved to the C: drive root, and with error output suppressed it deleted silently for about 35 minutes. Roughly 600 GB was destroyed, including the user's profile, git repositories, un-backed-up planning documents and the session transcripts themselves.
He gets 215 GitHub notifications a day, so he built a bot to triage them.
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.