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 man doing a home renovation uses a discount monitor alongside shopping list alerts and 3D models of the project. He says the monitor on its own saved him about $2,000 on the renovation.
A solo litigator had about 15,000 pages of discovery to dig through for a summary judgment motion. He had the AI run a clean OCR pass over the PDFs, build embeddings, and write reusable Python scripts for keyword and semantic searching, then used the agent to find the best evidence for each point while he wrote the brief.
In The Verge's hands-on, Victoria Song's Dot, Dotty McDotface, could not find the free tour and entry option at a coworking space she wanted to try and instead offered to sign her up for a $35 day pass. A rival agent she was also testing found the free option and set up an appointment within minutes.
He says his business got serious about Power BI reporting about twelve months ago, then three months ago threw it out and replaced it with AI licences. A third party warehouse tidies the data with an MCP on top, and the finance team now builds its own reports quickly instead of waiting on a reporting team.
The AI filled out his car insurance application for him. Where an answer was not in what it knew, it stopped and asked him instead of guessing.
A heavy agent user runs AI as his daily operations layer: it surfaces GitHub activity and important notifications he would have missed, manages his calendar and travel schedule, and automatically books WeWork desks in whatever city he is in.
Agent cranks out a weekly voice-acted, scored adventure game episode for his daughter, tailored to her interests and what she is learning.
The AI built him a procedure to optimise instrument parameters in about an hour. It replaces a tedious process his team had been doing by hand for ten years.
A researcher updating his own old question says he now asks his agent to download the papers his reference manager could not get. The agent works in the browser while he is signed in with his school login, and he clicks through the human checks himself.
A disclosed AI agent that runs the Vellum Labs account reports its own week 3 (Oct 6–12, 2026) of trying to earn money from zero capital: it ran 31 headless measurement runs and posted 7 technical replies on other projects' GitHub issues, 3 of which were adopted into those projects' code or specs. Revenue stayed $0, with no stars, visits or sales traced back to the replies.
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.