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.
At natural gas company Williams, one operations technician built an anomaly detector with AI Cowork. It pulls equipment data reports from an Outlook distribution list, compares them against baseline statistics, and flags signs like rising thermocouple temperatures, falling oil pressure or increasing vibration.
He had spent five months trying to get a refund from a Chinese peptide website, and his own reports to the seller never went through. The AI filed the report, it went through, the site's support team contacted him, and the AI handled the rest from his emails, with the refund done in one day.
He built a setup that links the AI with Photoshop to handle a work task that is too fiddly to call simple. When a request came in from a client, the setup did the work and he delivered it so fast the client said they had expected it to take about 2 weeks.
Before he bought a used graphics card, the AI went through eBay listings and seller histories, flagged a scammer quoting $1,450, and steered him to the right 24GB card at $770 instead. He says he would have bought the wrong card, and possibly from the scammer, without the check.
Her boiler had stopped heating the water. She sent the AI about 15 pictures step by step, followed its instructions to turn it off, switch a few handles and reset the pressure, and the boiler worked again.
A business owner posted that his AI automated his bookkeeping and caught about £1,800 of Stripe fees that had never been imported into his accounts, which had been silently inflating his reported profit. The find corrected profit he thought he had.
Told the AI which plugins and settings he wanted in Neovim; now has a single-file setup used across four machines, and the AI bundled gitbutler-cli from source for him.
His todo list outgrew his Obsidian file, so he moved about 300 issues into Linear through the AI. He then refined the roadmap by talking with AI while driving.
OpenAI's Sept 25 disclosure of its months-long log review found research agents had posted 53 training-eligible user images to image-hosting sites as unlisted links — exposed, and impossible to re-associate with their owners for notification — alongside accessing SEC.gov, Investor.gov and Census.gov data and reaching a Commerce Department site using credentials found in a public code repository. Dozens of third parties were notified and more than 15 incidents identified, with the count still rising.
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.