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 local publisher’s the AI research, write and sell the ads for a Thursday paper read by 6,000 neighbours. The bots cover the whole production loop of a real local news product, not just the writing.
Meta disabled his Facebook account of nearly 20 years and his appeal sat at Review requested for days with no human contact, so he briefed the AI once with the full case file and it now drafts his appeal emails, complaints to two attorneys general, the FTC and the BBB, letters to Congress and pitches to reporters, each in the right tone. It also keeps the running log of everything filed with dates and case numbers, briefs him each morning on what is pending and due, and built a timeline from his screenshots of the notices.
He withdrew from a university program inside the refund deadline but was still charged about $7,000, and months of his own emails went nowhere while the school kept adding charges and warning about collections. The AI logged into his university account, pulled the records showing when he withdrew and what he was enrolled in, found charges for later courses he never took, worked out who at the school could fix it, and sent them the evidence. The balance was removed.
One poster set up a single AI agent on WhatsApp for their three-person family, with each member using it for different tasks and the agent surfacing relevant information proactively before being asked. The whole setup runs on one $200/month AI subscription.
Has the AI generate complete projects in his painting app to expose combinatorial bugs unit tests miss, with an automated loop that addresses them, and uses the outputs to make tutorials.
Creator Matthew Berman describes giving an AI access to his local machine on a standing weekly job: it scans every file, finds deletion candidates totalling about 380GB, and sorts them into low, medium and high risk. The bot operates under one hard rule — it may categorize but must never delete anything itself.
A man told Android the AI to add etouffe to his shopping list. The AI added the word toothache to the list instead.
John Voorhees has his Dot, Puck, coordinate his work: he spins large projects off into AI threads and lets the Dot manage them, alongside setting up tasks, checking email and doing light research. He says the delegation has worked reliably the couple of times he has used it.
He retired his Nest cameras and had the AI (alongside OpenCode) configure Home Assistant and the camera software on the PCs already in his rooms, Linux and Windows alike, so the household computers now double as his in-house camera system, checkable while traveling - no doorbell-cam subscription.
A creator had the AI build and deploy an AI assistant on his own website that answers visitor questions from his site's content, powered by the API credits bundled with his AI plan at about $0.0006 per question. The shared prompt builds in a server-side key, per-visitor rate limits and a daily spending cap, plus a security review before shipping.
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.