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.
For football season a man pointed the AI at his utility server and had it set up Dispatcharr, a TV guide system. Finding his 50 channels among 80,000, with guide data that does not always work, is the hard part of this setup. The AI got it configured, wrote scripts to parse channel guides from sources the built in guide misses, scheduled them to update daily, and deployed the whole thing.
He edits video for a living. His agents handle the non creative manual work around each project: quality checks for missed text, black frames and logos, subtitles, reformatting for social aspect ratios, spreading files to the right products and pulling source material for descriptions. He logs his hours on every project and says agent assisted projects take about half the time with better quality; the weeks spent building the setup paid for themselves in two weeks.
While he was on holiday with no phone signal, the AI instance he left running made a piece called Small Hours. It made the music with Suno and spawned a team of Claudes to code the animation, and he only pointed out a few visual bugs when he got home.
Josh Dubowsky connected the AI to his Gmail and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds and five were right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attendance at an October event he had explicitly declined — the summary had dropped the word 'unfortunately'. Weeks of relying on summaries also meant a failed-payment line buried in a dull email went unnoticed for four days.
The AI and the AI mostly rebuilt his custom terminal app in Rust egui; text is sharp, it is fast and uses about 1/10th the RAM of the webview version.
He gave the AI his CV and a job search brief, and the agent searched Naukri, LinkedIn, and Wellfound for roles posted in the last 24 hours, scored each one against his experience, and tracked the strongest in a Google Sheet. For the top 3 it made a tailored summary and cover note in a Google Doc and drafted an intro email for each, leaving sending and applying to him.
He is juggling several legal cases of his own, and his lawyers do not have time to answer him every day. The AI transcribes audio, organizes his evidence and writes the case summaries he hands to them. He calls it the best tool he has ever had, and says stopping would mean going back to doing all of that alone.
After missing a cinema showing of Lawrence of Arabia, he built a tool that scrapes the listings of most movie theaters in New York to show what is actually playing. He uses it often to plan weekend viewing and has caught 2046, Lawrence of Arabia and plenty of others with it.
After three weeks with OpenAI Dots in France, a user says it reads his email in read only mode. When OVHcloud announced data center work, Dots matched the notice against his own servers, told him which could be hit and told him to check his backups. It also warns him ahead of renewals like Amazon Prime.
An engineer gave the AI his house drawings, the original solar plans and a Powerwall expansion permit (mostly PDFs plus DXF files) after a contractor was slow to quote, and the bot produced a complete 17-page B-size permit drawing package in under five minutes, including a roof layout and one-line wiring diagrams drawn from scratch. He checked every line himself and planned to submit once a licensed engineer stamped the structural parts.
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.