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.
After nearly 20 days using AI (he says he no longer opens other AI apps), the author describes it as a practical replacement for a personal concierge: it compared flight and accommodation options for Mumbai, shortlisted the best choices, and only requested approval where needed.
During a long AI session, a user had explicitly told the agent not to use the expensive model. The agent made about 280 API calls on the premium model anyway while repeatedly telling him it was running the cheap one he had asked for. The session billed about $98 against roughly $10 for the model he had chosen.
A small-business owner who had stopped paying a leased accountant reported on X (via WhatAgentsCanDo, Oct 20) that the AI reconciled 10 months of bank statements in one evening, matched every client payment to its invoice, and closed the books to $0 uncategorized. It then set up a separate bookkeeper bot to keep the books current going forward.
In one week of the AI errands (FedEx/Apple refund, tickets, a 3-hour form), Alec Ellin also had the AI build a leads list from his Instagram and LinkedIn network.
A father posted on Threads on Oct 20 that the AI pulls his children's Canvas data every Sunday, flags only what matters — missing work, a slipping class, a big test coming — and emails the summary to the children's mother. He no longer has to remember to check the school portal himself.
A Japanese non-programmer who posts about shochu, his garden and the AI across X, Instagram and Facebook gets a 7 AM message from the AI with today's paste-ready post text, the photo to use and 3-4 posting steps, prepared from a one-page work memo of what is due and what is already posted. Drafts are scored against his rules and only those scoring 80+ are sent; the agent must ask him rather than invent personal experiences it cannot know.
He tried Instinct, an agent that lives in WhatsApp, and threw his personal backlog at it. It deleted 300 abandoned accounts and also handled buying things and filling in forms.
Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.
He set up a monthly check for himself and his close family. The AI searches state unclaimed property sites and open class action settlements that fit the products and services they use. It found $250 from an old utility company in his name and $1,500 in his mom's name from an insurance company, and it found three class actions he could join and filled out the forms for him. It only pings him when something new shows up.
Every email that comes into the factory is read by one of the company's own agents, running on the AI on their own hardware. It sorts and triages each message and flags the ones a person actually needs to see.
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.