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 his work in television production he built a tool with AI for reviewing videos of shows in production and storing the masters, doing the jobs his team had been paying Vimeo, Trint and Frame.io style services for. It runs on one small server with a graphics card and has saved about £40k.
He wanted to digitize his papers. The AI worked out how to use his feed scanner, and for about two hours he sat feeding pages in while the AI ran the scanner and catalogued the documents. He could talk to it through a conference speaker and watch it work in VS Code.
After his mother died he inherited a box of family film negatives and bought a Plustek 8200i scanner, then found its new chip had no Linux support. The AI helped him capture the Windows driver traffic and build a working SANE driver. Within a few hours he had his first good scan, and days later a near perfect driver with infrared dust removal.
The owner of a roughly $800k-a-year buy-and-resell business describes having almost none: no CPA, no accounting software - the entire P&L is done by hand in one January evening from bank and credit-card CSVs. The one analytic step is periodic: he pulls the ad campaign data, feeds it to the AI, and from its read decides which products to remove and where to increase or decrease spend.
A young woman in Los Angeles upgrading her home electronics lab used AI's 'Chef' agent to find a soldering station under $200 on Marketplace, compare five specific models, have the agent message sellers directly, and negotiate the price down $50 before she picked up the Hakko FX-888D, unboxed and assembled it on camera.
Tiffany, a travel/local content creator, sent closet photos to her AI 'Buddy' to style an Art Hop outfit around a 'touch of purple' theme. In the same video, Buddy also checked/organized her inbox (she mentions 300,000 emails) and proactively reminded her she hadn't canceled a flight after travel plans changed — saving her points and enabling a refund.
A man gave the AI strict tag research tasks and had it work through the whole ticker list again and again, searching and comparing XBRL tags in SEC filings. The pipeline now pulls 10-K and 10-Q filings for more than 600 companies, maps tags onto about 35 financial concepts, and produces cleaned data. Doing 3 tickers by hand had taken him about 3 weeks and still gave wrong data.
A few months back he had the AI convert a Pure Data patch into an Arduino program that runs on standalone hardware. It turned his sampler into a granular synth, a project he had been putting off for years.
Steve Morseman gave the AI his ISP account info and asked it to cut the bill or improve service. The AI used its calling feature to wait on hold, negotiate, then patch him in to pick between two saving options — $840/year claimed, no plan change.
The AI took a webinar email and made a calendar event for it on its own. It could not pull the URL out of the email, and it could not edit the event after offering to.
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.