25 real things people did with ChatGPT, with the source and a prompt to try it yourself.
Buying small e-commerce brands, they codified everything they look for into a six page prompt. Given a listing's screenshots and financials, ChatGPT takes a first pass to decide whether a seller call is worth taking.
Result Still manual: screenshot, download, upload, then prompt
Booking flights for a Costa Rica trip, a picky traveler asked ChatGPT to look them up. It checked Kayak, noticed the return flights got in too late and offered other options; they ended up booking one.
Result More personal than Kayak's filters and buttons
Completed orders needed checking against CRM records before billing. Every night ChatGPT reviews each order form against the CRM for mistakes, then creates a draft invoice in the accounting system for review.
Result Also logs each deal's name and amount to a Google Sheet
Building their first AWS project by vibe coding, the writer designed the architecture and let Codex write the code. A flawed first design took a day, against an estimated three or four; the redesign also took a day and scaled.
Result ChatGPT's thinking mode caught a concurrency bug
Safari's lack of a favorite Chrome plugin was the writer's last complaint about it. ChatGPT pulled the source from their installed Chrome extension, ported it, and installed it in Safari in 20 minutes.
Result Cost about 6% of a $20/mo plan
Financial data for 100 schools, from tax filings into a Google Sheet. Operator clicked through it in the background, but rounded numbers, sometimes grabbed the wrong school, and was so slow it was stopped at 25.
Result Then o1 turned the sheet into an interactive chart
"What's for dinner?" with allergies, expiring food and a garden to use up. ChatGPT wrote the build plan and Codex built a local app. Two restarts and about 20 hours later, it's an MVP they use daily.
Result Codex claimed at least 3 of their ideas as its own
Amazon support couldn't figure out the URL for an account question and wanted to escalate with a phone call instead. Gemini gave the URL and explained what was needed in one reply. ChatGPT got it right too.
Result Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Amazon's own search failed
One won't eat this, another loves that. They keep each family member's preferences in ChatGPT and nail down the week's meals quickly. Now the slowest part is Walmart's website.
Result Now the slowest part is Walmart's website
It started as a hand-drawn layout for primes by a graphic designer. Gemini and ChatGPT turned it into C++, and the ~3.1x speedup came from cache use, not new math.
Result The speedup came from cache, not new math
A delayed flight, two airlines, three jurisdictions, and the compensation firms wouldn't touch it. ChatGPT worked out who to contact and exactly what to say. The airline paid.
Result Exactly who to contact and what to say
Esoteric errors, installation headaches, setup stumbles. ChatGPT got them through each one, Steam and all, and now they stay out of Windows for months. They wish they'd switched a decade ago.
Result Steam, LibreOffice and MakeMKV all worked
Stuck on a Swift error, they paste it with the surrounding code and ask what's going on. ChatGPT usually gives a solid lead in about half a minute. They still review every line.
Result They still review every line it writes
Why is a dot product the same as cosine similarity? ChatGPT broke it into small steps and built interactive vector sliders, and now they actually understand it, not just remember it.
Result They feel ready to build on it now
Their first Raspberry Pi project, built with Cursor and a little ChatGPT: a website that prints visitors' messages on a thermal printer in San Diego. They've been mostly incredibly kind.
Result Mostly incredibly kind messages
Hearing the same tracks again and again? ChatGPT and Cursor built a tool that skips anything recently scrobbled on Last.fm. It starts with Windows and is never turned off.
Result Starts with Windows, never switched off
Escape the algorithm's repeats. ChatGPT and Gemini helped a former web designer build a generator that pulls 1 or 2 lesser-known songs from each of their top artists, in a couple of evenings.
Result 1 or 2 deep cuts per artist
Ten years ago a similar scraper took them a horrendous amount of time and wasn't half as good. With free Claude and ChatGPT, this one grabs images, reads them with OCR and crops the hits.
Result About 5-10 hours over a weekend
Their dad's captions said things like "Christmas 1987", not dates. A script asked ChatGPT for dates and coordinates and wrote them into each photo. Now their timeline goes back to the day they were born.
Result A map of the family's road trips
Faulty windows, a long contract and UK law they didn't know. ChatGPT Projects parsed it all and wrote to the landlord, who went from stalling to getting a quote, with work due in a couple of months.
Result Work expected within a couple of months
A last-minute denial of a 6-year-old's life-saving surgery. ChatGPT guided the parent through the external appeal: who to contact, what to research, how to word it. The child is in their best health in 18 months.
Result Surgery done 21 days after the denial
Their company wants a weekly update in a strict template. A custom GPT turns the week's Obsidian notes into it, and 10 minutes of cleanup saves them a couple of hours, even as an LLM-writing skeptic.
Audio circuits had always intimidated them. They took apart a stereo effects pedal with ChatGPT, quizzing it on every part, then designed their own version in KiCad. A college-level crash course in a week.
Result Grilled it on every node, at all hours
Consistent marking and actionable feedback, every time. A UK teacher's custom GPT marks essays for their subject, and the students now use it to revise.
Result Repeatable marking, actionable feedback
v0 built a mobile-friendly site for a relative's business in 10 minutes. ChatGPT sharpened the marketing copy, v0 took it back in, and the whole thing was done in 15.