20 real things people did with Gemini, with the source and a prompt to try it yourself.
Tired of typing new Date().toISOString() and doing timezone math by hand, they built a small tool with Gemini, which added obscure date formats and random historical events along the way.
To keep up with industry and tech news, the writer built a free-tier Google Cloud Run job pulling Google News RSS feeds. Gemini picks which articles match their criteria and triggers a summary email.
Result Runs inside Google Cloud's free tier
Six AI workers, two each on Claude, Codex and Gemini, were set loose to build a SQLite-like engine in Rust. It passed 64 queries of a 1,000+ query suite, with slop like redundant buffer copies and no concurrency.
Result 54.5% of all commits were just lock coordination
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
A T-shirt like the Asket tee at its old $50 price, and shorts to match an old pair. Grok invented a few review claims on the way, but both picks turned out right.
Result Both picks matched; the shorts cost less
They planned the architecture with Gemini first (dependency injection, UI components, Firebase, logging), then let its agent mode build it step by step. The app works like a charm.
Result Works like a charm, neatly structured
Their new boiler acted up. They sent Gemini photos and asked for help; it turned out to be user error, nothing safety-critical, and the plumber call-out was saved.
Result User error, not safety-critical
Auto-placed crop zones with perspective correction and edge snapping, in the browser. It wasn't right on the first try, but building it was much faster than hunting for an existing tool.
Result Perspective correction and edge snapping included
The malware was cleaned out, but a hidden backup in the database, triggered by the WordPress cron, would have brought it back. Gemini pulled the encrypted packages apart and spotted it.
Result Traced to a fake Cloudflare popup scheme
They'd written one by hand years before, so they knew exactly what they wanted. In VS Code's Agent Mode, Gemini built it and refactored it into a Python decorator. One dumb corner case slipped through.
Result One dumb corner case slipped through
Claude writes the story page by page, with the tension planned to peak in the middle, and Gemini draws it in a consistent style. Their kids love them night after night.
Result Stories their kids love night after night
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 six-pointed star and an ornate frieze on the ceiling. Gemini placed the frieze in the 1901-1910 period, which dated the house in about 10 minutes instead of hours of searching.
Working abroad, they didn't know the local systems. Gemini flagged a pension account they could cash out when leaving the country, and Claude caught risky clauses in a contract too small for a lawyer.
Result Risky contract clauses fixed without a lawyer
They pasted raw PPP frames in hex into Gemini, which decoded and explained every byte. An hour later they knew enough to fix a Zephyr OS driver bug and submit a patch.
Result Every byte decoded and explained
Never built for mobile, a parent of three, a busy life. Gemini guided the Kotlin architecture and the UI, and their first Android app was a real joy to build. Impossible a couple of years ago, they say.
Result A real joy to build, for a parent of three
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
Treated as a child for a rare condition, they asked Gemini about it years later. It explained the test used back then was the wrong type. Two specialists confirmed it. Their advice: verify, don't trust blindly.
Result Two specialists confirmed the old mistake
Running D&D over a Discord screen share, the extra features of big tools just got in the way. An hour with Gemini produced a simple map that fits how they run the game, now a free web page.
Result Published as a free web page
Vermont town meeting reports locked the budget away in PDFs. A volunteer had Claude Code and Gemini pull the numbers out and build a comparison site, deployed in under an hour. Rough, but it works.
Result Deployed in under an hour