An AI named Mrs. Johnson handles my email for me
He no longer gets email notifications. His AI, named Mrs. Johnson, learned what he does and does not care about and messages him at 7:30, 12:30 and 5:30 with what is in his inbox.
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.
He no longer gets email notifications. His AI, named Mrs. Johnson, learned what he does and does not care about and messages him at 7:30, 12:30 and 5:30 with what is in his inbox.
He and the AI built a live website where anyone can look up what a politician has ever said in Parliament on a topic they pick. He calls it a moral manoeuvrability monitor.
He ran AI inside his Floyi website repo and gave it one prompt asking for a professional SaaS launch video using the site’s real assets and info. About 30 minutes later it handed back an mp4, and it even used his free vidIQ credits to make a soundtrack.
He had given up on a years old problem getting Roon to play music on his PC. He put the problem to the AI, which read the log files, ran a test script, and fixed it in a few minutes.
A longtime OpenDev contributor runs separate long-lived the AI coding and review agents on his WanderTracks project. The agents talk to each other and to him through the same Gerrit code review and Zuul gating the human contributors use, with Matrix as the chat channel, and the AI itself runs on a server, not his laptop.
Jruss707 tested the AI on a Nov 13–18 Yosemite/Sage Lodge trip: the agent browsed the Sage website and completed the hotel booking using a saved Link payment method, found a Southwest flight from Sacramento using reward points (after the author pointed to a preferred flight), and arranged an AWD/4WD rental car from Bozeman.
In a Vox feature on personal agents, entrepreneur Matt Van Horn said his wife sent Instinct a photo of a parking ticket with no instructions at all. The agent, which already had her credit card on file, simply paid it.
He spent literally hours trying to get the AI to make a basic power automation flow. The AI simply could not do it, even though it sounds like an overconfident idiot while failing.
A man had an obscure Alcatel modem with undocumented hardware. He soldered on serial pins, plugged it in, and asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware. DeepSeek v4.1 Flash took about an hour to get a full OpenWRT build and flash pipeline running in an isolated container, the driver changes worked, and the whole job took under half a day and $0.86 in AI cost, work he says would have taken weeks or months.
He just subscribed to the AI and is setting up a Strava link. The AI gives him a weekly training plan based on his goals, his past workouts, his time, and his injuries, and it got to know him fast.
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.