He needed his address history for a co-op application and had struggled to dig out leases from a decade or more back. The AI searched more than 20 years of his Gmail and built a spreadsheet listing his addresses back to 2006, with links to the emails behind each date and a flag on the dates that were only a guess.
She had pension paperwork scattered from 9 permanent jobs since 1990. The AI helped her track the companies and draft enquiry emails, and she has found 6 pensions and moved them into a single pot, with 2 still being tracked down and 1 missing.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A security researcher pointed GPT-5.6 Sol at MikroTik RouterOS 7.23.3 with a goal prompt to find a path from no login to remote code execution. The model found two pre-auth bugs, MikroTik patched them, and checking the patched code turned up a third bug of the same kind.
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.
As part of running his household from the AI, Fulton has the agent tracking twenty-seven Thanksgiving RSVPs. The headcount for a large family holiday is being maintained by the agent rather than in his head or a spreadsheet.
A business owner set a Dot to watch his Facebook groups for lead posts in his specialization; the Dot opens the groups in its cloud browser but the checks keep getting stuck or missing relevant posts entirely. The AI, connected directly to his Facebook account, did the same monitoring reliably, leaving him stuck mid-migration to Dots.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Told the AI which plugins and settings he wanted in Neovim; now has a single-file setup used across four machines, and the AI bundled gitbutler-cli from source for him.
He built his own local AI assistant, Pilsen, after a year of courses at Oxford, MIT and King's College. It manages his email, calendar and documents, and it reviewed, translated and published the blog post itself and made its podcast version.
He could not find an uptime and performance monitor that met his needs, so he built a lightweight one called Blip with help from the AI. He put the code on GitLab and wrote a blog post about it.