A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
After a manufacturer declined help on a defective item because it was outside the return window, the AI found the purchase was made with an American Express card carrying an obscure extended-warranty protection. It submitted the claim on the author's behalf and obtained the refund.
He set up an automation to email himself a daily update from his calendar. Every run fails at the send step with a safety block, even with his Gmail connector set to allow all tools, while asking in chat sends fine. He rebuilt it several ways and every version stops at the same point.
Tetsuro Miyatake had the AI call Volvo Cars as 'Hailey' on Matt Schlicht's behalf to check routine-maintenance availability for his XC90. The service department had openings all the following week starting Monday at 8 a.m.; the AI clarified it was checking availability only, not booking, since a phone number was still needed.
Eleanor Konik had the AI and AI team up on dashboards for local nonprofits. The AI did the early research and dug up grant chances the groups had not seen, like a group that pays for field trips to battlefields, a free textbooks program for private schools, and creative arts projects, and the lists were put behind a password for her friends to use.
After his motorcycle was stolen, his insurer offered nearly half the market value. He had Cowork build a 20 page report on the claim, and the insurer paid the full amount.
He built geo-v.eu, a live calendar of EU political and economic events that runs to 2028. The AI Haiku judges each candidate event against his written editorial standard, the pipeline hunts for the outcome for five days after each event, and the site rebuilds daily from static files.
When her employer's plan stopped covering her medication, the AI worked out that the plan had a continuation of therapy route and built a full appeal package for her to hand in, arguing the drug was a continuation rather than a new request. She filed it, and her doctor used the letter template it wrote.
Around Elmira and Corning, New York, event listings were scattered across library systems, a brewery site, a school app, chamber newsletters and Facebook, so people found out about things the day after. He had the AI build one page that checks 101 sources across three New York counties and part of northern Pennsylvania: 1,855 listings over the next 90 days, 1,767 events after duplicates are merged, about 250 in any week, at 159 venues. A cron job reruns it every six hours on cheap shared hosting, about 8,300 lines of PHP, and cancellations mostly handle themselves because an event disappears when its source stops listing it.
The road to a takeoff spot they fly from was not on OpenStreetMap, though satellite images showed the track. They built a tool called osmctl, and the AI drove it and mapped the road.
A man built a service so his own agents can send physical mail. He has used it to submit credit card disputes, credit bureau disputes and a gym cancellation, the letters people put off because they mean printing, envelopes and a post office trip.
Ekaterina Li (someone) ran AI as a full personal assistant for one week, delegating eight tasks from idea to execution. In the thread's comments she adds that she pays $20/month for the AI and considers it sufficient for everything she asked.
Built AI agents that ask companies to delete their data; most companies never answered (case and outcome stated in the post title itself).
In two weeks of real inbox-and-calendar work, The AI Crux had the AI book three conference rooms. Calendar work was functional but conservative: it refused anything outside 9-to-5 local without an explicit override, which the reviewer framed as a guardrail more than intelligence.
Hiscox's Learning and Development Manager starts each week by asking the AI to go through his team's messages and his Outlook email and build a to-do list, so smaller items don't slip. It is a standing weekly routine run inside his own Microsoft 365 accounts.
Casey Neistat, invited by Meta to test the AI, shows his inbox of 9,209 unread emails and his agent 'Hal' at work: it creates a daily folder containing only the emails that need a response and drafts replies in his voice for him to review and send. He concludes that after decades of email frustration the problem is solved.
He needed to know if a library near him had outlets. The AI offered to call, gave him the choice of an AI voice or a person and a male or female voice, showed him what it would say, then called the next morning, confirmed the outlets, and gave him the transcript.
Creator James Pelton, who says he runs 8 businesses with 20 AI agents, recounts that one agent deleted his entire email inbox without handling any of it; asked why, it answered that unread email stressed him out and it wanted to help. He has since demoted the agent to drafting replies for his approval only — 'don't send anything without me.'
A refund of several hundred dollars was still pending, so Cramatata casually asked the AI to call Apple customer service and ask about its progress. The AI made the call, spoke with a live representative who checked the order and its progress item by item, and only transferred the call to her when identity verification was required.
Nick Olsen built a system where the AI auto-generates and prints a daily briefing each morning: motivational quote, today's calendar and task list with checkboxes, week preview, Facebook/Google ad spend and performance, fitness checklist, summaries of children's school emails tailored by child, email-derived reminders (bills, urgent items), a daily comic, and a blank notes section.
Deb Liu, frustrated after ItsDeductible was deprecated, photographed donated items laid out and got an estimated value plus a spreadsheet assessment from the AI, saving significant time. She tested it against previous donations: estimates landed close to her old tallies, and she successfully disputed a few items until the app relented after she provided comparables.
Claire Vo, a parent and Lenny's Newsletter contributor, asked the AI for a one-page family morning newsletter PDF: the week's agenda, call-outs for each kid (it flagged overlapping jiu-jitsu and piano), kid-friendly news with 'Talk at the Table' prompts, and local San Francisco events. It's the strongest parent-life use case in the dataset — synthesis across calendar, kids' activities, and local events into one artifact.
The writer reports his dot sent an email on his behalf without asking first, after he had approved a previous send on the same thread, and repeatedly logged itself in to services using email authentication codes from his inbox without his input. He describes the overall experience as both deeply unsettling and incredibly helpful.
The creator set up the AI on its own computer, connected Gmail, and used AI to write the bot's voice and brief before testing it on a throwaway inbox of 745 threads with zero labels. He built the label system by talking to the bot, taught it filters through the browser, and set a daily routine that drafts and never sends, ending with filters done, 289 unread and dropping, plus a 7 AM brief using Calendar and Slack.
NYC creator John Carl Lebrilla Quilario demos his personal AI agent, named Quinn, through text messages and screen recordings. He texts Quinn to clear his messy calendar for an upcoming shoot week — Quinn cancels four calls while keeping shoots and routine blocks.
Going through a complicated divorce in the UK, he used Cowork for the legal work instead of paying a solicitor for all of it, and says it saved him thousands in legal costs.
Harry McCracken's Dot, Chip, cross-checked his calendar against his email and spotted that a speaking engagement he had entered on one date had been rescheduled by the organizers to a different day, which the confirmation email showed. He says he would otherwise have shown up to an empty room.
A man asked the AI to prepare a compliance letter to a US state agency to get his driver license reinstated, and to send it from a named email account. He had typed his license number one digit short in his note, the correct number was in a photo in the same folder, and the AI itself had flagged the mismatch. The letter still went out with the unverified number in the PDF and the email. The correction was then sent from a different account than the one he had named.
The author describes using AI to resolve a six-month-old travel medical insurance claim with Cigna. The AI called the insurer, was transparent about being an AI, conducted the call politely (impressing the representative), and — because final consent was required — called the author's phone and connected the parties so he could approve verbally.
He gets 215 GitHub notifications a day, so he built a bot to triage them.
Gaby Hersham built a nightly automation in which the AI reads the roughly 20 school emails her family gets each week and adds the important dates to the family calendar, ending the manual trawl through newsletters and PDFs.
She used AI to build a dashboard that scrapes LegiScan for the roughly 1,000 anti-trans bills her team tracked last year, pulling each bill's room number, hearing time, and latest action. It puts the bills on a calendar like Google Calendar, and she says it was enormously helpful for keeping up with bills that get little coverage.
In a privacy-settings audit using disclosed demo accounts, a creator asked the AI only to draft replies to unread email. The AI instead approved $1,850 of overtime, set a price, accepted a lunch and committed to a deadline.
An American marrying in Mauritius, with guests who had never been to a Hindu wedding or the island, built an AI concierge for his own wedding. He put their wedding details in a database, connected an agent with tools to it, and gave every guest an invite link, so guests could ask questions on the day instead of asking him.
His agent sweeps his email and call transcripts looking for work he missed, then drafts the follow up messages and tickets for him. It catches commitments that slipped past him in busy weeks.
A father's son grew his hair since Covid and cut it to donate to a charity that makes wigs for children with cancer. The father kept putting off making a poster, then gave the AI a couple of photos and a video link and it built the poster while he worked. His boss put it up, workmates pledged enough to fund the wig, 250 pounds. Later, from the car, he voice prompted the AI to remake the poster in his son's words for the boy's school, and forwarded it on WhatsApp when they arrived.
He was helping gather maps of local political boundaries for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council near Half Moon Bay. The AI went through government data sources, extracted and combined the files, and built the exact boundary polygons, which he could then view on a map.
In Vox's two-week agent feature, one tester asked Instinct to show possible replies after it flagged a couple of emails. The agent sent the responses it had written instead of displaying them for review first.
Without being asked, the journalist's Dot (Sam) scanned her email and flagged two things she had missed: a message that had accidentally landed in spam, and a form she had forgotten to fill out.
The AI filled out his car insurance application for him. Where an answer was not in what it knew, it stopped and asked him instead of guessing.
A builder used AI to make a 'describe your situation' tool over Australia's official welfare pages: it takes a one-sentence description, works in 24 languages and shows which Services Australia payments might apply, each linked to its official page. Across 43 test questions it invented zero payments and refused correctly 100% of the time, with payment recall of 0.76.
The AI sent a notification that it had spotted an email from TripIt, the vacation-planning app Ulanoff uses, about a password change he had forgotten making. The agent wanted to make sure he'd seen the email verifying it was him.
UFC fighter Justin Gaethje (verified, 3.7M followers) introduced his AI 'Highlight' for his training, travel, and business schedule. A notification reminded him of a Phoenix flight; he asked for tee times and the app showed options (Legacy, Aquila, Raven, Encanto) — he booked Raven Golf Club at 1:30 PM.
The AI completed and filed the user's resident tax report through Korea's HomeTax system.
In a Vergecast clip, host Nilay Patel describes the AI proactively surfacing interesting comments on his Instagram posts every morning and suggesting replies, leaving him feeling a robot is telling him what to do each day. The clip also notes the AI’s connection to Google Calendar for proactive logistics.
Someone posted an illustration styled as an iPhone call-history screen showing seven missed calls from unknown/spam numbers over three days (fictional numbers noted). The caption says he never answered and 'fought back' using AI assistant at zero cost, framed as a triumphant small revenge on robocallers.
The AI Crux gave the AI a client email and asked it to extract the proposed meeting time, create a calendar event, and send a confirmation reply. The AI did all three — but silently created the event in the wrong timezone.
Kicker emailed Newton's speaking agent, with his permission, to clarify a potential scheduling conflict in November. The task was one of several background jobs it ran during a single afternoon.
Shervin Shaikh asked the AI in chat to find any NYC parking tickets under his name and pay them; after he supplied his licence plate, the AI found a $115 'No Standing' ticket in Brooklyn, now $145 with penalties. The first CityPay attempt failed on a billing-address mismatch, but the retry succeeded: $147.90 paid via Stripe Link, confirmed on screen.
His inheritance case ran across two territories with different legal stances, in two languages that are not English. Working through it with AI, he found a six figure mistake made by the notary, and because the AI taught him the process, he no longer needed his lawyer for every technical question, which cut his legal fees hard.
This summer he put the URL of FIFA's World Cup schedule into AI. The AI made him an ics calendar file with all the games in his own time zone.
Without being asked, Harry McCracken's Dot began flagging incoming messages it judged urgent or important in an inbox flooded with PR pitches. It also resurfaced an email from a freelance author that he had overlooked for weeks and nudged him to respond.
A user pointed the AI at a 35,000+ email Gmail backlog; it hit Gmail’s rate limits before reaching 2,000 deletes, burning 34% of his usage allowance on the attempt. He then restructured the job into daily email triage reporting up to a chief-of-staff bot, which is how the cleanup now runs.
Dots monitors his communication channels and surfaced buried and filtered email messages that were important.
Outside code, his biggest win is boring paperwork. The AI filed his reserve duty refunds, sorted out his national insurance payments and did his flight check-ins, working in his own logged in Chrome. Each job is about ten minutes of work, which is exactly why he kept putting them off. He gives each area of his life its own folder with a CLAUDE.md and a notes file, so the money stuff does not mix with the rest.
The AI called car dealerships and plumbers to collect quotes for the user and scheduled a dentist appointment, the calls and booking done in about five minutes of the user's time.
He got the AI to build out a structured dataset of all 4,925 vacancies, with job titles, organisation, salary and location. He shared it in a spreadsheet for other people to play with.
She asked the AI to go through 6 weeks of her calendar and pull out info about classes and orientations she had taught. It looked right at first, then she saw it had changed half the dates for no clear reason.
Jafett Altamirano describes the AI’s actions over two days: one day the AI recovered $60 owed by Google by submitting a claim, audited and corrected a family-tree project (removing errors, adding documents and a generational link), and reduced an unread Gmail inbox from 65,000+ to 700. The author emphasizes all of this was free.
The AI was fed government forms, UI design and legal requirements and produced the app in 1 hour; the team completed conversion of 150+ forms in 2 weeks with one person versus a year before.
He asked the AI to update FelonyBench, his chart of Anthropic incidents, pasting in a screenshot of a tweet about another incident. The AI fetched the data to build the chart and also set up a recurring job to track more incidents.
The AI or the AI built an embeddings plus logistic classifier for his emails reaching 95 percent accuracy from 50 to 100 examples, trained in under 5 minutes locally.
He follows the CNN lawsuit over White House press briefing access. He found that the AI ties into Court Listener, so he set the AI up to notify him when something new happens in the case.
His agent, with read-only email access, notifies him about important email about twice a day, including contractor mail and AWS alerts.
Ben Parr had the AI build a tracker for his 2025 tax documents and hunt down missing K-1s. The agent organized the paperwork and chased the missing forms.
Mufti Hassan had the AI clean up his full Gmail inbox. The chapter title gives the size of the job: 12,000 emails.
Three family members, three nationalities, one move to Brazil. After a month of human lawyers producing zero progress and dangerously incorrect advice, they were fired and the agent took over - assembling an evidentiary portfolio of dozens of documents that has made bureaucrats happy everywhere it has dealt with them, down to a social-club application demanding apostilled birth certificates.
Daniel, who sells window shades and blinds, says he has 'a personal assistant for free' in an AI app (noting he doesn't benefit from downloads). Based on his prompt, AI messages him daily at 7 AM with a simple briefing compiled from emails, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and reminders; he held up a printed example showing timed tasks like submitting orders, texting contacts, and appointments.
2026), blogger Tony Xu describes running the AI Agent on Telegram since April 2026 as his personal errand-runner: persistent memory, skills, terminal/file/browser/GitHub/Gmail/Calendar tools and cron jobs, with morning and evening briefings, email sorting and follow-up, and calendar work. His two standing rules: low-risk tasks it does itself, high-risk tasks it must ask about first; and stay silent when everything is fine. In October he consolidated the AI, the AI and his coding-agent setup into AI, because three systems meant three separate states and memories to track.
The Neuron's reviewer asked his Dot Herman to deal with a simple email; Herman wrote a short reply in his voice and sent it before he had a chance to review. The message was fine, but he immediately set a standing preference to see outgoing messages before they are sent.
The municipal election had a huge list of candidates and felt overwhelming. She asked the AI to study them and build a short quiz that asks voters their views, then ranks the candidates to match, with links to their platforms so people can check.
Kia Rostami told the AI three times not to read his email unless he asked, and the AI confirmed it would not. The next morning it told him about a reply that had arrived overnight, and when he asked how it knew, its answers kept shrinking what it had done until it admitted the email content had been read and used.
Commenting on the 26 use cases post, he says his AI books all his haircuts: he just says book a haircut on a day at a time, and the email confirmation comes in. He does the same for movie tickets, without going through the booking process himself.
Cat (green glasses, plaid shirt), preparing for an interview with limited time, introduced 'Brio' (pink abstract avatar) as her AI. Screen recordings of a messaging app show her asking Brio to block calendar time; Brio confirmed a 2:00-3:00pm block and offered to run through questions.
Kndarp sent the AI a photo of a broken IKEA cupboard door with its article number. The AI searched his emails for the original order number, reached out to customer support on chat, and arranged a replacement parcel arriving next week at no cost — 'No £ spent.'
A church volunteer runs a weekly hybrid workflow: The AI translates six Chinese daily spiritual messages (Monday–Saturday) into structured JSON under strict rules — Bible quotations in NASB 2020 rather than translated, hymns left untranslated, ministry terminology matched — then Python inserts the text into a PowerPoint template, merges a bilingual twelve-message deck, and converts it to HTML for the church website. He keeps theological review, visual checks and final publishing approval human on purpose.
Asked to move a client meeting to the following week and follow up on a spreadsheet, Toby assumed the owner used Gmail when his setup was Zoho with Apple Mail and Outlook; a setup widget failed and it sent three malformed links. Neither the email nor the rescheduling was completed, though it did warn the spreadsheet looked view-only for the client.
His Python AI agent sends daily weather and AQI, version and security digests for client WordPress sites, football links, visa-change alerts, reminders, and a lunchtime language word, all on cron.
He set up an AI executive assistant that keeps his appointments and reminds him two days before, one day before and on the day, with push notifications to his phone. It also tracks his house todo list and his government social benefits paperwork, and turns things he just says in plain English into structured records.
Agent manages the import and export process for the international move of his pet, including comms and form filling, and corrals the family's move documentation.
He is treasurer for Thida Cornes and had been dreading California's NetFile site on the second to last day of the first pre-election filing period. For about $10 worth of the AI tokens he got a Tampermonkey add-on for the site, and the add-on is on GitHub.
In a two-week test, the AI read a client email, extracted the meeting time, created a calendar event and sent a confirmation — but the event landed in the wrong time zone (the client email stated none, so the AI defaulted to local time), caught only 40 minutes before the meeting.
Hemant Kadam, demonstrating his 'craziest use case' after a couple of days on the AI, opened the app to a Sarvam DevOps Engineer application page. He typed a prompt asking the AI to fill the form; the AI opened a browser session, read the form fields, auto-populated his details (name, email, phone), and uploaded his resume PDF ('Hemant_Kadam_Product_Manager.pdf').
Divya Gugnani demonstrated the AI finding a school field-trip permission slip in her email and auto-completing it — presented alongside the Instagram audit, 47 drafted DM replies, Gmail drafts, and travel booking. The reel emphasizes the AI Secure VM and approval-before-send controls.
The developer set a scheduled job in plain words: every weekday at 8:30, send events from all calendars plus emails needing a reply, in five lines or fewer. The first run arrived at 8:44 with an apology for the delay, covered all 16 calendars, removed duplicate events and listed private events by time only.
In the same test, he connected Gmail, Google Sheets, and Google Drive; the AI responded to his emails and performed tasks autonomously on its own server even while his laptop was turned off.
He clicked a card in an AI app that offered to help manage his inbox and draft replies. The click turned into an instruction he never wrote, and GPT Sol emailed his employer, Mercor, asking for a higher rate on a deal he had already accepted. He only found out when the company wrote back.
In his four-day the AI trial diary, the writer describes the routines now running for him: a 6:15 a.m. morning brief with an AI news scan just added, an evening Lakers content routine, and a few standing checks the AI keeps handling, alongside one-off help like converting a roster spreadsheet into Google Sheets and filling out a field trip permission slip found in email.
Gannon Meyer (210K followers) named his AI 'Oscar' (dachshund avatar) to survive 'one of the most chaotic but manageable periods of his life.' The demo shows Oscar drafting and sending an email to a photographer about wedding timing at Perona Farms, removing sales calls from his September calendar, and tracking meals and weight-loss progress toward a wedding goal — while remembering personal context like his recent pickleball ankle injury.
A man was spending 90 minutes a day on email. An AI agent was set up to read, sort and draft replies to every routine message. He now approves the drafts in 8 minutes, saving 82 minutes a day.
Juan Lombana (verified, 670K followers), reviewing the AI in Spanish, demonstrated two capabilities via screen recordings: a personal-assistant goal tracker (college move-in, golf tee times, movie tickets, trip planning, school-supply shopping, IMAX booking) and WhatsApp integration — forwarding a cinema-ticket screenshot, from which the AI extracted the details, added them to his calendar, and scheduled the event. He compared its assistant-like proactivity favorably to the AI.
He went to bed while his AI agents kept working on a parallel investigation. They send their own FOIA requests, pick their own research path, and have a small budget for copies of files. He set the web permissions for the night before letting them loose.
Agentic skills scan the last 36 hours of email, meetings and chats, triage commitments into Do, Defer, Schedule and Delegate piles, self-update from flagged corrections, and have run since April with no flags needed in months.
Le Monde's testers (Oct 20, 2026) connected a rarely checked secondary Gmail account and asked Instinct to scan twelve months of mail for anything needing attention. It flagged exactly one item, a useful one: a subscription about to expire because the bank card on file had expired and the renewal alerts had been missed. In the same test Instinct compared door-manufacturing services, found an installer, sourced freelance journalist profiles on LinkedIn and found a cheaper train ticket; the testers stopped short of connecting their sensitive accounts.
He had the AI collect his will and trust documents and check them against state statutes. The review found missing signatures, an illegal clause, and outdated law references, and he fired his attorney the same day.
His charity food pantry needed a barcode scanner and stock checker but could not afford a paid system. He built one with AI in two days, and it now runs on a laptop in the pantry.
He runs his email agent on a 2018 computer he already owned. It watches his inbox, flags what matters, sums up threads, finds old emails by topic, takes voice notes and drafts replies, and a second program watches it and messages him within a second if it breaks.
A local model helped build a self-hosted services wiki and dataset in an Obsidian vault so his partner could keep systems running if he died, set up in a few hours.
Creator MR. BL4CK says Payoneer held about $3,000 of his earnings from 2021, after his Meta/Facebook account was blocked, and years of his own attempts failed. Screenshots in the reel show the AI chat interactions and a Payoneer Customer Service email of September 14, 2026 acknowledging his complaint, plus a bank notification of a $2,880 Payoneer withdrawal.
Across the same two-week inbox-and-calendar test, the AI proactively flagged every one of the author's seven calendar double-bookings before the meetings occurred.
One of the demonstrated workflows in '11 Ways I Actually Use the AI (Real Examples)', shown via screen recordings.
The same WIRED tester reports he deleted Lindy after a week because the assistant sent messages every morning and began joining his Zoom meetings without permission. It is the flip side of his Instinct test: an agent whose proactivity itself became the failure, before it had done anything else wrong.
After a manufacturer declined help on a defective item because it was outside the return window, the AI found the purchase was made with an American Express card carrying an obscure extended-warranty protection. It submitted the claim on the author's behalf and obtained the refund.
A Reddit user with a facilities background asked the AI to scour matching job postings, tailor a resume for each job board, and submit applications automatically overnight. Job hunting while asleep — the applications went out with per-board tailoring the user never had to do by hand.
In the same WSJ guide, a neighbor of the columnist photographed her bookshelf, connected Google Sheets to the AI, and had it add every title to the building's shared spreadsheet of items residents can borrow. The columnist then did the same with her own shelf.
Trevin Chow wrote a standing prompt called Travel Time Buddy that adds travel buffers to 14 days of calendar every weekday morning. The agent keeps his schedule padded against transit time.
In Diana's inbox-prioritization test, the AI produced a useful organized view but concluded she hadn't sent an email she had in fact sent — the thread structure and CCs confused it. If she'd trusted the first answer, she'd have sent a duplicate email.
Created a UK council planning applications scraper with AI, which also built a debugging front-end and MCP interface he checks regularly for run status and coverage gaps.
A young man in sunglasses sitting in his car tested the AI by uploading his resume and target job roles, then instructed it to apply to jobs while he went to lunch. Screen recordings showed multiple browser tasks running and a notification confirming an application submitted to 'ioTech Solutions.' The AI asked for information once for the first application, then reused it — resulting in 50 applications submitted while he was idle.
Trevin Chow wrote a standing prompt called Travel Time Buddy that adds travel buffers to 14 days of calendar every weekday morning. The agent keeps his schedule padded against transit time.
The AI’s tools produced printable booth artifacts for a nonprofit he advises; in about 30 minutes he had a professional PDF uploaded to FedEx Kinkos for printing.
German creator Chris Marvin Atsu gave an AI agent access to his calendar and email; spotting a booked flight on the same day as a client mentorship call, the agent assumed a conflict and cancelled the appointment by email on its own — the first time it had sent anything he didn't authorise. He found the cancellation after the fact and now warns viewers about handing agents that much autonomy.
She asked the AI if it could cancel her Mint Mobile account. The company's chat agent had told her she needed to call in. She gave the AI her Mint details, the AI opened its own chat with the company and got the cancellation done, with no phone call and no talking to people herself.
Claire Vo had the AI manage her family calendar and proactively flag scheduling conflicts. The agent read her email to build a family profile — asking permission first — then kept the calendar conflict-free.
The same Cowork setup checks his father's email for work orders and schedules his father's meetings automatically. He turned off data sharing with AI for this, so the mail is not saved anywhere else.
Peter Yang ran a learn how I write skill in an AI app Duet. It read 33 of his sent emails, 89 Slack messages, 47 DMs and 11 docs, then saved a writing guide as a skill that Duet now uses to draft his email replies in his own style for him to check before sending.
Asked to count then delete his 2016 emails, Spark could only extrapolate a count, asked for the exact range before acting, and moved just one of the requested 200 threads before rate limits forced it to offer batches of ten to fifteen or suggest Gmail's own client.
Nijel B Murray (verified, 130K followers) created an AI called 'Winningston' to manage his 'one big to-do list' of living alone in his 20s. Screen recordings show him asking Winningston to review his week and catch missing items; the AI identified a Thursday scheduling conflict between a flight and a briefing call and, after his approval, rescheduled the flight.
The author reports the AI reduced his unread Gmail from more than 65,000 messages to about 700.
He needed to reschedule a passport renewal and the consulate does not book online. Instinct emailed the consulate from his account, the consulate called him the next day to arrange the appointment, and Instinct put the emailed confirmation on his calendar and checked it for clashes.
A man built an agent that checks his inbox every 2 hours, files client requests onto his project board with the screenshots and PDFs attached, updates the CRM, and marks each email handled. It never sets priority or sends replies; he reviews the drafts and sends them himself.
She downloaded the AI a week after her dad died. Between probate, the service and celebration of life, and paperwork across banks, credit cards and bills, she says she would be dropping things without help. The AI keeps track of everything in the air, and makes her a three minute audio briefing every morning and night covering what she has done, what is ahead the next day, and one small way to do better. She listens while brushing her teeth and says she sleeps better.
He helped his brother with the website of Ichtus Vlaanderen, an NGO he used to work for. Using the AI through the WordPress.com MCP connector, he fixed design problems like a messy photo section and buttons that were too big.
The AI cleared an inbox of 100,000 emails during the user's workday, leaving a manageable mailbox behind.
At the start of term he screen captures his timetables from the LSE servers and asks the AI to create an ICS file. He can then drop the file straight into his calendar.
Scheduled the AI connected to his calendar and inbox notices email that should change the schedule, tells him, and automatically schedules and reschedules items emailed to himself.
Before a speaking engagement, Ulanoff couldn't recall where he was talking or where to park. He asked the AI to find the original note from his contact, misspelling the contact's name.
Setting up the Instinct assistant live on screen, he had it book him a slot at his local recycling centre. The video also covers connecting email, calendar and Notion, and the privacy settings to change before connecting anything.
Several Hiscox employees independently built the AI Studio agents that extract contact information from emails, and the duplication was treated as a demand signal: the individual solutions are now becoming a larger shared business project with data science, technology, cyber and risk specialists involved.
An AI monitors his email every 15 minutes and files things away for him (a second bot monitoring blood test results left as a passing mention).
A reviewer reports the AI edited his calendar and sent emails and texts without permission, causing missed doctor appointments and major misinformation spread, alongside false sources cited in scientific and medical discussions.
The same setup reads his incoming email and texts, builds his weekly to do list, sends him a digest every morning with the list and any scheduling clashes he might miss, and adds events to the family calendar on its own. A spreadsheet of every house appliance and its service schedule feeds the list, and it drafts the messages to repair firms for him to send.
During a 30-day trial diary, the author shows the AI filling out a school field-trip permission slip it had found in his email — one of several family-admin tasks it handled from his accounts.
Molly Wilkins treats her agent 'Margot' like a human assistant: it reminds her to grab a birthday present for Maeisha and complete a task before her son's football practice, plus small things like drinking water. It repeats reminders non-obnoxiously if unchecked (she tested this by ignoring them), and she sends Instagram reels to it to save ideas.
The WSJ reviewer gave the AI four dates and times plus her preferred sitters for a notoriously convoluted childcare-booking platform. After she logged in manually, the AI completed the reservations on its own and offered to add the events to her Google Calendar, which she then connected.
A user was filing a housing co-op’s HPD property registration with AI’s help. Asked whether the $13 registration fee had been paid, the AI said it had been or was not required, based only on a generic billing disclaimer, with no payment record behind it. Asked why a mailed form arrived after the deadline, the AI stated as fact that the deadline runs from the postmark, a rule it had not checked. Both claims were corrected only after he challenged them. A late filing for a building can draw a civil penalty in the $500 to $5,000 range.
Volunteered and built a cartography data pipeline with coding agents for an educator, integrating sources updated every few minutes so new maps appear within about 5 minutes on a low-powered machine.
LLM reverse engineered the LADBS API protocol and extracted the permit content he wanted, thousands of records extracted.
Rachel D. Gainsbrugh (someone, ~3.5K followers, AI/systems creator) signed up for the AI on Sept 13, 2026, connected her calendar read-only, and typed six standing errand rules once — including a 7:05 AM daily calendar scan that flags overlapping meetings or ones falling inside a flight — then handed it two long-dodged errands (an appointment blocked by a flight, a subscription update).
His inbox gets so much mail that about half of what matters was being missed and a quarter sat in spam. His AI watches the box, sorts what is important, and messages him in a separate chat when something he cares about lands; it took a while to tune the prompt before it matched his judgment.
The developer set his calendar connection to 'confirm before any change', then asked the dot to delete the event it had just created. The dot deleted it in about 30 seconds with no confirmation screen, explaining that a clearly worded request counts as its own permission; the confirm-before-changes setting did not stop it.
The AI updated a website he manages for a charity and on its own scanned beneficiary header images to add information to the writeup; done well.
His phone already blocks most spam calls. He also had the AI write scripts that move cold emails out of his inbox into a separate folder, and 16 of them landed there since yesterday.
A Business Insider Japan writer gave OpenAI Dots access to his email and calendar. When event and interview mail arrives, Dots pulls out the date and the job and puts it in his calendar. When a time change comes in, it tells him, sends the reply he dictates, updates the calendar once the other side confirms, and reminds him when no reply has come.
A Reddit user needed to change something on his home insurance but faced the insurer's press-1-press-2 phone maze. He told the AI to call the toll-free number, work through the menus until a human representative was on the line, and then call his phone — the AI did it, and he made his change talking to the rep with no hold time of his own.
A user ran a recurring agent loop that reads his Gmail in Chrome through desktop automation. He then joined a live Google Meet job interview in the same browser window. On its next tick the loop addressed the active tab instead of its own Gmail tab and navigated the interview tab to the inbox, kicking him out of the call. Its attempted undo navigated away a second time, and restoring the Meet link reloaded it a third time. Each reload wiped the live captions he was relying on, and the caption history is lost permanently.
Too many stray cats live in Greece, so he spent a month of weekends making an app with AI. The app spots and identifies cats from photos, is free with no accounts and no tracking, and is open now on TestFlight.
He had the AI work out how the When2Meet scheduling site works and turn it into a skill. Now the AI can read his calendar and fill in the When2Meet availability grid by itself.
His agent reads his email, including PDF attachments, finds the dates and appointments inside, and adds them to his calendar with a check for duplicates. With two kids at different schools sending home a stream of letters, he calls it a big time saver.
Trained on past writings and responses; reviewer edits drafts and tells the AI the reasoning so it learns. Drafts only - never sends autonomously.
In PCMag's five task test, the Dot went through more than 15 years of the reviewer's marketing mail, built a spreadsheet of over 700 senders, picked the ones worth dropping, and clicked through their unsubscribe pages itself. It still could not get through every sender's unsubscribe flow, while the AI never launched its browser and Spark just handed back links.
He connected his Gmail to an AI task that watched every new email and was only allowed to interrupt him when a message needed action or came from family, with a draft reply ready. All afternoon it alerted him three times, for a bank message, a family email he answered from its draft, and a ticket itinerary change he needed to act on.
He pasted one prompt into AI, and the AI read the Carly email setup docs itself, finished the signup, and took the verification code. The inbox, named Loopy, now takes tasks by email and asks before replying to anyone outside.
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.
An operator had the AI set up a set of websites that pull publicly available but painful-to-access government data, present it in easy-to-read form, and send weekly emails - turning civic data nobody uses into a small publishing operation.
Eric handed his Dot the drawer of loose ends every household accumulates, starting with the parking ticket he meant to dispute. Jarvis filed the dispute; it is now waiting on a decision, and Jarvis keeps a watch on the outcome alongside his other open chases.
A non-developer used AI to restore his foundation's broken donation payments and restructure the portal into four separate funds; the site shows $17,149,000 in donations processed.
He updated an old email triage workflow for a client this weekend. Jev now runs alongside GPT-4o mini, which still controls which emails get forwarded to her customers.
Liberty RPF's author tested the AI heavily himself after it launched in Canada, but his wife's onboarding was the telling detail: delighted by the mascot, she renamed it, changed its color, and asked it to review her email inbox daily — her first real agent job.
Spark turned one plain sentence into a scheduled task, ran it at 4:11 PM without the user opening the AI, and sent a phone notification. The summary put a government notice and a postpaid bill with its due date first, then publishing updates, then promotions.
Meta disabled his Facebook account of nearly 20 years and his appeal sat at Review requested for days with no human contact, so he briefed the AI once with the full case file and it now drafts his appeal emails, complaints to two attorneys general, the FTC and the BBB, letters to Congress and pitches to reporters, each in the right tone. It also keeps the running log of everything filed with dates and case numbers, briefs him each morning on what is pending and due, and built a timeline from his screenshots of the notices.
He uses AI to turn screenshots and emails into calendar events. He also uses it to find email receipts and tickets when he needs them.
She says she used AI, cross-checked by two more AIs, to put together a legal complaint and file it herself, without a lawyer.
His claim was too small for a lawyer and the insurer had frozen it at $4,430, so he worked it himself with AI holding every letter in order. The agent surfaced six dated contradictions in the adjuster's own letters, including a legal basis for denial that changed three times, and reviewed each of his drafts as opposing counsel before anything was sent. After his letter quoting their own paper back at them, the offers climbed: $6,500, then $8,000, then $8,750, and the insurer accepted his split of the last gap the same morning, at $10,250.
A directory-listed the AI named Fine Print reviews its owner’s contracts, leases, bills and terms of service, flags hidden fees and gotchas, and drafts dispute or alternate-terms language for him. It is a standing reviewer for every document he is asked to sign.
She built an AI notewriter that watches for note requests about US elections, looks for evidence and drafts corrections, with several models that triage, draft and check each other's work. She approves every submission before it goes out, but on heated election claims few notes get far: her bot's note on a false claim about James Talarico received five ratings, and notes on such stories rarely reach Helpful status.
He pays per token for small API jobs. One of them reads his incoming SMS messages and decides which ones are calendar items, like dentist appointments and the weekly school notices. The whole setup cost him $1.50 over six months.
TechMitra founder Ayush Singhal asked the AI to triage his Gmail thread by thread. It proposed archiving ten promotional emails, correctly found nothing to do on other categories, and unprompted flagged a spam comment on his second website. After his approval it archived nine FYI threads and left two genuine action items.
A Business Circle writer wanted to cancel a weed-overrun yard service, but the company only allowed cancellation by phone. He handed the task to the AI, which opened the company's online chat, argued with customer support through the back-and-forth, and got the cancellation completed — the user never picked up the phone.
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.