He pointed the AI Fable at a newspaper archive and asked for a timeline of wildfire events in and around the Adirondacks. The result is an interactive timeline built from 12,000 pages of newspapers.
His morning agent reads his email and builds a prioritized to do list with time blocks for the day. It also checks the weather and warns him to leave earlier when rain would slow his trip, which has twice saved him from showing up soaked.
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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
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.
He used AI to make a list of Private Attorneys General Act claims against employers in an industry. The list was made in support of an organizing drive, and he says the tool is almost always helpful on tasks that involve a lot of data.
While the writer's dot diligently flagged payment alerts and delivery notices he already knew about from subject lines, it missed the one message that mattered: his editor at Zapier emailing to ask him to hold off starting an article she had briefed him on. Had he started the work, the missed flag would have wasted real effort.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
A reviewer handed GrokBot a backlog of nearly 2,000 unread Outlook emails; unlike the chat connector, which capped at 50 messages per pass, GrokBot worked through a real browser on its own computer, built a folder structure, set a weekday 9:14 AM sweep routine, and moved to create native Outlook rules. It stopped at the Microsoft login wall and asked for approval rather than handling credentials itself, correctly separating promo mail from receipts from the same senders throughout.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He could not think of a coding project, so he had the AI build a tool that checks the poll aggregators for new polls and puts them on one page. He now hears about new polls about five minutes sooner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.