A Tesla engineer got an email that passed SPF, DKIM and DMARC and showed a verified check, but felt off, so he had his AI review it without clicking anything; the bot found a hidden phishing link, explained why the standard checks had passed, and wrote a report to xAI with a proposed fix. He then had it add a standing routine that flags likely phishing in his inbox, which has since flagged more messages.
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.
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.
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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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. Oscar proposes actions but executes only after a
In PCMag's five-task gauntlet comparing Dots, the AI and the AI (summarized by WindowsForum), the final test pointed the agents at a Gmail inbox to identify marketing clutter and unsubscribe from the senders. The AI identified the emails but failed to launch its browser to actually follow through on external unsubscribe links when required, leaving the execution undone; Dots, by contrast, catalogued 700+ senders and clicked through unsubscribe pages.
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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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.