The AI handled Grandparents Day registration and the email to his parents
In the same trial diary, the AI completed the school's Grandparents Day registration and wrote the email to his parents about it, taking the whole task off his plate.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Life admin
Email, calendars, forms and paperwork · 213 ideasThe AI built me a dashboard that tracks 1,000 bills and their hearings
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.
Ask the AI, and the event lands on my calendar
He runs AI on his homelab. He can ask the AI to throw an event on his calendar and it appears, and the setup can also send events to his primary calendar by email.
Find and pay my overdue NYC parking ticket
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.
$115
Draft my email replies — but it approved overtime instead
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.
$1,850
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My bots found grants local nonprofits did not know about
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.
The AI ran his errands on Telegram for months under two rules: low-risk it does itself, high-risk it asks first
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 AI built a structured dataset of all 4,925 job vacancies
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.
Find my misfiled iPhone in FedEx's system and get Apple to refund me
In a single week of errands, Alec Ellin had the AI trace an iPhone that FedEx had misfiled in its own system and get Apple to refund him for it. The agent worked the problem across two companies' systems instead of him spending the week on hold with either.
I had the AI map where agents can stop you and search your devices
A man had the AI build a zoomable Google Map with the parts of the USA highlighted in red where DHS, ICE and CBP can stop people with no suspicion of wrongdoing or warrant and search their electronic devices. He put the map on his own website so anyone can check it.
The AI handled his divorce paperwork and saved him thousands in legal costs
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.
Publish the government data nobody can read, and email it weekly
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.
The AI made our co-op annual meeting deck in 20 minutes
He is treasurer for a nonprofit food co-op. He gave the AI the co-op's financial statements, some notes on what he wanted to explain, and the logos, and 20 minutes later he had a ten slide deck and separate printouts for the annual meeting.
Attack my 35,000-email Gmail backlog (rate limits fought back)
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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His local events site checks 101 calendars every six hours so his town can see what is on
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.
Has the AI responding to his emails and running tasks autonomously on its
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.
His AI watches his flooded inbox and pings him only about mail that matters
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.
Had the AI 'Brio' block one hour (2:00-3:00pm) on her calendar for interview
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.
My agents file FOIA requests on their own while I sleep
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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He is juggling several legal cases of his own, and the AI transcribes the audio, organizes the evidence and writes the summaries his lawyers get
He is juggling several legal cases of his own, and his lawyers do not have time to answer him every day. The AI transcribes audio, organizes his evidence and writes the case summaries he hands to them. He calls it the best tool he has ever had, and says stopping would mean going back to doing all of that alone.
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.