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 asked the AI to screen his unread Instagram threads one morning. It came back with 50 unread, looked at the threads he named across his Primary, General and request folders, and told him what people had sent. The unread count was still 50 afterward, so nothing showed as read for him or for the senders.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Ahead of an apartment move, a reviewer asked the AI for a day-by-day packing schedule. The AI built one with sessions capped at 30 minutes, sequencing items so things the person won't need before the move get packed first.
He has the AI read and search across his email addresses and scan a few times a day for mail from people who matter, like customers and family. He has basically stopped checking email forty times a day. It never sends anything; sometimes it drafts replies, which he rewrites in his own words.
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.
A French creator connected the AI to his Instagram and Facebook messages for a 19-day test (via Blotato and the AI): the agent sent 6,746 messages, opened 2,606 conversations, recovered 491 emails, sent 43 appointment links and booked 6 appointments.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.