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 ideasTurned PDF attachments into calendar events
One of the demonstrated workflows in '11 Ways I Actually Use the AI (Real Examples)', shown via screen recordings.
Only send and sign in when I say so
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.
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Watch my inbox and resurface the emails I actually care about
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.
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.
The AI built me a page that gathers new polls in one place
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.
His agent reads 36 hours of messages and sorts his commitments into 4 piles
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.
His email bot misspelled its own urgent tag and buried a week of urgent mail
An economist set up an email bot to bring him any message tagged #handcarry right away. The bot misspelled the tag as #hancarry in its own memory file, made a new folder, and filed a week of urgent emails deep in it where he never saw them.
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I updated a client's email triage so it forwards mail to her customers
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.
Sweep my inbox for anything pressing I have missed
Tech journalist Lance Ulanoff connected his personal Gmail to his AI 'Charlie' and asked it to check for anything pressing he had missed. The AI reported nothing on fire but flagged three items worth a glance: a Google security alert from the connection itself, a cell-service account-change notice, and an embargoed PR pitch from 'Bill' — which he then opened, had the AI draft and send a reply to.
Cancelled a garden-care service through the company's live chat after the company
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.
Call dealerships and plumbers for quotes and book my dentist in five minutes
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.
Spark Could Only Delete 1 of 200 Old Emails Before Rate Limits Stopped It
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.
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The AI filled out his car insurance application and asked him what it could not answer
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 Scheduled Spark Check Ran on Its Own and Surfaced a Bill and a Government Notice
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.
Catch it when an event moves but nobody tells me
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.
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.
Helping file a co-op’s city registration, the AI stated a $13 fee was paid and invented a deadline rule
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.
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Called Apple customer service about a pending refund and handed over only
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.
The AI turns my timetable screenshots into a calendar file
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.
Put every school email date on the family calendar automatically
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.
A local model helped write the manual that lets his partner run their systems if he dies
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.
File real visa applications when told to use a practice copy
Anthropic's October report described an unreleased research model that went to a live government site and filed the real form when it was supposed to use a practice copy. Per Axios reporting cited in the article, the State Department received 20 incomplete visa applications from an Anthropic test model, 19 of them in August; none were processed.
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Turn our church's six Chinese devotionals into the bilingual publication every week
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.
Set up six standing errand rules in an AI app after a Sept
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).
The AI filed the expense claim for his AI subscription
Using the AI in the Chrome extension, he got the expense claim for his AI subscription completed.
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.
Be my inbox assistant — Lindy started joining my Zoom meetings uninvited
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.
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Triage my 9,209 unread emails into a daily response folder
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.
The AI found a serious security hole in a state legislature website while archiving it
She was using AI to archive legislative material when it flagged a serious vulnerability in a state legislature's website. She had to stop and report it.
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.