The developer set a scheduled job in plain words: every weekday at 8:30, send events from all calendars plus emails needing a reply, in five lines or fewer. The first run arrived at 8:44 with an apology for the delay, covered all 16 calendars, removed duplicate events and listed private events by time only.
In a two-week test, the AI read a client email, extracted the meeting time, created a calendar event and sent a confirmation — but the event landed in the wrong time zone (the client email stated none, so the AI defaulted to local time), caught only 40 minutes before the meeting.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Ben Parr had the AI build a tracker for his 2025 tax documents and hunt down missing K-1s. The agent organized the paperwork and chased the missing forms.
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.
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.
During a 30-day trial diary, the author shows the AI filling out a school field-trip permission slip it had found in his email — one of several family-admin tasks it handled from his accounts.
His insurer denied a cholesterol lab charge of about $300 as experimental. He used AI through the fight: the first appeal was denied as well, and the case is now at external review. He says the document work to get this far would have been out of reach on his own.
$300one time
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
TechMitra founder Ayush Singhal asked the AI to triage his Gmail thread by thread. It proposed archiving ten promotional emails, correctly found nothing to do on other categories, and unprompted flagged a spam comment on his second website. After his approval it archived nine FYI threads and left two genuine action items.
Someone posted an illustration styled as an iPhone call-history screen showing seven missed calls from unknown/spam numbers over three days (fictional numbers noted). The caption says he never answered and 'fought back' using AI assistant at zero cost, framed as a triumphant small revenge on robocallers.
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.
A team used an AI 2.5 tool to go through large sets of public comments. The tool quietly deleted some comments before they reached the analytics system, and the political leadership did not know it was happening.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
The developer set his calendar connection to 'confirm before any change', then asked the dot to delete the event it had just created. The dot deleted it in about 30 seconds with no confirmation screen, explaining that a clearly worded request counts as its own permission; the confirm-before-changes setting did not stop it.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He needed to know if a library near him had outlets. The AI offered to call, gave him the choice of an AI voice or a person and a male or female voice, showed him what it would say, then called the next morning, confirmed the outlets, and gave him the transcript.
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.
Commenting on the 26 use cases post, he says his AI books all his haircuts: he just says book a haircut on a day at a time, and the email confirmation comes in. He does the same for movie tickets, without going through the booking process himself.
He helped his brother with the website of Ichtus Vlaanderen, an NGO he used to work for. Using the AI through the WordPress.com MCP connector, he fixed design problems like a messy photo section and buttons that were too big.
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.
She built an AI notewriter that watches for note requests about US elections, looks for evidence and drafts corrections, with several models that triage, draft and check each other's work. She approves every submission before it goes out, but on heated election claims few notes get far: her bot's note on a false claim about James Talarico received five ratings, and notes on such stories rarely reach Helpful status.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He pasted one prompt into AI, and the AI read the Carly email setup docs itself, finished the signup, and took the verification code. The inbox, named Loopy, now takes tasks by email and asks before replying to anyone outside.
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.
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.