Built a 2025 tax document tracker and hunted down missing K-1s
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.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Life admin
Email, calendars, forms and paperwork · 219 ideasHad the AI auto-fill a Sarvam DevOps Engineer job application: read the form
Hemant Kadam, demonstrating his 'craziest use case' after a couple of days on the AI, opened the app to a Sarvam DevOps Engineer application page. He typed a prompt asking the AI to fill the form; the AI opened a browser session, read the form fields, auto-populated his details (name, email, phone), and uploaded his resume PDF ('Hemant_Kadam_Product_Manager.pdf').
Scan and categorise my Instagram DMs every morning
Agency owner Rui Fu (someone, 253K followers) demonstrates the daily system he shows for the AI: an 8 AM scan of the last 24 hours of Instagram DMs, categorised into brand partnerships, collaboration requests, fan messages and spam so he wakes up to only the important ones. The tutorial also shows an auto-reply rule for guide inquiries and offers his prompt guide in exchange for comments.
The AI does his boring paperwork in his own logged in browser: reserve duty refunds, national insurance, flight check-ins
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.
Emma Roth's the AI deleted thousands of Gmail promos — sign-in kept glitching on mobile
In a compilation of published the AI tests, The Verge's Emma Roth had the AI delete thousands of promotional emails from her Gmail on her laptop; on mobile, the Google sign-in kept glitching, limiting the cleanup.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Le Monde testers let Instinct scan a year of a neglected Gmail inbox
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.
Travel Time Buddy standing prompt adds travel buffers to 14 days of calendar
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.
Run my 6:15 a.m. morning brief and my standing checks
In his four-day the AI trial diary, the writer describes the routines now running for him: a 6:15 a.m. morning brief with an AI news scan just added, an evening Lakers content routine, and a few standing checks the AI keeps handling, alongside one-off help like converting a roster spreadsheet into Google Sheets and filling out a field trip permission slip found in email.
Scan my inbox unprompted and rescue a message trapped in spam
Without being asked, the journalist's Dot (Sam) scanned her email and flagged two things she had missed: a message that had accidentally landed in spam, and a form she had forgotten to fill out.
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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
I asked the AI to update my chart. It set up a recurring tracker too.
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.
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.
Scheduled the AI reads his mail and moves his calendar before conflicts happen
Scheduled the AI connected to his calendar and inbox notices email that should change the schedule, tells him, and automatically schedules and reschedules items emailed to himself.
A cheap Haiku setup reads his texts and files the ones that belong on his calendar
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.
Delete the test event, but confirm with me first
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.
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.
Set up a daily website check via the Goals feature by chat
Jack created a recurring daily website-check goal by chat in about a minute, then deleted it by chat. The Goals tab itself was slow to load (once 25 seconds, once stuck on placeholders).
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.
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.
The AI checked his will and trust against state law, and he fired his attorney
He had the AI collect his will and trust documents and check them against state statutes. The review found missing signatures, an illegal clause, and outdated law references, and he fired his attorney the same day.
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.
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.
The AI mapped the missing road to the takeoff spot
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.
I made an app to photograph and identify the stray cats on my street
Too many stray cats live in Greece, so he spent a month of weekends making an app with AI. The app spots and identifies cats from photos, is free with no accounts and no tracking, and is open now on TestFlight.
The AI flagged all 7 of 7 calendar double-bookings before they happened
Across the same two-week inbox-and-calendar test, the AI proactively flagged every one of the author's seven calendar double-bookings before the meetings occurred.
I set the AI to watch Japan residency rule changes for me
A US citizen with permanent residency in Japan set the AI to monitor developments on the sudden proposed rule changes on the Japan side. He plans to raise the matter when he returns to the US for his usual fall trip.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The 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.
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.
Proactively flagged a TripIt security email about a password change he had
The AI sent a notification that it had spotted an email from TripIt, the vacation-planning app Ulanoff uses, about a password change he had forgotten making. The agent wanted to make sure he'd seen the email verifying it was him.
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.
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.