A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
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.
Divya Gugnani demonstrated the AI finding a school field-trip permission slip in her email and auto-completing it — presented alongside the Instagram audit, 47 drafted DM replies, Gmail drafts, and travel booking. The reel emphasizes the AI Secure VM and approval-before-send controls.
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.
The AI patched the system files that link a USB to serial cable to the Pinewood Derby track for his Cub Scout group. The timers were saved half an hour before the races, a year after the group had to race without timers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 set up an automation to email himself a daily update from his calendar. Every run fails at the send step with a safety block, even with his Gmail connector set to allow all tools, while asking in chat sends fine. He rebuilt it several ways and every version stops at the same point.
In two weeks of real inbox-and-calendar work, The AI Crux had the AI book three conference rooms. Calendar work was functional but conservative: it refused anything outside 9-to-5 local without an explicit override, which the reviewer framed as a guardrail more than intelligence.
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.
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.
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.
A man built a service so his own agents can send physical mail. He has used it to submit credit card disputes, credit bureau disputes and a gym cancellation, the letters people put off because they mean printing, envelopes and a post office trip.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Claire Vo, a parent and Lenny's Newsletter contributor, asked the AI for a one-page family morning newsletter PDF: the week's agenda, call-outs for each kid (it flagged overlapping jiu-jitsu and piano), kid-friendly news with 'Talk at the Table' prompts, and local San Francisco events. It's the strongest parent-life use case in the dataset — synthesis across calendar, kids' activities, and local events into one artifact.
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.
The author reports the AI reduced his unread Gmail from more than 65,000 messages to about 700.
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.
Before a speaking engagement, Ulanoff couldn't recall where he was talking or where to park. He asked the AI to find the original note from his contact, misspelling the contact's name.
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.
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.
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.
Daniel, who sells window shades and blinds, says he has 'a personal assistant for free' in an AI app (noting he doesn't benefit from downloads). Based on his prompt, AI messages him daily at 7 AM with a simple briefing compiled from emails, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and reminders; he held up a printed example showing timed tasks like submitting orders, texting contacts, and appointments.
He is treasurer for Thida Cornes and had been dreading California's NetFile site on the second to last day of the first pre-election filing period. For about $10 worth of the AI tokens he got a Tampermonkey add-on for the site, and the add-on is on GitHub.
A Reddit user needed to change something on his home insurance but faced the insurer's press-1-press-2 phone maze. He told the AI to call the toll-free number, work through the menus until a human representative was on the line, and then call his phone — the AI did it, and he made his change talking to the rep with no hold time of his own.
Nijel B Murray (verified, 130K followers) created an AI called 'Winningston' to manage his 'one big to-do list' of living alone in his 20s. Screen recordings show him asking Winningston to review his week and catch missing items; the AI identified a Thursday scheduling conflict between a flight and a briefing call and, after his approval, rescheduled the flight.
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.
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 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.
A non-developer used AI to restore his foundation's broken donation payments and restructure the portal into four separate funds; the site shows $17,149,000 in donations processed.
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.
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.