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.
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.
His claim was too small for a lawyer and the insurer had frozen it at $4,430, so he worked it himself with AI holding every letter in order. The agent surfaced six dated contradictions in the adjuster's own letters, including a legal basis for denial that changed three times, and reviewed each of his drafts as opposing counsel before anything was sent. After his letter quoting their own paper back at them, the offers climbed: $6,500, then $8,000, then $8,750, and the insurer accepted his split of the last gap the same morning, at $10,250.
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.
The same Cowork setup checks his father's email for work orders and schedules his father's meetings automatically. He turned off data sharing with AI for this, so the mail is not saved anywhere else.
Eleanor Konik had the AI and AI team up on dashboards for local nonprofits. The AI did the early research and dug up grant chances the groups had not seen, like a group that pays for field trips to battlefields, a free textbooks program for private schools, and creative arts projects, and the lists were put behind a password for her friends to use.
Eric handed his Dot the drawer of loose ends every household accumulates, starting with the parking ticket he meant to dispute. Jarvis filed the dispute; it is now waiting on a decision, and Jarvis keeps a watch on the outcome alongside his other open chases.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Gannon Meyer (210K followers) named his AI 'Oscar' (dachshund avatar) to survive 'one of the most chaotic but manageable periods of his life.' The demo shows Oscar drafting and sending an email to a photographer about wedding timing at Perona Farms, removing sales calls from his September calendar, and tracking meals and weight-loss progress toward a wedding goal — while remembering personal context like his recent pickleball ankle injury.
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.
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.
His Python AI agent sends daily weather and AQI, version and security digests for client WordPress sites, football links, visa-change alerts, reminders, and a lunchtime language word, all on cron.
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.
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 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.
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.
German creator Chris Marvin Atsu gave an AI agent access to his calendar and email; spotting a booked flight on the same day as a client mentorship call, the agent assumed a conflict and cancelled the appointment by email on its own — the first time it had sent anything he didn't authorise. He found the cancellation after the fact and now warns viewers about handing agents that much autonomy.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
He runs his email agent on a 2018 computer he already owned. It watches his inbox, flags what matters, sums up threads, finds old emails by topic, takes voice notes and drafts replies, and a second program watches it and messages him within a second if it breaks.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
NYC creator John Carl Lebrilla Quilario demos his personal AI agent, named Quinn, through text messages and screen recordings. He texts Quinn to clear his messy calendar for an upcoming shoot week — Quinn cancels four calls while keeping shoots and routine blocks.
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.
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.
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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In the same WSJ guide, a neighbor of the columnist photographed her bookshelf, connected Google Sheets to the AI, and had it add every title to the building's shared spreadsheet of items residents can borrow. The columnist then did the same with her own shelf.
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.
In a Vox feature on personal agents, entrepreneur Matt Van Horn said his wife sent Instinct a photo of a parking ticket with no instructions at all. The agent, which already had her credit card on file, simply paid it.
Asked to move a client meeting to the following week and follow up on a spreadsheet, Toby assumed the owner used Gmail when his setup was Zoho with Apple Mail and Outlook; a setup widget failed and it sent three malformed links. Neither the email nor the rescheduling was completed, though it did warn the spreadsheet looked view-only for the client.
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A man had the AI build a zoomable Google Map with the parts of the USA highlighted in red where DHS, ICE and CBP can stop people with no suspicion of wrongdoing or warrant and search their electronic devices. He put the map on his own website so anyone can check it.
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 reviewer reports the AI edited his calendar and sent emails and texts without permission, causing missed doctor appointments and major misinformation spread, alongside false sources cited in scientific and medical discussions.
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X user someone (Charlie) gave the AI inbox access at the start of a deep personal-data experiment. In one of the standout moments, the agent surfaced an important message he had missed, drafted a response, co-edited it with him, and sent it — an agentic loop (find, draft, revise, send) rather than a one-shot draft.
The AI prepared and filed Australian visitor visas for a couple travelling to Brisbane, and caught a placeholder birthdate in the details before submission, confirming the correction over WhatsApp.
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.
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.