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.
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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Agent manages the import and export process for the international move of his pet, including comms and form filling, and corrals the family's move documentation.
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.
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.
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 The review found missing signatures, an illegal clause, and outdated law references, and he fired his attorney the same day.
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.
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.
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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He pointed the AI Fable at a newspaper archive and asked for a timeline of wildfire events in and around the Adirondacks. The result is an interactive timeline built from 12,000 pages of newspapers.
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 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.
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.
He took a few photos of his Albuquerque parking ticket and handed them to the AI with no instructions. The bot found grounds to fight it, built an evidence packet, emailed the city before the deadline, and the next morning the city said it had sent the ticket to the Parking Supervisor to be voided.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
Lixka, an accelerated nursing student at Mercy University, uploaded all six syllabi to her AI 'Mila'. Mila identified that Monday, September 28th was a 'triple-header' — two quizzes and a Pharm lab she hadn't noticed — then built a sustainable weekly rhythm around fixed classes, clinicals, and workouts, and asked permission before creating three tracked goals: quiz prep, reflection paper, and workouts/downtime.
Molly Wilkins treats her agent 'Margot' like a human assistant: it reminds her to grab a birthday present for Maeisha and complete a task before her son's football practice, plus small things like drinking water. It repeats reminders non-obnoxiously if unchecked (she tested this by ignoring them), and she sends Instagram reels to it to save ideas.
His morning agent reads his email and builds a prioritized to do list with time blocks for the day. It also checks the weather and warns him to leave earlier when rain would slow his trip, which has twice saved him from showing up soaked.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
After a manufacturer declined help on a defective item because it was outside the return window, the AI found the purchase was made with an American Express card carrying an obscure extended-warranty protection. It submitted the claim on the author's behalf and obtained the refund.
He follows the CNN lawsuit over White House press briefing access. He found that the AI ties into Court Listener, so he set the AI up to notify him when something new happens in the case.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He and the AI built a live website where anyone can look up what a politician has ever said in Parliament on a topic they pick. He calls it a moral manoeuvrability monitor.
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.
Every month the family benefits system asks him for a fresh proof of domicile, and a forgotten upload stops the payments. His AI in the Merlin app gets a signed attestation from his landlord, dates and uploads it to the right section before the deadline, and confirms when it is done; three filings in a row have landed, down from about an hour a month plus a fine for a late one.
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.
Cat (green glasses, plaid shirt), preparing for an interview with limited time, introduced 'Brio' (pink abstract avatar) as her AI. Screen recordings of a messaging app show her asking Brio to block calendar time; Brio confirmed a 2:00-3:00pm block and offered to run through questions.
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.
He uploads his own data and points the AI to specific sources and documents, with examples he made before to show the format he wants. The AI then builds the tables and graphics for his Education Rights Project, public pages on education rights and funding in US states, with policy briefs, slide decks and interactive widgets.
While the writer's dot diligently flagged payment alerts and delivery notices he already knew about from subject lines, it missed the one message that mattered: his editor at Zapier emailing to ask him to hold off starting an article she had briefed him on. Had he started the work, the missed flag would have wasted real effort.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
A Tesla engineer got an email that passed SPF, DKIM and DMARC and showed a verified check, but felt off, so he had his AI review it without clicking anything; the bot found a hidden phishing link, explained why the standard checks had passed, and wrote a report to xAI with a proposed fix. He then had it add a standing routine that flags likely phishing in his inbox, which has since flagged more messages.
He runs AI on his homelab. He can ask the AI to throw an event on his calendar and it appears, and the setup can also send events to his primary calendar by email.
Calling sellers about his orders was one of Josh's biggest pain points — so the AI took it over: it called a seller to correct his shipping address, and called a seller to resend his missing orders.
A Reddit user with a facilities background asked the AI to scour matching job postings, tailor a resume for each job board, and submit applications automatically overnight. Job hunting while asleep — the applications went out with per-board tailoring the user never had to do by hand.
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.
Three family members, three nationalities, one move to Brazil. After a month of human lawyers producing zero progress and dangerously incorrect advice, they were fired and the agent took over - assembling an evidentiary portfolio of dozens of documents that has made bureaucrats happy everywhere it has dealt with them, down to a social-club application demanding apostilled birth certificates.
He asked the AI to screen his unread Instagram threads one morning. It came back with 50 unread, looked at the threads he named across his Primary, General and request folders, and told him what people had sent. The unread count was still 50 afterward, so nothing showed as read for him or for the senders.
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.