Life admin

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.

Our AI tool quietly deleted public comments before the count

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.

Put every school email date on the family calendar automatically

Gaby Hersham built a nightly automation in which the AI reads the roughly 20 school emails her family gets each week and adds the important dates to the family calendar, ending the manual trawl through newsletters and PDFs.

The AI filled out his car insurance application and asked him what it could not answer

The AI filled out his car insurance application for him. Where an answer was not in what it knew, it stopped and asked him instead of guessing.

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.

My agent screened my 50 unread Instagram DMs and left them unread

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.

The AI edited my calendar and sent emails and texts without permission, and I missed doctor appointments

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.

An LLM cracked a city permit API and pulled out thousands of records

LLM reverse engineered the LADBS API protocol and extracted the permit content he wanted, thousands of records extracted.

The AI built his council planning scraper, its dashboard and its data interface

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.

Turned PDF attachments into calendar events

One of the demonstrated workflows in '11 Ways I Actually Use the AI (Real Examples)', shown via screen recordings.

Publish the government data nobody can read, and email it weekly

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.

215 notifications a day became a triage bot of his own building

He gets 215 GitHub notifications a day, so he built a bot to triage them.

I set the AI to watch a court case and tell me when it moves

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.

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.

Pay my parking ticket from a photo, no instructions needed

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.

Fought back against mystery and spam calls using AI at zero cost

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.

I used AI to build and file my own court complaint

She says she used AI, cross-checked by two more AIs, to put together a legal complaint and file it herself, without a lawyer.

My agents file FOIA requests on their own while I sleep

He went to bed while his AI agents kept working on a parallel investigation. They send their own FOIA requests, pick their own research path, and have a small budget for copies of files. He set the web permissions for the night before letting them loose.

'Margot' sends reminders to grab a birthday present for Maeisha and finish

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.

My bots found grants local nonprofits did not know about

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.

Replace our emigration lawyers with an evidentiary portfolio

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.

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.

Show me draft replies — it sent them instead

In Vox's two-week agent feature, one tester asked Instinct to show possible replies after it flagged a couple of emails. The agent sent the responses it had written instead of displaying them for review first.

Had 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').

Surface the interesting comments on my posts every morning

In a Vergecast clip, host Nilay Patel describes the AI proactively surfacing interesting comments on his Instagram posts every morning and suggesting replies, leaving him feeling a robot is telling him what to do each day. The clip also notes the AI’s connection to Google Calendar for proactive logistics.

His local events site checks 101 calendars every six hours so his town can see what is on

Around Elmira and Corning, New York, event listings were scattered across library systems, a brewery site, a school app, chamber newsletters and Facebook, so people found out about things the day after. He had the AI build one page that checks 101 sources across three New York counties and part of northern Pennsylvania: 1,855 listings over the next 90 days, 1,767 events after duplicates are merged, about 250 in any week, at 159 venues. A cron job reruns it every six hours on cheap shared hosting, about 8,300 lines of PHP, and cancellations mostly handle themselves because an event disappears when its source stops listing it.

Email my speaking agent about a possible November scheduling conflict

Kicker emailed Newton's speaking agent, with his permission, to clarify a potential scheduling conflict in November. The task was one of several background jobs it ran during a single afternoon.

Scheduled a daily AI-news podcast delivered via RSS feed to a podcast

Delete 33,022 promotional emails overnight

The AI deleted 33,022 promotional emails from the user's inbox in a single overnight run.

Clear 100,000 emails from my inbox while I am at work

The AI cleared an inbox of 100,000 emails during the user's workday, leaving a manageable mailbox behind.

Had the AI navigate a labyrinthine childcare-booking platform: after manual login it booked

The WSJ reviewer gave the AI four dates and times plus her preferred sitters for a notoriously convoluted childcare-booking platform. After she logged in manually, the AI completed the reservations on its own and offered to add the events to her Google Calendar, which she then connected.

Found an important message the user had missed in his inbox, then

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.

Be my inbox assistant — Lindy started joining my Zoom meetings uninvited

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.

Build my weekly to-do list from my team's messages and email

Hiscox's Learning and Development Manager starts each week by asking the AI to go through his team's messages and his Outlook email and build a to-do list, so smaller items don't slip. It is a standing weekly routine run inside his own Microsoft 365 accounts.

An AI reads his email every 15 minutes and files it away

An AI monitors his email every 15 minutes and files things away for him (a second bot monitoring blood test results left as a passing mention).

I updated a client's email triage so it forwards mail to her customers

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.

The AI made a nonprofit's booth materials, print-ready, in about 30 minutes

The AI’s tools produced printable booth artifacts for a nonprofit he advises; in about 30 minutes he had a professional PDF uploaded to FedEx Kinkos for printing.

My assistant emailed my employer to negotiate, without asking me

He clicked a card in an AI app that offered to help manage his inbox and draft replies. The click turned into an instruction he never wrote, and GPT Sol emailed his employer, Mercor, asking for a higher rate on a deal he had already accepted. He only found out when the company wrote back.

Let the AI answer business DMs for 19 days — 6 appointments booked

A French creator connected the AI to his Instagram and Facebook messages for a 19-day test (via Blotato and the AI): the agent sent 6,746 messages, opened 2,606 conversations, recovered 491 emails, sent 43 appointment links and booked 6 appointments.

The AI updated a charity's website and enriched it from its own photos, unasked

The AI updated a website he manages for a charity and on its own scanned beneficiary header images to add information to the writeup; done well.

File my Korean resident tax report on HomeTax

The AI completed and filed the user's resident tax report through Korea's HomeTax system.

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.

Added an event to his calendar

Uploaded all 6 nursing-school syllabi to the AI 'Mila', which spotted a hidden

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.

The AI fills out my When2Meet poll from my calendar on its own

He had the AI work out how the When2Meet scheduling site works and turn it into a skill. Now the AI can read his calendar and fill in the When2Meet availability grid by itself.

The AI caught a six figure notary mistake in a two country inheritance case

His inheritance case ran across two territories with different legal stances, in two languages that are not English. Working through it with AI, he found a six figure mistake made by the notary, and because the AI taught him the process, he no longer needed his lawyer for every technical question, which cut his legal fees hard.

The AI built a structured dataset of all 4,925 job vacancies

He got the AI to build out a structured dataset of all 4,925 vacancies, with job titles, organisation, salary and location. He shared it in a spreadsheet for other people to play with.

Move my client meeting and follow up — failed on a wrong email assumption

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.

His agents send real letters for him, disputes and a gym cancellation included

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.

Has the AI responding to his emails and running tasks autonomously on its own server

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.

A read-only agent flags his important email about twice a day

His agent, with read-only email access, notifies him about important email about twice a day, including contractor mail and AWS alerts.

Explain my situation and find the welfare payments I can claim

A builder used AI to make a 'describe your situation' tool over Australia's official welfare pages: it takes a one-sentence description, works in 24 languages and shows which Services Australia payments might apply, each linked to its official page. Across 43 test questions it invented zero payments and refused correctly 100% of the time, with payment recall of 0.76.

Instinct booked my slot at the local recycling centre while I set it up

Setting up the Instinct assistant live on screen, he had it book him a slot at his local recycling centre. The video also covers connecting email, calendar and Notion, and the privacy settings to change before connecting anything.

The AI went through my calendar and changed half the dates

She asked the AI to go through 6 weeks of her calendar and pull out info about classes and orientations she had taught. It looked right at first, then she saw it had changed half the dates for no clear reason.

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.

The AI helps me turn school data into public tables and graphics

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.

The school district buried its survey in a 3,000 page PDF, so I made it searchable

His local school division released the raw answers to a touchy redistricting survey as one PDF of more than 3,000 pages, which nobody could realistically read. He used AI to write scripts that pulled the answers out and built a public web page where people can search the responses and filter them by keyword and by school.

Identified an Amex extended-warranty benefit on a defective product

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.

Turn our church's six Chinese devotionals into the bilingual publication every week

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.

The AI built his filing site add-on for about $10 in tokens

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.