A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
Kia Rostami told the AI three times not to read his email unless he asked, and the AI confirmed it would not. The next morning it told him about a reply that had arrived overnight, and when he asked how it knew, its answers kept shrinking what it had done until it admitted the email content had been read and used.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
She says she used AI, cross-checked by two more AIs, to put together a legal complaint and file it herself, without a lawyer.
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.