Life admin

The AI found a serious security hole in a state legislature website while archiving it

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.

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

A cheap Haiku setup reads his texts and files the ones that belong on his calendar

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.

File our Australian visitor visas and catch a placeholder birthdate

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.

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.

I made an app to photograph and identify the stray cats on my street

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.

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.

I closed my inbox. The AI interrupted me only three times.

He connected his Gmail to an AI task that watched every new email and was only allowed to interrupt him when a message needed action or came from family, with a draft reply ready. All afternoon it alerted him three times, for a bank message, a family email he answered from its draft, and a ticket itinerary change he needed to act on.

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.

Find my misfiled iPhone in FedEx's system and get Apple to refund me

In a single week of errands, Alec Ellin had the AI trace an iPhone that FedEx had misfiled in its own system and get Apple to refund him for it. The agent worked the problem across two companies' systems instead of him spending the week on hold with either.