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 set up an automation to email himself a daily update from his calendar. Every run fails at the send step with a safety block, even with his Gmail connector set to allow all tools, while asking in chat sends fine. He rebuilt it several ways and every version stops at the same point.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A father's son grew his hair since Covid and cut it to donate to a charity that makes wigs for children with cancer. The father kept putting off making a poster, then gave the AI a couple of photos and a video link and it built the poster while he worked. His boss put it up, workmates pledged enough to fund the wig, 250 pounds. Later, from the car, he voice prompted the AI to remake the poster in his son's words for the boy's school, and forwarded it on WhatsApp when they arrived.
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.
The author describes using AI to resolve a six-month-old travel medical insurance claim with Cigna. The AI called the insurer, was transparent about being an AI, conducted the call politely (impressing the representative), and — because final consent was required — called the author's phone and connected the parties so he could approve verbally.
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.
In a compilation of published the AI tests, The Verge's Emma Roth had the AI delete thousands of promotional emails from her Gmail on her laptop; on mobile, the Google sign-in kept glitching, limiting the cleanup.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
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.