A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
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 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.
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.
Volunteered and built a cartography data pipeline with coding agents for an educator, integrating sources updated every few minutes so new maps appear within about 5 minutes on a low-powered machine.
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.
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.
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 inbox gets so much mail that about half of what matters was being missed and a quarter sat in spam. His AI watches the box, sorts what is important, and messages him in a separate chat when something he cares about lands; it took a while to tune the prompt before it matched his judgment.
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.
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.