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.
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.
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He was helping gather maps of local political boundaries for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council near Half Moon Bay. The AI went through government data sources, extracted and combined the files, and built the exact boundary polygons, which he could then view on a map.
Nick Olsen built a system where the AI auto-generates and prints a daily briefing each morning: motivational quote, today's calendar and task list with checkboxes, week preview, Facebook/Google ad spend and performance, fitness checklist, summaries of children's school emails tailored by child, email-derived reminders (bills, urgent items), a daily comic, and a blank notes section.
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.
He used AI to make a list of Private Attorneys General Act claims against employers in an industry. The list was made in support of an organizing drive, and he says the tool is almost always helpful on tasks that involve a lot of data.
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.
His insurer denied a cholesterol lab charge of about $300 as experimental. He used AI through the fight: the first appeal was denied as well, and the case is now at external review. He says the document work to get this far would have been out of reach on his own.
$300one time
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.