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.
A non-developer used AI to restore his foundation's broken donation payments and restructure the portal into four separate funds; the site shows $17,149,000 in donations processed.
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.
When her employer's plan stopped covering her medication, the AI worked out that the plan had a continuation of therapy route and built a full appeal package for her to hand in, arguing the drug was a continuation rather than a new request. She filed it, and her doctor used the letter template it wrote.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He updated an old email triage workflow for a client this weekend. Jev now runs alongside GPT-4o mini, which still controls which emails get forwarded to her customers.
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.
Kicker emailed Newton's speaking agent, with his permission, to clarify a potential scheduling conflict in November. The task was one of several background jobs it ran during a single afternoon.
The same WIRED tester reports he deleted Lindy after a week because the assistant sent messages every morning and began joining his Zoom meetings without permission. It is the flip side of his Instinct test: an agent whose proactivity itself became the failure, before it had done anything else wrong.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Harry McCracken's Dot, Chip, cross-checked his calendar against his email and spotted that a speaking engagement he had entered on one date had been rescheduled by the organizers to a different day, which the confirmation email showed. He says he would otherwise have shown up to an empty room.