A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
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.
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.
The same Cowork setup checks his father's email for work orders and schedules his father's meetings automatically. He turned off data sharing with AI for this, so the mail is not saved anywhere else.
The author reports the AI reduced his unread Gmail from more than 65,000 messages to about 700.
Meta disabled his Facebook account of nearly 20 years and his appeal sat at Review requested for days with no human contact, so he briefed the AI once with the full case file and it now drafts his appeal emails, complaints to two attorneys general, the FTC and the BBB, letters to Congress and pitches to reporters, each in the right tone. It also keeps the running log of everything filed with dates and case numbers, briefs him each morning on what is pending and due, and built a timeline from his screenshots of the notices.
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.
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.
During a 30-day trial diary, the author shows the AI filling out a school field-trip permission slip it had found in his email — one of several family-admin tasks it handled from his accounts.
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.
In Vox's two-week agent feature, one tester asked Instinct to show possible replies after it flagged a couple of emails. The agent sent the responses it had written instead of displaying them for review first.
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.