After reading the AI’s summary of an embargoed PR pitch, Ulanoff had it draft a reply. The first draft overpromised a meeting, so he had it strip the meeting references to just agreeing to the embargo and getting images and details.
His son is in half a dozen orchestras and bands, plus cadets and Explorers and Scouts, and his daughter is in reception class at a different school. Both schools send everything by email, the important details are often buried inside one of several PDF and Word attachments, and he kept missing things. Over the years the schools had collected three different email addresses for him, which made it worse. He got the AI to help him build a system that runs on a schedule in GitHub Actions, reads the school emails and drops the events into a shared Google Calendar. It costs him about $2 a month in API credits, which he calls much cheaper than a missed guitar lesson.
His son is into Rubik’s cube competitions. Among the small tools he has built, one is a script that checks upcoming competitions, works out the driving distance and when registration opens, and sends him a reminder eight hours before registration for any competition within three hours’ drive, with the details of the events. He does not say yet whether it has caught one.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
With three kids at three different schools, Kranda gets a ParentSquare digest for each. Every weekday at 8:53am the AI opens every digest, reads the full text, and sends him only what matters for his kids; on days when nothing is important, he hears nothing at all.
He connected the AI to iMessage on his Mac with a BlueBubbles server, polling about every 5 seconds and waking only for allowlisted senders and chats. When he moved dinner with his wife by 30 minutes in his calendar, the AI messaged the family chat on its own and told his wife about the change.
A father of a 5-year-old used AI to generate a fresh bedtime story every night, sometimes with audio mode reading aloud - until his daughter started asking for 'that story we listened to before' and the favorites were buried across scattered chat threads. He built a small website, FifiStory, as a persistent shelf: the stories live in one collection that can be read or listened to, and he keeps adding to it as they use it. He made it free and public, no account or paywall.
The AI built his daughter's NFC card music system in about 2 hours of iteration, working seamlessly on card place and remove using depth camera detection.
Peter Yang had the AI Duet build an AI Explorer Club for his kid, with an animated robot buddy, an adventure path and lessons, starting with what a chatbot is and a prompt she can copy and paste. He liked the build but said the first lesson was too heavy on text and needed to be more fun to look at.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
On a Tuesday, Fulton's the AI warned him that Sunday would open near freezing, connecting a forecast swing to his calendar without being asked. The practical point was jackets for the children before their Sunday activity.
Noah gave his AI Q its own Google Voice number so it can text his partner directly. With his permission, if she asks something within reason the AI answers for him: it can tell her whether his phone battery is dead, or share his location, because he has given the AI location access. His standing policy is that anything the AI sends as him is drafted for his approval first.
A mom of four school age kids started using AI last week and it already watches her school email, the grades site, Google Classroom and the ClassDojo app. It adds events and tests to the family calendar, sends a weekly report on missing assignments, reminded her about a field trip permission slip today, and drafts the email when a kid is out sick.
Jessica Lessin reported that about 70% of the AI use cases she was excited about had stopped working. Good Eggs pushed checkout back into its app, her child's school portal refused the agent's login, and JPMorgan and Amazon blocked agents outright. Segment starts at 15:16.
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Anthropic's Project Swap sent 201 employees' the AI-powered agents onto a digital trading floor to pitch, haggle and strike book-swap deals. Agent preference rankings matched their owners' on 61 percent of book pairs, and staff ended up with roughly their fifth choice of ten; most of the shortfall came from misread preferences, not bad bargaining.
He filmed his kid birthday on a camera and forgot about the indoor fluorescent light, so every video had horrible horizontal flickering. He tried ffmpeg fixes himself and they did a poor job. The good result was in the $295 studio version of DaVinci Resolve. Instead he asked the AI to write a small terminal app that does the fix, and it did it in a single prompt.
Jonathan Fulton set the AI a careful specification for a morning inspirational email to his parents, sister, brother-in-law and wife, sent under his name at 7:00 AM. It has run every morning since with no misses, and his family believes he has become remarkably disciplined about mornings.
His AI setup generates maths problems matched to each son's school level, states the reward up front (0.50 dollars per finished set), and the boys complete the sets to earn it. He lists it first among the things his agent does for the family.
Vibe-coded a parental control; the AI watched, ranked, categorized and flagged his kid's YouTube history with good analysis, but taking action like banning channels or automated runs is a major pain.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He had the AI put together a big brief on summer day camps that take 5 year olds within a 15 minute drive in rush hour of his zip code, with one Spanish immersion camp. He read the options, checked drive times and the camp sites himself, and says the three camps they went with were great and close.
A creator had the AI plan his real Christmas party for 16 guests from a single prompt: it filled a Shop cart with Retro Candy Christmas decorations under a $75 budget, designed the invitation in Canva, planned the menu and filled an Instacart cart at Aldi within $250, built a Spotify playlist, and produced an 11-page printable host guide. He reviewed and paid for the carts himself; the AI never checked out.