Family

The AI’s animated demo explained the night sky to his 5-year-old better than anything he found

The AI whipped up an animated demo to teach his 5 year old why the sky is not black, a better explanation than existing ones he found.

The AI and Siri both failed to put his son's basketball calendar on the family calendar

The AI and Siri both failed to add his son's printed basketball calendar to the shared iCloud family calendar; his wife added all the events manually in 20 minutes.

The AI Agents Traded Real Books for 201 Anthropic Staff in Project Swap

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 built a baby weaning and medicine log for his two kids and put it on the App Store with no subscription

The app came out of his own frustrations managing two kids with his wife. Tiny Tummies is a UK baby weaning log that also tracks food, medication and sickness, and it has no subscription. It took about a month to build and three weeks to get approved, and a series of updates and an in app purchase are going through approval now. He built it on the AI Pro plan.

Two kids at two schools and three email addresses became one shared family calendar that fills itself

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.

Messaged a Facebook Marketplace seller with questions on the reporter's behalf

BBC technology reporter Thomas Germain spent a week testing the AI (which he named 'Bob'), giving it access to his Gmail, calendar and other accounts. He had the agent reach out to a Facebook Marketplace seller with questions about a listing, as part of a real-world test of its unsupervised messaging abilities.

Book a karaoke room — the venue refused to talk to an AI

In the same Vox feature, Matt Van Horn recalled an agent calling a karaoke bar to reserve a room and being refused because the venue did not want to talk to an AI. He completed the reservation through Fo, a service that adds human help.

Build EVA, a family assistant that tracks two kids across schools and swim teams

The user built EVA, a family assistant on the AI, which finds what matters in school email, tracks deadlines, updates the family calendar, and answers questions about what is coming up.

Rosey keeps the family calendar and reads card balances for the budget

Rosey adds calendar events and reads credit card balances for budgeting.

Track my baby's feeds, sleep, and diapers

A new dad on paternity leave built a full baby tracker with AI in a week, then opened it to other parents as a cheaper SaaS after finding existing trackers obscenely priced. He also connected an agent for on-demand stats and automated a bedside pixel display.

The AI went through 500 podcast episodes and picked the 29 that fit my life

A fellow parent pointed him to the Tilt Parenting podcast, which has more than 500 episodes. He told his second brain in an AI app to search the archive for episodes relevant to his situation, and it picked 29 episodes, saved their transcripts, and wrote him a brief on what each one could teach him.

Keep my household AI workflows running as sites block agents

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.

The AI watched swimming lessons and booked one for his son the moment a spot opened

The AI monitored swimming lesson availability and automatically booked a suitable lesson for his son when one opened up.

The AI’s lottery research for a robotics event took 4 hours of machine and 5 minutes of him

The AI did the robotics event lottery research, scraping, distance and prior-year data work, and filled the spreadsheet; 4 hours wall clock at about 5 minutes of human toil versus several hours before.

Build a bedtime-story shelf because the AI chats kept losing my daughter's favorites

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.

He made a personalised book for his daughter’s fourth birthday and printed 25 copies

A father used AI and the AI Images to write and illustrate a personalised book for his daughter’s fourth birthday. The pictures took several attempts to get right, but he ended up with 25 printed copies at £3.32 each and a book that would not otherwise exist.

Drafted follow-up emails to a landscaping company (reviewer found the tone overly

The nanny logs her hours in an app he built, and it totals her pay each week against their contract

He built an app that lets their nanny track her worked hours in it, so the family does not have to keep track so closely. The app holds their contract details with her, including the exceptions for vacation and sick days, and gives a total at the end of the week for payment reconciliation. It is one of several small apps he has built for family life.

I photograph my son's school flyers and my agent puts everything on my calendar

Her son's school sends home a lot of paper: fundraisers, spirit days, costume parade rules, events like Trunk or Treat. She photographs each flyer and the AI pulls out the dates, times and details and helps her get them on her calendar. When she could not remember whether Trunk or Treat was on the calendar, she asked the AI, and it was added along with the costume parade.

Compare festival rentals, and flag which walk home is unlit

Eric's daughter and her friend needed lodging for a music festival in Europe during her study abroad. His Dot, Jarvis, priced four places and annotated each with whether the walk back from the shuttle has streetlights after 10 p.m. When a provider replied in French, Jarvis read it, updated the comparison and said what changed: one rental ruled out, another cheaper but with a longer, uphill, unlit walk home. Eric finished the checkout himself.

Rosey updates the kids' chore chart on the kitchen frame every morning

Rosey updates the kids chore chart on a Skylight frame every morning.

My agent built an AI club site for my kid to learn from

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.

The AI watches my kids' six school Facebook groups and flags the clashes

School news for his two kids comes through six Facebook groups as well as email. The AI watches all of them, asks him which events he wants to track, spots clashes like a field trip on the same day as a dentist appointment, and keeps his calendar updated, and it also pulls the Scouts dates together and, before a camping weekend at two different spots, told him the weather at each one and what the boys should pack to stay warm.

Vibe-code a physical live scoreboard for my son's 10th birthday

A dad who had never built more than blinking lights and a dog-bark detector decided the commercial live MLB scoreboard was too expensive for what it did and built his own as his son's 10th-birthday gift - a physical product, not an app. Over months of nights and weekends with AI/the AI and the AI he went from concept to web preview to a parts list and a 3D-printed case screwed into the back; the finished board shows live MLB and NFL scores, pulls his son's own baseball games and practice schedule from GameChanger, runs arcade games, and has a quiet mode that shuts it down after bedtime.

Send my husband a full run-of-week household brief while I travel

While Sarah Dooley traveled for a week, her Dot cross-checked her calendar, email, and the previous Sunday's grocery receipt, then sent her husband a brief with a dinner plan for every night built from ingredients already on hand, plus pickups and evening plans for their three daughters. It also flagged a school day she had wrongly assumed was a day off.

Put my boys' school events in my calendar from emails and bulletins, and email the school for me

A mother posted on Facebook on Oct 19 (explicitly 'not an ad') that the AI pulled her sons' school event dates from emails and bulletins she could never find by searching, put them in her calendar, and set a dinner-planning reminder. The AI also emailed the school to update her phone number, confirming everything with her before anything was sent.

The AI grades his kid's video history well, and the banning hand stays his

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.

My agent checks my kids' Google Classroom and emails them a daily homework plan

A parent says the AI goes through his kids' Google Classroom and tracks their homework in every class: due dates, missing work and scores. It then sends the kids a daily email on how they are doing, with a daily plan to stay on top of their work.

My daughter talked to the AI to make her own game. It now lives on our Raspberry Pi.

He let his daughter chat out loud with AI to make a game, and the AI gave her small kid sized coding lessons along the way. They put the game on his Raspberry Pi box with an Arduino joystick, so she can play it whenever she wants.

The AI built his daughter's tap-card music system in about 2 hours

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.