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.
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.
Someone in the house heard a beep a little before 12:13 AM. He handed the question to an agent with access to the camera recorder. It came back with the sound, the source and a short list of reasons: a smoke alarm that sounded once, at 3417 Hz for 0.87 seconds, about two metres from one camera. It was not a fire, not carbon monoxide and not a dying battery.
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.
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.
The AI produced a thirteen-page strategic assessment of Fulton's father's retirement community. Its pickleball court count was verified from satellite photos — eight dedicated courts, checked, in his words, from orbit.
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.
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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Host Alex reported that his AI designed and ordered the wristbands for the show's AI Engineer sauna meetup. The design-to-purchase loop was completed by the agent alongside his other travel tasks.
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.
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.
Simmons asked László to check in with his father once a week about the business sale and report back, judging his father more likely to talk it through with an AI checking in than to raise it with his son. The article records the arrangement being set up, not its later results.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Scanned a storybook with his phone and had the AI OCR it and compare it against the list of words and sound patterns his kid knows, flagging the irregular words and new sounds to cover before reading.
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.
Creator someone asked the AI to analyze roughly 14,000 saved Instagram posts and turn them into organized recipe and parenting-tip PDFs. Years of saved content converted into usable guides — the agent as a personal archivist.
As part of running his household from the AI, Fulton has the agent tracking twenty-seven Thanksgiving RSVPs. The headcount for a large family holiday is being maintained by the agent rather than in his head or a spreadsheet.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Her wedding site on Joy worked until the platform disabled SSO and she could no longer edit it - mid-planning. She rebuilt the whole thing herself with AI from her own requirements list: password-protected bridal-party and admin sections and direct RSVPs, replacing the platform entirely.
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.
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.
A father posted on Threads on Oct 20 that the AI pulls his children's Canvas data every Sunday, flags only what matters — missing work, a slipping class, a big test coming — and emails the summary to the children's mother. He no longer has to remember to check the school portal himself.
Replying in the prompt thread, he says the AI hosts and updates their family dashboard on its own. Attached to it is a store: he set up a Bluetooth NFC reader beside it that works like a card scanner. The kids scan a card to see their point totals, and when they buy something the points come off their total. They can check a balance, move points between them, and take points out as cash. He says it has been a huge hit.