Family

Sends messages to friends via connected Messenger and Instagram accounts

In the same roundup, Jason Zhang listed a bonus feature: sending messages to friends via connected Messenger and Instagram accounts.

My agent watches my kids' classes in Canvas and built a dashboard of missing work

He has the AI logged into the Canvas parent app. It tracks each class and lists any missing assignments. He told it to ignore work missing for less than 3 days, so he does not get noise about things that are not due yet. The first version was all text, so he asked the AI to build a nicer dashboard, and it did. He says it is far better than using the Canvas app himself.

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

Turn my kids' old Yoto players into audiobook players

A parent had the AI write firmware that turns his children's unsupported second-generation Yoto players into Audiobookshelf clients. The AI handled flashing, log reading, and fixes while he did the physical button presses, and the firmware is public on GitHub.

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.

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.

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.

The AI logs into his child’s school system daily and puts homework on the calendar

A father set up the AI with access to his credential vault so it can log into his child’s school information system and the other school sites, pull together the homework and due dates, add them to the child’s calendar, and add a reminder the day before with a link. He modelled the workflow out formally and set it running daily.

Design and order wristbands for our meetup

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.

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 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.

Turn a classroom review game into a personal study game for my son

A teacher and dad rebuilt his classroom card-review game into 'Bad Mascots', a mascot-horror study game for his 2nd-grade son: The AI planned the conversion, wrote the image prompts and built and tested the game file, questions come from a photo of the boy's weekly vocabulary sheet, and progress saves to its own Google Sheet. Weekly updates take about 10 minutes from photo to approved questions, and the game is live and playable online.

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.

My agent checks my kids' school account every day and tells me what changed

A father's the AI logs into his kids' school account daily. It tells him if any classes were missed, any discipline notes, assignments not handed in, and whether grades moved up or down since the last check.

His tool reads the school emails and tells them what to pack the night before

He built a tool that reads the emails from his kid school and activities, swimming, music classes and scouts. It adds everything to their shared calendar, sends a WhatsApp message the day before reminding them what to pack in his school bag, and tells them what is on the lunch menu so they do not cook the same thing for dinner. He says the morning scramble is gone and the head space is back.

The AI found summer camps for my 5 year old. We went with three.

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.

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.

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.

Track replies to nine class inquiry emails and watch them daily

The AI sent and tracked nine inquiry emails about classes for the user's children, built a reply tracking table, and monitors the threads daily for responses.

Drafted a reply to a PR rep about an embargoed product, co-edited

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.

Analyzed ~14,000 saved Instagram posts and generated organized recipe and parenting-tips PDFs

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.

The AI runs the school admin for my four kids

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.

An agent makes his daughter a new voice-acted adventure game every week

Agent cranks out a weekly voice-acted, scored adventure game episode for his daughter, tailored to her interests and what she is learning.

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.

My agent runs our family points store where the kids scan a card to spend points

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Find and request chess books for my 6-year-old at the library

Eleanor Konik writes that she hates requesting books through the county library website, so she told the AI to find books about chess aimed at a bright 6-year-old; the AI picked titles and requested them using her library account. A few days later the county emailed that the books were available, and she picked them up (her post also shares an AI invite code).