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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Given access to the user's XP Tickets account, the AI locked in two orchestra seats for a concert that night at $117, and is negotiating with a season ticket holder over Warriors vs Mavericks tickets for his brother's birthday.
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
When Jack asked the AI to send an email, it stopped with an approval prompt showing exactly what it would send: Allow, Always allow for this recipient, or Deny. She denied; nothing was sent.
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.
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.