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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.