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.
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Family
Kids, parents, partners and friends · 72 ideasTwo 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.
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.
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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.
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.
Lock in two orchestra seats for $117 and negotiate my brother's game tickets
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.
$117
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.
The AI builds maths practice apps for his sons and pays out half a dollar per finished set
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.
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.
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.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.