A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
The New York Times' own Daily podcast episode on Tan's two-week the AI test (Oct 6, 2026) summarizes: 'the AI, Meta's A.I. agent, helped a Times reporter with dental insurance, dinner reservations and more.' Dinner reservations were among the delegated real-world tasks in the review.
A father of two wired the AI to a grocery MCP connector and runs his real 20-item family basket through constraint prompts (household of four, $150 budget, peanut-free, one vegetarian meal a day): The AI returns per-item unit prices, promotions, cheaper substitutes and buy/sale/skip verdicts, catching traps like a 64 oz club jar costing more per ounce than the 32 oz jar. Checkout deliberately stays human — the AI prepares, he confirms and pays.
He gives the AI his shopping list and it compares prices at his two local supermarkets, which sit next to each other, then places a click and collect order with each one holding only the items that are cheapest there.
PCMag asked all three agents to find a named risotto recipe, match its ingredients to what a local Wegmans stocks, and load them into Instacart. Once the reviewer linked his Instacart account, the Dot found the recipe, matched the ingredients and filled the cart without a hitch, while the AI needed his password and a login code and added saffron nobody asked for.
Dylan Heagy photographed a fridge whiteboard and asked the AI to order the grocery list from Sam's Club. Photo-to-cart grocery ordering: the list never gets retyped, it just gets bought.
Whenever he visits a restaurant, the reviewer asks the AI to rebuild its menu as an accessible web page, with each category as an H2 heading and each item as an H3, delivered as a shareable HTTP link he can navigate by headings with a screen reader.
AI agent Rosey in a family iMessage chat does meal planning and Walmart grocery shopping via BrowserMCP.
Answering a what do you use it for thread, he says he had the AI take his grocery list and check the deals at his two stores. It worked through the trade offs: Kroger had a sale on ice cream but Sam's Club was far cheaper in bulk, while Kroger carried many more flavors. He had told it his rules on name brands versus generics, size variations, and coupons that stack with the sales. Result a few minutes before he posted: it saved a third of what the order would have cost at Kroger.
He set up a message bus between his server, his desktop and his laptop. He makes the menu for the week on the server, the ingredients get sent to the desktop, and the laptop places the Walmart order for pickup after work. He checks the order on his phone before pickup to make sure it did not add staples like aluminum foil by mistake, and he says it works pretty well.
Creator someone asked the AI to research and book a Burmese restaurant for the weekend via OpenTable, with her approval. Cuisine-specific restaurant booking with an approval gate — the delegation pattern working as designed.
MAXX (5.9K) explains she never saves recipes, only likes them. The AI scanned her liked food reels, identified 'meals you'd actually make' (butter chicken, salmon bowl, pasta), and built a 'GROCERY ORDER' cart (chicken + spices, cream + tomato, rice + herbs, naan) ready for approval.
A Dexterity Solutions presenter demonstrating the AI walks through user examples including the AI booking a dinner reservation for two at Osteria Lina via browser automation. The same reel cites tweets from users William Geronco, Reezy, and Dan Lopgnow and references an Engadget article plus a live prompt database at muse.every-ai.com (1,000+ prompts).
In 'Ways to Use the AI Episode 2', a creator demonstrates his grocery system: he keeps a list in Google Keep, then asks the AI to access his Walmart account, find his most recent milk purchase from his purchase history, and add it to the cart. He reports the AI completed the task, identifying three items in the cart including one he did not recognise.
A man subscribes to a meal delivery service but its web app is slow and he kept forgetting to pick the next week’s meals, ending up with defaults he did not want. He now has the AI crawl through the app weekly and bring him the options he cares about, based on his dietary preferences.
Nutritionist's agent 'WALL-E' pulled 12 ingredients (cauliflower, carrots, broccoli, zucchini, bell pepper, tomatoes, herbs, garlic, lemon, salt) from her detox-soup recipe, added them to an Amazon Whole Foods cart, and presented checkout review at $30.79 with next-day 5-6pm delivery in Beverly Hills. Delivery was filmed the next morning.
Parker Pannell showed the AI booking a Thai restaurant via OpenTable alongside the $150 suit purchase, $295 in found subscriptions, and drafted email replies. He framed the day as checking off a completed goal with a companion at the restaurant, emphasizing the AI’s calendar and Instagram integration and its ability to act with or without approval.
Reverse engineered his supermarket API and made a custom MCP to automate grocery shopping; now fills his cart through AI.
TheCleaningChannel's the AI 'Foodie' plans meals around her family's favorite foods and allergies and builds the grocery list in Instacart. The order is left ready for checkout with pickup or delivery options; nothing was purchased in the video.
A dad of two under two steered the AI to build Forkcast, a weekly meal-planning and calorie-tracking web app, because existing apps plan only a day at a time. It generates his grocery list from the week's plan and imports recipes from photos and labels for his 90-day weight-loss challenge.
A creator had the AI map his household's staple basket, then price it at every store within a two-store, 20-minute-drive rule. Sam's Club plus Aldi came out about $32 per basket cheaper — roughly $600 a year — with itemised trade-offs.
With his wife and two kids sick, he used AI connected to his recipe database and Instacart to order the ingredients for a recipe from Safeway by voice. The groceries were at his door in about 30 minutes.
An AI user runs the agent on a headless home server with his DoorDash and email credentials stored in 1Password. The AI logs into DoorDash with a skill it built itself and chats with support reps, and the user says it now gets refunds issued with no issue where DoorDash had turned stingy with him.
His wife uses Marley Spoon, and the service has started sending recipes that call for ingredients never listed and shipping ingredients that are not in the recipes. Its customer service bot refunds them automatically every week.
Shana Basnight (someone, 6.9K followers) named her AI 'Marigold' and asked for a dad's-birthday restaurant (steak, Inman Park). Marigold suggested Kevin Rathbun Steak, Two Urban Licks, and Il Premio; when the first was closed on Sundays, she offered a backup and, with permission, booked a table for four at Two Urban Licks via OpenTable.
Each week the system plans meals from his own recipe notes and what is left over, builds the shopping list, and adds it to his Aldi cart through the store's system, flagging anything out of stock. He schedules the pickup and pays in the app himself.
After years of building his own food logging apps and never liking them, he set up an AI as his food logger in about half an hour, and now sends it a voice note, a text or a photo of each meal. The bot works out what he ate, looks up the nutrition numbers and logs it in a Google spreadsheet it made for him, and its guesses are usually right.
Jenn Farmer (3.3K followers) asked her AI 'Dolly' to plan a College of Charleston Family Weekend (Nov 6-8) near King Street with Friday dinner on Shem Creek. Screen recordings showed Dolly researching, then offering to book NICO Oysters + Seafood via OpenTable — confirmed for 4 on 11/06 at 7:00 PM after a time change — then booking Indaco for 4 on 11/07 at 6:00 PM.
Amanda Robinson ('The Digital Gal', 3.5K followers) got a notification that the AI wanted to book 'Beeside Del Mar' for 5:30 PM for 3 via OpenTable. The chat showed detailed criteria — seafood-focused, mocktail/cocktail variety, ~$50 per person, cool vibe, Instagrammable but not trendy.
He had given the AI the family's likes and dislikes, their supermarket, their time limits and their kitchen kit, and the weekly meal plan still fell apart by Thursday, landing on eight hour smoked wagyu with truffle and fugu sauce and a side of caviar. It hit the macro targets and missed everything that mattered. He does the plan himself again.
Miguel Sosa (32K followers), a busy student-athlete, created an AI named 'CR7' (cartoon avatar). After telling it he had soccer training the next day, he asked for dinner help; the AI suggested grilled honey chicken with pasta and marinara, produced the ingredients list, and gave step-by-step cooking instructions.
He built a meal planning setup for his family around their tastes, his dietary needs and two picky kids. Once a month he counts the freezer, including the random leftovers from bulk meat buys, and the plan works like a factory parts list so shopping quantities come out right. The family wastes much less food, dinner is always ready to be made, and eating out because there is nothing at home has mostly stopped; he still shops by hand because his supermarket has no public way for a tool to fill a cart.
The AI wrote a spec, got it reviewed and built a v1 of a new feature for his meal-prep app before he got home from errands.
Steve Caldwell built a weekly meal-planning system in Notion on the AI for his household. The roundup reports it saves his family about an hour each week.
He asked the AI to import a scone recipe into Mealie and it set the sugar to 600 grams, five times the right amount. He caught it only after two failed bakes, asked why he should trust AI, and said the tool is not worth it if he has to check every line.
Laura Legge (32K followers) challenged herself to feed a family of four on $30/week using pantry items (salmon, frozen mixed veggies, turkey breast, oils, seasonings). The 'the AI Atlas' app returned a seven-dinner plan with recipes, a missing-items grocery list, and a browser price comparison across Walmart, Stater Bros., and ALDI for zip code 92880 — Walmart won at $29.66.
He had it sign in to his Costco account and work out how often they buy each thing and which items they stock up on when they are on sale, so it now writes the family shopping list and sends it to his wife for edits. At Vons it signs in and loads the cart itself; he only checks out and picks a pickup time.
Chris William Young (40 followers), juggling a 9-to-5, Ironman 70.3 training, and investing in a climbing gym, showed screen recordings of the AI building DoorDash grocery carts from Jewel-Osco ($130.02) and H Mart ($50.33), noting substitutions and missing items like Thai tea mix, then placing the order for delivery. He explained he avoids DoorDash himself out of exhaustion, and walked through the workflow: prompt, the AI searches memory, takes over the browser to shop, requires user approval befor
Austin of YoMamasTech dragged a photo of his handwritten grocery list into AI, which read the handwriting and built the cart in Instacart at Aldi: ground beef, butter, non-fat plain Greek yogurt and five more items, subtotal $40.33, with checkout left to him in the Instacart app. He then pasted a chili recipe URL and the AI added 21 more ingredients (brown sugar, beef broth, kidney beans among them) to reach $70.72, deliberately skipping the recipe's 2 lbs of ground beef because the handwritten list already covered it.
A man told Android the AI to add etouffe to his shopping list. The AI added the word toothache to the list instead.
A weekly scheduled plan writes the week's dinners into their Google Calendar, trained on the family's dietary needs, restrictions and preferences. It checks the local weather forecast and the calendar itself, so a hot day gets burgers on the grill, a cool night gets chili, and travel days or evening commitments get easy low stress meals. They eat out far less now.
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.