After dry-running a personal-assistant the AI through August, its owner let it pay a real $3,731 bill that arrived by email; routines now watch his Gmail for invoices three times a day. The first live payment went through under the watch setup he had tested for a month.
A pipe burst in his house two months ago. He now has the AI run his side of the claim. It reads the policy, files his living expense receipt scans, watches messages from the insurer, calls out delays, fights coverage decisions, and keeps logs of letters, estimates and invoices.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He told the AI to request anything it could get sent to him for free, with no limits set. So far a fabric sample and a lot of state travel guides have arrived, and he is a bit worried about how much more is coming.
He wired a double entry bookkeeping tool into AI and snaps photos of receipts as they come. When he fed it a batch of bank statements for his rental property, the reconciliation flagged a missing $47 charge for him to check.
A materials scientist with a PhD and almost no coding background built and shipped a live stock portfolio tracker over about three months and 277 commits, pasting code blocks the AI gave him into a terminal and pasting the results back. The tracker is not about returns: it makes him write down why he bought a stock and what would prove him wrong, then pressure tests his reasoning and scores how well his past calls held up.
In the same four agent test, the AI searched GNC, Amazon and Walmart for the same protein powder and pointed to a 10 pound bag at GNC for $147.99, about $0.92 an ounce. The link it gave led to a page not found error. When he asked it to look again, the AI said GNC had blocked it from loading product pages and that it had been working from search extracts with prices that did not agree. It also said it could not check Costco, Target or Bodybuilding.com.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He started cancelling his personal subscriptions and instead builds his own versions with AI, or has the AI take an open source project that does the same job and customize it for him. What he still pays for is the AI, YouTube, Spotify and Starlink.
Marco Madonna spent three days in October having the AI turn the Excel workbook he and his partner use to run their house into a phone dashboard backed by the same Google Sheet, which was never replaced. The AI first mapped the workbook and flagged a total that didn't add up, the app now writes expenses and budgets back into the sheet, monthly broker reports are imported only if every check passes, and a verification script matched 50 checks against the sources with zero unexplained differences — plus it spotted a kids' savings payment likely credited to the wrong contract.
Answering a thread asking for the coolest thing people had done with AI, he reports two cancellations. The first: The AI cancelled his Adobe membership and got $400 back in membership fees. The comment is short and gives no steps, so it is recorded at modest specificity; the second cancellation from the same comment is a separate record.