Ornicorns, Balloons, and One Very Capable AI Agent
How I went from party planning paralysis to invites in the inbox in a single afternoon.
Yoni Rechtman posted a take on March 9 that got a lot of traction: consumer AI agents don’t have real use cases because people don’t actually do that much work in their personal lives.
Claire Vo replied three days later with a list of 33 things she manages. It got 187,000 views. I added my own reply - “plan twin birthday parties (invites, cake, entertainment)” made the cut.
That was Wednesday. By Sunday, I’d stopped adding to the list and started doing something about it.
The Party That Wasn’t
My twins, Daphne and Violet, turn three in less than a month, and until last Sunday my party planning consisted entirely of: reserving a park.
That was it. I’d booked the picnic tables at a local playground weeks ago and then stopped. My parents are flying in. There would be a party. But the actual doing of it had stalled completely, buried under everything else on my plate.
Then I had lunch with a friend in the East Bay. She made the case - gently but convincingly - that the kids would genuinely love showing up to a real party with their people. She was right. I knew she was right.
So crossing the Bay Bridge, I started mentally running through everything a birthday party requires: open Paperless Post, pick a design, customize the invite, wrestle with an outdated contact list, brainstorm a theme (ornicorns - my daughter’s word for a unicorn that she’s been saying since, well, ever - it’s the theme now), figure out loot bags, track RSVPs somewhere. Each step is small. Together they become a full afternoon of context-switching across five different apps, making dozens of micro-decisions before a single invite goes out.
I’ve done this before. I know exactly how it goes.
And then I had a different thought: why am I about to do all of this myself?
So I Tried Something Different
I’ve had Lulubot - my personal AI agent - for a few weeks. I’d been using it for various personal tasks, but this was the first time I thought to hand it something that required coordinating directly with other people. Specifically: sending emails to our friends and family on my behalf.
So I tried it.
I created a dedicated “🦄 Twins Birthday Party” topic in Telegram and spun up a new agent just for this project.
It worked better than I expected - and once I saw what Lulubot could do, I just kept going, offloading more tasks and more thinking as we went.
What Actually Happened
Within a single session, Lulubot had pulled the party details from its own calendar, built a party page with all the details and an RSVP button, designed an animated email invite complete with an AI-generated ornicorn GIF, and sent invites to our full guest list.
RSVPs started coming in that same evening. A Google Sheet was tracking everything. A to-do list existed. A reminder to order loot bags was already queued up for when RSVPs closed.
All of this happened while I was sitting in the car on the way home from lunch with friends.
The party hasn’t happened yet — that’s Part 2. But somewhere between sending that first message and watching RSVPs roll in, something shifted in how I think about what I’m willing to hand off. The list of “things only I can do” keeps getting shorter.
The question I keep sitting with: how many things are still on your mental to-do list not because they’re hard, but because you haven’t thought to ask?
Paid subscribers: I’m walking through exactly how I set this up - the calendar trick that gave Lulubot full context before I typed a word, the Google Sheet structure with the de-dup logic that saved me from double-counting RSVPs, and the framework I’m now using to think about what’s worth delegating to an agent vs. what still needs me.
