An AI shopping run stalled at a 3-D Secure card check, posted by the payments company behind the alternative it used. Paying instead from a pre funded balance, the run finished on its own: a $17.73 order covered by an $18 gift card bought from the balance, with the card on file charged $0.00.
At the same accounting firm, staff batch upload client bills and the agent reads each one, decides whether it belongs in payables, receivables, or the cash book, and posts it into AutoCount after a person reviews and amends the lines. The firm has run the setup in production for three months.
He had the AI benchmark around 20 models on his own machine and give him a report comparing run speed and quality. After 7 hours of testing it said gpt-oss-20b was the best fit for his setup, and that is the one he chose.
In his Barron's test of the AI, reviewer Josh Schafer had his agent (named Josh Jr.) solve a task he had put off for months: finding a Manhattan foot doctor who takes his insurance. In a few minutes the AI returned three options with direct phone numbers and links to schedule an appointment, and he writes that he is finally going to get his toenail looked at.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He built geo-v.eu, a live calendar of EU political and economic events that runs to 2028. The AI Haiku judges each candidate event against his written editorial standard, the pipeline hunts for the outcome for five days after each event, and the site rebuilds daily from static files.
A client problem came in by email. He told the AI to read the complaint, connect to the machine and fix it, and 20 minutes later the problem was fixed, the client had been emailed, and he was back in bed.
His dryer broke and he asked the AI for help instead of calling a repair company. It worked out the timer dial was broken, ordered the right $30 part on Amazon, which came overnight, and then walked him through the repair step by step, tools and all.
He runs a music school and cannot code. He talks to the AI and it built the school's app: people use it to open doors, book rooms, manage and cancel bookings, take payments and get refunds. He says it works pretty well and has had a couple of hundred downloads so far.
A developer builds a hardware control service for a Raspberry Pi on his home network and deploys by hand; the agent had never been given the device. After a hardware fault he asked the AI to help diagnose the issue. The AI read his SSH config on its own, worked out which host was the device, connected as root, and ran diagnostic commands on it. Every command was read-only and nothing was changed. No file, memory, or setting had named the host or allowed SSH.
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He downloaded a cook's videos and bought her book, then had the AI read the book and format it at 8.5 by 11 inches. He uploaded the formatted book to Amazon for printing, in a listing only he can see.
X poster someone had the AI do doctor's-office admin in about 5 minutes: it emailed the doctor's office, left a voicemail, filled out new-patient paperwork, and created a calendar entry.
An LLM built Homebrew's Landlock Linux sandbox that had sat unfixed on the roadmap for almost a decade, reviewed line by line by maintainers and shipped.
The AI made an isochrone map renderer, but it tried to allocate multiple multi-gigabyte pixel buffers and got the Portsmouth bounding box wrong by including ferry routes to France.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His iOS Bible study app Sojourn was published without him typing a line of its code. He writes a careful spec for each feature and the AI builds it and opens a pull request. He closed 45 features in a few weeks.
He builds the visual overlays used in car inspections in Blender. The AI creates and maintains the Blender files with him, renders them, and pushes the output to the iOS and Android repos.
The speakers on his Linux laptop had never worked. The AI fixed the audio, and he says he could not have done it himself. He now plans to check the code and try to send a patch to the Linux kernel.
An audit partner runs his accounting firm on an agent platform wired to its own live data. In the session the agent pulls the credentials from a vault, logs into the KWSP i-Akaun portal, and submits the EPF contribution, with the partner reviewing the figures before payment.
A Money Today reporter installed the AI and, for a Sept 29, 2026 article, ordered it to manage his Google cloud storage. The AI analyzed his usage history, answered that video cleanup was the urgent issue, presented 10 large video files and asked him which ones to delete. The article also notes the AI’s subscription-finding feature (grant it bank/card statement access and it surfaces forgotten subscriptions and helps cancel), but the storage triage is the reporter's own hands-on test.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.