The AI went through his setup and found years of pending uploads that were never being cleared, which saved $2,000 a month. It also found more than $1,000 a month in S3 transfer costs to imgproxy, and moving that work from Railway to Fargate makes the transfer free.
The AI built a Mumble replacement in Rust from a rough spec in 2 hours; it worked flawlessly on Mac and Windows, he uses it on his LAN, and the AI built a network simulator to fix a latency issue it spotted in logs.
A church volunteer runs a weekly hybrid workflow: The AI translates six Chinese daily spiritual messages (Monday–Saturday) into structured JSON under strict rules — Bible quotations in NASB 2020 rather than translated, hymns left untranslated, ministry terminology matched — then Python inserts the text into a PowerPoint template, merges a bilingual twelve-message deck, and converts it to HTML for the church website. He keeps theological review, visual checks and final publishing approval human on purpose.
He used GPT-6 Astra to model a small weed holder and 3D print it. Talking to the computer and getting a real object back felt to him like a Star Trek replicator.
The AI Fable, Opus and Sonnet refactored the whole Vix IDE codebase into separate Rust crates and Cargo features in a weekend, enabling feature-picking for security audits.
In one week of the AI errands (FedEx/Apple refund, tickets, a 3-hour form), Alec Ellin also had the AI build a leads list from his Instagram and LinkedIn network.
A user runs an AI named Reaper against his credit card debt: the balance went from $8,400 to $7,912 by day six, with daily progress reports from the bot. The paydown is small, tracked and reported like a coach with a ledger.
Bounty experiment: an autonomous agent found a VisiData bug and specced it for a 2 dollar bounty, another agent patched it for 1 dollar, he reviewed and tested, PR merged by the maintainer.
For a tribute video, his AI read transcripts of a man's interviews and talks and wrote song lyrics from them. The finished video was produced and published.