A solo founder runs his game key store with about a dozen AI sessions, one each for code, pricing, copy, bookkeeping and suppliers. They stay in sync through a shared record where facts are only ever added, each fact says whether a session confirmed it or just read it somewhere, and his decisions go into a numbered ledger the sessions look up instead of asking him again.
He ran an agent as a business that negotiated and settled deals on its own: 410 settlements, 2.19 dollars in against 4.46 dollars out. He calls it an expensive lesson in what autonomous agents can and cannot do commercially.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Had the AI build an open-source source control system, benchmarked on a 100k-file monorepo as 12x faster sparse checkout and 82x higher concurrent land throughput than git.
Before a Wednesday conference trip to Japan, the AI proactively reviewed the author's Google Schedule, noticed the Visit Japan registration was missing, and messaged him. After he logged in, it auto-populated his flight and hotel details so he could finish with one final click.
After three months with Home Assistant OpenCode and the free Big Pickle agent, a homeowner says he has written no YAML at all. He asks in plain words and it builds his dashboards and automations, like a goodnight routine that turns off downstairs lights, locks the front door and sets the thermostat, and it found the old guest mode condition that was blocking one automation.
He kept finding papers months late, so he set up a weekly digest with AI. It pulls new papers from Europe PMC, bioRxiv, and Crossref, filters them by his keywords, and puts them on one page every Monday.
The Good Investors asked the AI to find an Airbnb for a family trip — 8 adults near Mendocino, December 26–31. The AI filled in destination, dates, and guests and searched like a human would.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Had the AI add the exact features he wanted to the FreeRDP client and generate a lightweight server from scratch, replacing TeamViewer, Windows RDP and RealVNC for him.
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 New Zealand sheep farmer who had only made small scripts before installed the AI on a Raspberry Pi server and, over more than 1,000 prompts, built a working online game with a persistent world and real players. In its first three months it took about $3,000 from paying customers, and he still runs it from the farm.