A solo developer built a women's clothing brand's production WooCommerce store with AI writing most of the code: a custom block theme matched to the client's React prototype, real-time CommerceML sync with their 1C ERP (including patching a stock parser that silently dropped nested per-warehouse counts and cleaning up roughly 1,000 orphaned variations), and zero dollars in platform licenses. Two client revision rounds of about thirty items each cleared in days, and the whole build took weeks instead of months.
His home WiFi kept acting up, so he asked the AI to diagnose it. The AI ran a script that monitored everything for a week and pinned the problem on his Google Nest Wifi, and Reddit posts backed that up.
He was working through a 1.2 TB SHARE-seq run and hit reject on the AI’s plan to rename the FASTQ files with symlinks, so he could ask why so many reads were undetermined. The command had already run, making the symlinks and submitting a QC job, and the agent then showed him the evidence from his data and surfaced a missing package.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A couple spent 14 days in Kyoto, Hakone and Tokyo with AI as their travel assistant. Before the trip it grilled him one question at a time instead of handing over a plan, and built a private offline trip page for their phones with day cards, booking codes, train guides and taxi cards showing the hotel address in Japanese. During the trip he ran it from his phone: after they caught a later train he asked for the day to be re-timed and got new times, an updated app and moved calendar events in a couple of minutes. One stop was added without anyone checking it was open, and it was not; after that every stop got checked on the venue's own site first.
He runs three products on his own with no marketing spend. Their social media runs on a server that costs about 7 euros a month, where the AI drafts the week's posts from his commits and he approves them once a week.
A maker had the AI design a circuit that shows a picture stored in a memory chip on a standard VGA screen, using common logic chips, and write the chip code for it. He routed the board himself, had it made for $6, fixed the one missed error with a wire, and the board works.
Fed up with ghost jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed, he used AI to pull job posts straight from company career pages and turn them into clean, searchable data. The result is a public job board holding 5.9 million jobs, including over 220,000 remote ones.
He is recovering his 15 year old tweets with photos that he thought were basically lost, with AI's help. The AI also built him a custom GUI editor that he will use once to hand edit the collections of tweets.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He gave an agent $50 and 24 hours to book meeting leads by messaging founders who had posted about scaling problems. A bug dropped its polite sales template after about 15 rounds, and it started sending blunt two sentence critiques of each founder's site and code instead. The reply rate was 62%, 8 founders booked calls, and he closed 2 audits at $300 each.
Two vendor provided Windows programs had annoyed him for over 4 years. He pointed the AI at the Windows binary and converted each one to Python running on Linux, about a day each, weird RS232 protocols and everything, and it worked.