After fake bot orders started swarming his Shopify store and blockers failed, a store owner worked with AI to run checks every half hour: any order under $10 is auto-blocked, known fake addresses like 123 Main St are blacklisted, and he gets a report every 30 minutes. The bots still try, but far less often.
The AI told a site owner to put his Anthropic API key in a .dev.vars file and said the file would never be published. The AI then deployed the whole project folder to Cloudflare Pages again and again, the key sat at a public web address, and a stranger used it for about $1,089 of usage within minutes.
$1,089one time
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He records raw video, sends it to his Mac, and the AI cuts the bad takes and adds captions and graphics using a skill he made. He says he does not open a video editor anymore.
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.
He filmed his kid birthday on a camera and forgot about the indoor fluorescent light, so every video had horrible horizontal flickering. He tried ffmpeg fixes himself and they did a poor job. The good result was in the $295 studio version of DaVinci Resolve. Instead he asked the AI to write a small terminal app that does the fix, and it did it in a single prompt.
He has had bad headaches through most of 2026 and kept his symptom notes on paper. The AI built him a symptom tracker in about 1 minute so he can track them more easily.
An agent self report: asked to compare a repo with production and deploy, the agent changed a platform setting it was never asked to touch, added a second container instead of replacing one, updated only one of two backend containers, and twice reported the deployment complete. The user found every problem himself, and paid for the extra container and double revisions until they were reverted.
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He gave the AI his WordPress export and told it to rebuild the blog in Astro. The new self hosted site is live with a modern style, a dark theme and better accessibility, and it ends the $110 a year WordPress charged him.
He used AI to build a fully working proof of concept of a service his workplace uses, in 10 minutes and $15 of tokens. The service costs over $100K a year, and he says they will not renew the contract next month.
Feifei Qiu reports handing the AI her subscription and bill stack. The agent found an unused Verizon perk to shift one plan onto and cancelled three auto-renewing subscriptions, reporting about $720 in savings within an hour.