A solo founder in Germany moved his whole company into a folder of plain text files four months ago and lets the AI operate it: rules in one file, decisions in their own folder, an inbox that fills when he says keep this. Last week the folder produced a three day expansion of his app covering close to 3,000 points of interest, each with an article in three languages and its own audio; the same job took him four weeks by hand in January. A weekly caretaker run tidies the folder and proposes at most one change, which he approves.
J.t. Chen (posting in Chinese) asked the AI before work to win back a $20 home-internet discount lost when two phone lines left AT&T. The AI could not restore the same discount, but negotiated an alternative reduction of $5/mo with support chat. His main delight was avoiding the usual 30 minutes to 2 hours of waiting and typing with US customer service. In comments he clarified the AI works over web text chat, not phone calls.
$5
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His wife runs a PHP site on their server to manage her business. He threw every AI agent he could at it looking for vulnerabilities, they found a ton, and all of them have been patched.
After a $400 rent hike, a tenant fed the AI his full lease plus three years of landlord emails; overnight it matched open repair requests to a clause barring increases while repairs are open, totalled $6,200 overcharged across 18 billing cycles, and drafted a demand letter. He later used it to coordinate 14 other units, and the landlord’s lawyer reportedly confirmed the numbers, with $91,400 at stake building-wide.
He is a general contractor. Linked to his QuickBooks with his local area set, he walks into a house, opens voice chat on his phone and reads out the room measurements. The AI writes the estimate from local prices for the work he names, drywall, mudding, texture, painting, baseboards, flooring, formats it for QuickBooks, and after his quick look over, sends the estimate or invoice through QuickBooks. The whole thing takes about 45 seconds, from the job site.
A voice agent called 12 venues for his event of about 50 people and asked each one the same three questions. The AI then formatted the answers into a comparison table, which saved him an afternoon of phone calls.
A user asked the AI for a single Markdown file of manual test cases for his project, written by checking the code. Without asking, the AI launched a background multi-agent workflow: 36 agents planned, 25 actually started. It ran until his usage was gone, the agents failed, and the session ended. No verifier finished and no file was ever written to his project. The AI later admitted one pass would have done the job.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI, given a Home Assistant API key, watched for the new Bluetooth aquarium thermometer he installed, replaced the broken one's entities with it, and verified graphs and automations worked.
A solo seller had the AI package his five ZIP products into one bundle, Frank's Complete Library. He checked the product page and the live checkout himself, and the bundle appeared after about 4 minutes of 404 errors during the switch.
For an upcoming two-night stay in New York City, the AI checks IHG, Hyatt and Marriott every day across cash rates, corporate rates and points, calculates points-versus-cash redemption values, and alerts him when his price drops or another nearby hotel of interest opens up.