A man had an obscure Alcatel modem with undocumented hardware. He soldered on serial pins, plugged it in, and asked an agent to reverse engineer the firmware. DeepSeek v4.1 Flash took about an hour to get a full OpenWRT build and flash pipeline running in an isolated container, the driver changes worked, and the whole job took under half a day and $0.86 in AI cost, work he says would have taken weeks or months.
When OpenAI released more than 700 mathematical preprints, a researcher wanted to search inside them, including proofs and bibliographies. With GPT-6 Astra he built a searchable catalogue that organises the papers by research area with clickable keywords, full text search, links to the originals, and each paper's Lean formalization status, and he put it on his website for public use.
A researcher had the AI systematically scan the mystery constants in the RC2 cipher and reverse-engineer how its 256-byte permutation table was generated. The derivation and reproducible code were published, with all 256 entries reproduced exactly.
A musician in a home studio asked the AI to search his Instagram followers and follows for musicians active in the past year, select two songs per musician, and compile them into a YouTube playlist. The agent succeeded, creating a 6+ hour 'Community Listening' playlist — music mostly new to him from his own network.
A home server owner had the AI study his running server and turn the setup into Ansible files, which they refined together until it worked. The AI also wrote a small tool that unlocks the server encrypted disk from another machine, which he now uses.
A man has a monthly task of changing about a dozen labels. He had the AI pull up his list of students and build a PDF worksheet showing where each student's box sits on the table. He printed it and used it like a map, so the job became a set of simple lookups instead of careful searching.
He used AI to create a small tool on val.town that automatically syncs his GoodReads updates to BookHive. The val.town blog featured the tool as one of his experiments.
A developer asked his dot to download all the English learning materials he had purchased from a page and gather them in a folder. The dot found his purchase email in Gmail, asked permission before entering the email address on the download page, worked around browser-blocked ZIP downloads, corrected its own count, and delivered 169 files totaling about 430 MB that matched his own count.