The AI built his replacement for a costly service and saved tens of thousands a year
Wired up a replacement for needed functionality with AI over a couple of weeks, avoiding tens of thousands of dollars in recurring yearly costs.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasConcur AI booked my flight with my birth date wrong
Concur's AI booked a man's flight but read his European passport wrong and put his birth date down as the 1st of the 18th month. The flight ended up booked with the wrong birth date.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI edits my YouTube videos, not just the code in them
He has the AI edit his YouTube videos end to end. It transcribes them, cuts the dead air, zooms the jump cuts, adds lower thirds, sound effects and music, and hands back a Premiere timeline.
His experts provision real data environments through agents in plain requests
Domain experts use agents via MCP to provision real environments, e.g. a 200Gi PostgreSQL with PostGIS plus a copy of a Texas layer set, a big productivity boost over provisioning web interfaces.
The AI turns each of my wife's photo shoots into a blog post
Mark Mason says the AI watches his wife's Instagram for new photo shoots. When she posts one, it writes a blog post in her voice, saves it in WordPress and emails her the link.
The AI built me a widget that counts down to my last class
To mark the start of the semester, he asked the AI to build a macOS widget. It counts down how many weeks are left until the last class, and how many of those weeks are real teaching weeks.
His support agent closes 78% of tickets, but a recount says a quarter of them still needed a human
His support agent reports closing about 78% of tickets with an 11% reopen rate. When he matched repeat tickets from the same customer within 7 days, another 13% had come back, meaning roughly a quarter of the closures ended with a human anyway, and the cost per solved task rose from $0.54 to $0.71.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Built offline .NET knowledge base from 820 MB corpus
A builder used AI in Google AI Studio and DeepSeek to build a 19 project .NET system over about 4 and a half hours. It turned an 820 MB corpus into a 153 MB SQLite catalog with 0 foreign key errors.
The AI built my data tool and saved a $1000 a year Matlab licence
He runs a one person business that makes electronics for hobbyists and his customers run several of his devices at once. The AI built a stand alone program that plots their measurements together, the job he had been doing in Matlab, and worked out on its own how data from different products fits together and how to line it up in time.
$1,000a year
Replace my $29/mo ManyChat auto-replies with AI drafting in my voice
Creator Pratibha cancelled ManyChat ($29/mo) and plugged the AI into her Instagram instead. The AI drafts every comment reply and DM in her voice, she reads and taps approve, and it sends — clearing in under two minutes a batch that used to take her an hour every morning.
$29a month
Farm agent merges paddock sensors, markets and weather into one decision picture
Beef, sheep and cotton farmer Andrew Gill dictates voice notes and takes photos in the paddock, and the Farm Assistant agent files them alongside his paddock sensor data, livestock market prices, weather and cash flow. Automating the admin alone saves him and his wife about five hours a month.
5 hourssaved
His agents talked to each other by email and flooded him with 500 unread messages
His agents communicated by email and flooded him with 500 or more unread emails in a single thread, which pushed him to build a different way for agents to talk to each other.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Opus helped him make 3D sudoku puzzle books that now sell as a printed product
Made 3D sudoku books on paper (SUDOCUBE) with Opus, which came up with the algorithm and extended his Kakuro codebase; books exist as a product.
The AI made and published their API video from four instructions
The company asked the AI for a video showing how easy it is to program with their API and gave it four instructions. The AI put the rest together itself, and made and published the post.
His AI setup routes tasks from chat and tickets to the right repos and opens the PRs
Cyrus and the AI system routes Telegram and Linear tasks to repos by label and opens PRs for review; he is more hands off across multiple projects.
His team's agents keep a live wiki of decisions and status that he steers from
His team has coding agents write and update a wiki of decisions, open questions and status as they work, which he reads to set direction for the next agent sessions on real projects.
Keep my launch video moving across Work, the AI and chat without me sequencing it
In Futurepedia's early-access test, the Dot coordinated a Dots launch video: it requested three intro versions in an AI app, selected one, sent it to an AI motion-graphics skill and started a thumbnail in another chat. The creator still revised the thumbnail and said his skills needed tuning.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Globo Agents Review Creative Advertising Material 3x Faster
Brazilian media group Globo uses AI Enterprise agents to review creative advertising material. The review process now runs three times faster.
I had the AI build a website for my buddy's painting company
He had the AI build a website for his friend's painting company, then guide him from GitHub to Cloudflare and finish the SEO. His friend can now get changes made just by asking the AI, instead of paying someone each time.
His bot spends leftover agent tokens writing pull requests from his task lists
His RemainderBot uses excess the AI and the AI tokens to write PRs from his goals and task lists, 111 PRs done including customer call prep, runs as a cron job (own-use separable from the Show HN tool post).
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.