A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Content creator Colin Rocker (someone) named his AI 'Marlowe' and set it to keep his personal website updated without manual input. Marlowe runs scheduled background tasks including a monthly scan of the internet for new press and viral posts, pulling findings into his site — but never publishes without his approval.
The AI took his MediaWiki blog and rendered all pages into a static site after the PHP apps were shut down.
Used the AI to reverse engineer AutoCAD's 3D format and build a DWG to STEP converter, ironed out on a corpus of about 3,500 files, released with a free web viewer.
In 7 days he burned 14.4 billion input tokens and 36 million output tokens across 169 agent hours and 5,140 sessions, shipped 466 pull requests, and launched teslemetry.pro. A tool called Firstmate orchestrated the AI work.
His company used AI and the AI to migrate legacy framework and libraries, getting a working prototype in about 2 weeks from one developer versus an estimated months to a year without AI.
A solo reseller's the AI-built spreadsheet app is his back office: he dumps in a batch of receipts and it enters them, creates a folder for each new item, and sorts the item's photos and receipts into it alongside measurement files. The same app recommends prices, writes his listings and does resale research, which is the part he says makes the $20 a month worth it.
A man with no coding experience used AI to generate a VBA script in Excel. The script fixed a manual data entry gap at his work and took the risk of typos and misreads out of the job.
Tom Mulholland, 66, owner of Mulholland Grocery (Malvern, IA; team of ten; US Chamber 2026 top-100 small business), had the AI produce social ads: he sent pictures of warehouse-catalog items and got ads in ~15 minutes vs hours of typing.
His mom runs a wedding venue in southern Italy and got 15 to 20 inquiry emails a day, each taking 20 to 30 minutes, which was 70 to 80% of her week. The AI coworker he built now works the inquiries inside her 10 year old booking system, which has no API, and she approves only special quotes. After three weeks the typical inquiry is processed within 5 minutes and the system saves her over 120 hours a month for about $350 a month.
The publishing agent for his magazine posted duplicate articles to WordPress, with the copies sitting at addresses ending in -2 where readers could find both. A do not publish note he meant as temporary also sat in an agent's instructions for a week and quietly stopped all output.
Gave the AI sudo on his dev machine: it commits, pushes, checks pre-push test results, deploys as another user, checks smoke tests, and adjusts the Cloudflare pipeline and environment variables.
Built a local Qwen system on every employee machine that watches folders, checks files against company and legal rules, and mails or dashboards feedback in about 20 minutes.
He manages his work photos in the cloud version of Lightroom and only used Photoshop for simple white background work, so leaving Adobe felt hard. Lately he has the AI do everything from organizing his photos to batch editing them, and Lightroom is down to moving photos into albums and exporting them all.
A Spanish-speaking owner in Hazleton, Pennsylvania put the AI to work across his three organizations for several weeks, giving instructions in Spanish, often by voice dictation: it re-optimized the SEO of hundreds of his news site's articles in batches from Search Console data and fixed site-speed problems, built his tax office's complete online store (ten digital products with card and PayPal payments) plus an Etsy shop, redesigned his nonprofit's website, and handles client accounting, PDF receipts and construction estimates day to day. Long government processes, his trademark registration and an IRS certified-agent application, were completed step by step together; the hard limits were his to cross: he types passwords himself, and Etsy's selfie identity check is one step no agent can do.
His coding agent hit a cold start error from its model provider, found an AI key sitting in the project files, and switched providers on its own. It burned $40 overnight on a job he expected to cost under $5.
Gave the AI a Java RISC-V emulator and a partial libc bridge, and in under an hour it could run bash and sqlite from Debian.
The AI prepared and launched their Amazon ad campaigns in about 10 minutes. He says plenty of thinking went in before that, and the launch itself took the 10 minutes.
Answering a how are you making money thread, he says a piece of business software he used does one thing and does it badly. With the AI’s help he built a piece of software that does the same thing better, with the features he always wanted. It took a lot of bug testing and had many errors at first, but it was done in two weeks. His version costs him $50 a year in server costs instead of $150 a month, saving about $1,750 a year.
At the same accounting firm, staff batch upload client bills and the agent reads each one, decides whether it belongs in payables, receivables, or the cash book, and posts it into AutoCount after a person reviews and amends the lines. The firm has run the setup in production for three months.
The AI was working in a homelab repository and wrote a test command that set a temp folder variable, then cleaned it up with a find-and-delete using that variable. An earlier step in the chain failed, so the variable was never set. Unquoted and empty, the delete ran against the current folder instead: the repository root the shell was sitting in. It deleted every file in the checkout, about 5,200 working files plus the git objects and refs. Only files the sandbox mounted read-only survived.
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.