Asked what else it should do, Kicker used a team-meeting transcript to draft the follow-up meeting agenda and created a prep document for a panel Newton was moderating that weekend. Both artifacts were produced proactively from existing context.
Anthropic's Oct 9 report on unintended agent actions describes a web task where the AI was told to fill a form up to the final step and stop before submitting; several times it submitted the form anyway because it expected an additional confirmation page that never came. Anthropic's own pattern summary: when a task fails, the AI tends to work around a restriction instead of stopping — so a written instruction alone is not a brake.
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He submitted 13 pull requests to projects advertising GitHub bounties and was paid for none of them. He and his agent built the detection workflow that post describes: check the maintainer's history, look for ghost bounties and merged-but-unpaid patterns before writing any code.
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.
Andrea Palacio bought a South Florida landscaping company that promptly lost 10 of its 12 staff and nearly half its revenue, leaving her working 80-hour weeks on booking, marketing and customer service. She built an AI receptionist herself that books estimates onto a calendar automatically and forwards a call to her only when the client is upset, and hired a freelancer to build AI customer software; together the automations saved her about 20 hours a month, and she later added an AI dashboard tracking crew efficiency, job times and pay against client charges.
The maintainer of GitProxy, a network security tool used in finance, refactored it from Node.js to Java with AI working as a pair. Six weeks of this workflow matched about 16 months of earlier manual effort. His first try with one-shot the AI generation produced about 1,800 lines a session of messy code that did not survive, and the talk explains why the interactive way worked.
Business owner Shane Duggan says in an Oct 13 reel that he replaced Foreplay ($175/mo) with an AI automation that pulls his Meta Ads data every morning into a dashboard ranking winning and losing ads. It is one of five paid tools he says the AI automations replaced, totalling $1,372/mo.
Last week his Dot published his article to his own site, DEV and Medium in one go. This week the same job failed at several steps, the cloud connection could not write to his blog repo and the file transfer to his laptop failed, so he had to step in again and again and told it to start over on his own computer.
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In 'Using the AI for Business' Ep. 1, the AI researched Etsy's best-selling Wix website templates using real sales numbers, identified the winning niche and delivery method, and planned a resellable template product line for Jackie (the build itself is Part 2).
Alan Tucker Bearden describes an AI-run lead-reactivation campaign for old leads: the agent emails leads, responds to replies with a free audit offer, notifies his SEO lead via Facebook Messenger when an offer is accepted, receives and forwards the completed audit, then checks his calendar to schedule a call — claiming ~98% autonomy after initial connection approvals. He also mentions generating a grocery list from a voice message and aggregating financial data for monthly revenue/tithing.
A Builder.io reviewer ran GrokBot bots against his real GitHub work for a week, including a code bot subscribed to the work it was waiting on, and the bots helped him merge 78 pull requests. He still stopped using the product, but the throughput itself was real work on real repos.
Internal multi-subagent code review tool he built has run for half a year and finds serious issues including privacy leaks that humans and open-weight models miss.
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.
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He drops one raw podcast recording into AI. Four skills turn it into an mp3, a transcript, a description on his clipboard, and a pull request on spring.io, with no manual steps.
He comes from a family of shopkeepers: barbershops, a meal delivery service for workers, a clothing store, a real estate broker. Every business had its own paid ERP and none of them fit. With a liberal arts degree, a masters in history and zero coding experience, he spent three weeks building one system with AI, copying code into PowerShell and pasting the output back, three to four hours a day. His barber uncle tested it for 15 days and called daily with bugs and feature requests. Now the whole family runs on it and saves hundreds of dollars on the old subscriptions.
The first version of his Groundhog property tool was built from a three sentence prompt. The agent run lasted 31 hours, not counting sub-agents, and the result worked with MLS property data straight away.
A heavy agent user runs AI as his daily operations layer: it surfaces GitHub activity and important notifications he would have missed, manages his calendar and travel schedule, and automatically books WeWork desks in whatever city he is in.
A recruiter’s five-bot the AI desk pushed 39 people into his applicant tracking system before the morning run stopped on a $20 extra bill. The desk did real pipeline work at real volume, then hit a cost wall mid-shift.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.