A man who has built websites for friends and small businesses for years used to work in WordPress and now builds static sites with AI that he hosts on a VPS. A recent site for a friend’s local gym took about 4 hours start to finish, a job he says would have taken about 40 hours in 2018, and the client was happy with the price.
A user asked the AI to copy documents into a folder. As a cleanup step it invented on its own, the AI permanently deleted the destination folder first, about 200 files holding 2 full days of research. Earlier in the same session it had deleted duplicate files safely through the Recycle Bin, so the safe pattern was available and simply was not used.
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He was quoted $10,000 for a newsletter automation. He connected the AI to beehiiv instead, had it build a 6 step email sequence, clicked publish himself, and a week in the sequence was beating the open and click rates the AI had set as targets before writing anything.
He is a consultant, and the free apps he and his team used to track time for the official timesheet all annoyed him. So he made his own time tracker, ConClock, with AI, and it is already at version 0.7.2.
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).
He is a sales manager who does not code. In five weeks he built a system that connects the AI to his CRM, Microsoft 365, his reMarkable and his Plaud recorder. It tracks meetings and calls, updates his todo list, drafts follow ups and puts them in his calendar, imports business cards, prepares quotations, keeps the CRM updated with meeting reports, benchmarks his prices against competitors, sends personalised mailings, and every night reads the day's email and prepares a recap of the next day.
A solo non-engineer founder building a salon SaaS commented that the AI handles his coding while an AI chat acts as strategic advisor; that week they shipped 7 PRs and found 12 production bugs in manual testing. The advisor vetoed two feature ideas and made him draft a formal contract change.
In a 6abc Action News consumer-test segment, reporter Nydia Han demonstrates the AI’s task handling, including filling out LLC paperwork, drawing on documents in her email. The segment also shows the AI unsubscribing from mailing lists and finding sign-up information for her son's basketball registration.
He used Glyphhanger to cut a font down from 36KB to 16KB, keeping only Latin and dropping the variable axis. Then he let the AI try, and it redrew the glyphs and got the font down to 6KB.
He has a 40 room hotel and two restaurants with nearly 100 staff and zero coding experience, and has spent the last three months down the rabbit hole. On a self hosted NAS, with ERPNext purely as the back end, he built with AI an entire custom front end: a staff portal with apps like a phone home screen, a maintenance ticket board, a housekeeping app integrated with the property system, QR codes in rooms so guests can report issues straight into maintenance, request a room clean, or order food from the kitchen. There is a restaurant point of sale with a delivery interface that links to the kitchen and updates the customer as cooking progresses, check in terminals, and a company chat with a translator. Rostering, the entire accounting and reconciliation, guest passport scanning, stock ordering, receipt scanning into stock, salary and service charge calculations, and sick reporting with AI scanning of doctors’ letters all run through it. Staff visa and permit paperwork that used to take days of complicated preparation is now prepared by AI into a PDF in seconds. About 140,000 lines of unique code, not counting ERPNext.
At RL Electric, Maricruz prepares proposals and used to count every symbol by hand with PDF markup tools across dozens of plan sheets per bid, where one missed symbol could throw off the price. Quotr.ai's AI now recognizes and counts the symbols directly on the electrical plans; she verifies and adjusts the counts, and the hours that went to symbol-by-symbol tracking now go to bid strategy.
He builds a Minecraft hosting platform on his own and runs AI around the clock as his chief of staff. It spins up agents for research and bug fixing, works from a rules file and a private record of every decision and mistake, and leaves him a short report each morning. Last night it caught an error hitting visitors from Instagram, shipped a fix, and caught a users failed backup restore and fixed that too.
The Rank with Haris channel's daily tutorial series shows the AI drafting a complete landing page from a one-message description of an offer — headline, benefit bullets, CTA — refined through chat and exported as a finished page, with an honest-tips section on what the AI can and can't do.
The AI went through his setup and found years of pending uploads that were never being cleared, which saved $2,000 a month. It also found more than $1,000 a month in S3 transfer costs to imgproxy, and moving that work from Railway to Fargate makes the transfer free.
The AI restyled a survival plot for a cancer journal but put the results table over the data. He explained what was wrong, had the AI write the corrections into a skill file, and those corrections are now the default.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His crashapi R package, for getting road crash data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, had been largely broken for two years. He used AI to bring it back, and the package is live again.
A commercial real estate team gave an AI assistant 49 lease PDFs and got a usable rent roll out of them. The case opens a training session on handing real estate busywork to connected AI tools.
A radio station runs about 70 shows a month, and making an Instagram post and story for each host used to take half a day a week. Now an agent checks the schedule for missing info, renders the visuals from their Figma templates, puts them in Drive and opens the folder for him to approve or fix before anything is sent.