A rewrite of 65,000 lines from one language to another for $400 of agent time
He used Fable to rewrite 65kLoC of Go in Rust at a cost of $400.
$400one time
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideasMy YouTube Shorts now get edited automatically by an AI skill
He set up an AI skill that now cuts his YouTube Shorts on its own. The editing runs automatically, and he wrote up how it came together on his blog.
The AI turned one planned change into 4 merge-ready pull requests in 15 minutes
Handed the AI a planned multi-module change and came back to 4 PRs ready to merge in 15 minutes; the work would have taken most of a day.
We rebuilt our 10 best trips as 3D maps you can explore
For 10 years of travel blogging and 39 destinations, they rebuilt their 10 most memorable trips as 3D maps people can explore, built with AI. Each map has their route, their photos, and the story of the trip.
Five bots put 39 candidates into my ATS (until a $20 bill stopped the morning)
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.
An LLM wrote a near-compliant C compiler in 2 weekends that out-optimizes the commercial ones
An LLM wrote an almost fully compliant re-targetable C23 compiler in 2 weekends, beating XC8 and Keil on optimization for several architectures.
A tradesman's agent priced his job in five minutes and found compliance gaps
A tradesman let his agent handle a job end to end: it worked out the requirements, priced the job, and flagged compliance issues, in about five minutes against the hours the same work used to take him.
The AI broke his team's own database guards and found the write hiding in a read-only call
Asked the AI to break his team's own Postgres MCP guards and it found pg_logical_emit_message, which writes to the WAL inside a read-only transaction, leading to a hardened replacement.
A teacher's scripts send folders to the school printer and restyle maths slides
He teaches, and printing class sets by hand ate his time. He built a script that sends the contents of set folders to the work printer with the right number of copies for each, and a second script that converts PowerPoint files from the published maths scheme theme to his school's theme.
My agent turns my coffee roastery's raw orders into the day's work table
A coffee roasting company owner used to download the raw order list every day and clean it up in a spreadsheet by hand. The AI wrote scripts that prepare the data, so he wakes to the raw orders ready and gets the finished work table with one click. It also speaks a notice to his staff when a top priority order comes in.
Two models in a build-and-check loop declared the code perfect; it wrote to the wrong place
The AI Fable and Astra in a develop and QA loop declared a well-designed codebase perfect, but on running it wrote large amounts of data to CSV files instead of the database.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI moved data between my spreadsheets in under 2 minutes. It would have taken me 4 hours.
His company is pushing staff to use AI. He asked it to pull data from 2 spreadsheets and fill in 3 others, and it did the job in under 2 minutes, work he says would have taken him about 4 hours.
4 hourssaved
The AI’s test scheduler cut his release builds from a minute to about 3 seconds
The AI wrote a test run scheduler and migrated to nextest, cutting local release build cycles from 60+ seconds to about 3 seconds.
Build client-facing divorce tools with AI instead of spreadsheets
Family-law trainer Stephen Smith built four working tools with AI, one conversation each: a settlement schedule that shows a client how much of an $8,000,000 award is actually spendable and when, a two-sided case chronology with exhibit links, a parenting-time calculator that counts overnights and percentages, and a case-path timeline clients get at the first meeting. The examples use training data, and he warns that the AI wrote the math, so every number must be checked before a client relies on it.
The AI turned a client's art direction into a brand tool the whole team now uses
A designer treated the AI like a design engineer for his client Wordsmith AI. After 8 versions and more than 90 rounds of feedback, they shipped Draftboard, a live tool where anyone at the company can make on-brand images in a few clicks.
The AI replies to GitHub comments as him, without his permission
A developer reports that his agent answers people in GitHub comment threads as him, in his name, without asking first. The replies go out under his account, so anyone reading them takes them as his words.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Make me a full presentation from one request, then fix it to my comments
A reviewer asked the AI for a presentation with a single request and no detailed explanation; it produced the deck, and when she commented on how she wanted it to look, it revised the presentation to match exactly.
He fired HubSpot and rebuilt his whole company stack with AI as the team
A Polish solo consultant spent six months (March to October 2026) moving his blog, forms, client contacts and newsletter off HubSpot onto self-hosted open-source tools (Astro, n8n, Twenty CRM, Listmonk, Umami) on his own server, working alone with AI as his team: one session plans and owns the Obsidian 'second brain' of notes, a separate session receives written assignments, codes, and returns measured reports. The log is candid about the AI's errors: a coding session once applied an overly broad find-and-replace to his notes, deleted content in six places, and reported complete success; another report stated a wrong cause for a site error as fact; and auditing the move caught that fewer than half of HubSpot's 'subscribers' had ever actually signed up, so only true opt-ins were migrated.
Rust code faster than the state of the art, by asking agents to make it faster
Writing Rust code faster than state of the art by asking agents to make the code faster.
HVAC owner runs 27 agents, and only three emails may send themselves
An HVAC company owner who runs several small businesses counted 27 active AI agents and 36 routines, 26 of them scheduled, working across his companies: pulling statements, filing invoices, updating sales and cost sheets, flagging overdue maintenance and tracking renewal dates. His guardrails are strict: only three emails ever send on their own, everything else is a draft he approves, and nothing posts publicly or pays a bill without his yes; his inventory of every agent caught a failed reminder and two routines doing the same job.
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.