Five minutes from a rough grammar sketch to a working parser, instead of hours
Hands an LLM a loose BNF-ish grammar and gets a recursive-descent parser in five minutes instead of 2 to 3 hours by hand.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideasThe AI made my slide deck as pictures of slides, not real slides
He often has the AI turn his talk script into a slide deck, and this time the AI made the deck as images of slides instead of real slides. It took him several minutes to spot what was wrong.
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His Dot filled the newsletter tool from a Google Doc. The draft was 95% good.
Alistair Barr gave his Dot an old edition of his AI Insider newsletter as a Google Doc and told it to try a test run in the workplace newsletter tool, using the written how to guide. The Dot logged in for him, with a password click and a two factor code from his phone, and about five minutes later sent back a test draft his editor called 95% good.
Cut duplicate email automations and rebuilt a welcome flow in under an
A worked example in metaflow.life's the AI-for-email-marketing guide: one business cut duplicate email automations and rebuilt a welcome flow in under an hour using AI connected to Klaviyo.
The AI made a spreadsheet of a 500 object Salesforce schema in five minutes
Asked at the last minute for a spreadsheet of a complex Salesforce setup, he had the AI build it. The sheet covered more than 500 objects and more than 8,000 fields, with a note on which fields were likely to hold private data, and it was done in five minutes.
Run HR support for plant workers inside WhatsApp
Coca-Cola Andina built its HR agent Andi in an AI app Studio and bridged it to WhatsApp, where its Argentine plant workforce actually lives, authenticating workers against SAP-synced HR data. About 1,200 of 3,600 active employees use it monthly across nearly 5,000 conversations with a 4.1/5 satisfaction score, and unresolved issues are bundled into tickets for HR.
The AI threw away his unsaved file without asking, classifier watching
The AI, running with the auto-classifier, discarded an unstaged, uncommitted file without asking.
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Engine's Eva Agent Resolves Half of All Chat Inquiries
Engine's help agent Eva, built on Salesforce Agentforce, resolves 50 percent of chat inquiries, per Salesforce's release.
My agent fixed my signup tracking. The new subscribers were bots.
Five new newsletter subscribers in three days were credited to direct traffic, so he asked the AI to inspect his PostHog analytics, his main site, and his newsletter site. It traced where the tracking was lost, changed the links, deployed and tested the fix, then checked the server logs and showed the signups were bots.
The AI rebuilt the Jupyter kernel I use every day
He used Deno's Jupyter kernel all the time for exploring TypeScript libraries and automations, and was going to miss it. He pointed the AI at the problem and the result is cdp-kernel, Deno's Jupyter kernel extracted to run notebooks on any V8 runtime, now on GitHub.
A database swap done in minutes gave his app 10 times lower latency
Migrated a non-trivial Firestore app to SQLite with agentic coding in a few minutes of migration time, getting 10x lower latency and 10x requests per second.
The AI’s plot said 57 down. The picture showed thousands. I caught it by eye.
In his daily bioinformatics work, a volcano plot the AI’s script made had a subtitle saying 57 down while the blue side of the plot showed thousands of points. He told the AI to find out why, and the AI traced it to an inner join that pulled the up and down counts from a different comparison than the one plotted, then admitted the mistake.
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A week of posts written and scheduled in one weekend hour
She spent an hour on the weekend with AI and turned a bunch of her ideas into posts for the whole week. Everything was then scheduled through Post2All, so her content for a busy week was sorted before the week started.
Screen 900 applications into a 50-person shortlist
A case-study video describes a recruiter who gave the AI the real hiring requirements for a QA tester role and had it review roughly 900 emailed applications — without sending, deleting or moving any mail — and return a structured shortlist table of about 50 candidates.
His fantasy sports app has real paying subscribers, and a data API side business grew out of it
He has been building a fantasy sports app with AI since June. It gives lineup advice and waiver alerts, and its autopilot mode actually makes moves in your league for you. It is live with real paying subscribers, and he also sells the same sports data as an API to developers, which has picked up its own small customer base.
A vibecoded MMO reached 1,000 players over 10 weeks
A vibecoded MMO reached 1,000 players over 10 weeks.
The AI broke nearly all of his automation scripts in the act of improving them
Gave the AI all his IronPython scripts to improve; it broke nearly all of them.
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An invoice helper grew over nine months into the system that runs his field service firm
He started nine months ago with help making a better invoice. It is now a full field service system: it handles jobs and invoicing, his technicians use connected apps, and it tracks vehicles and equipment. The latest addition is tool tracking with Bluetooth tags.
He rebuilt his 70 year old mother's business website with AI and her revenue quadrupled
His mother has run a resume writing and career coaching business for almost 20 years, but bookings had been falling and her site sat on an old WordPress setup. He moved her to GitHub and Vercel, rebuilt the whole site with AI in a few hours, added online booking through Calendly, and moved the domain over. She now runs the site herself with AI's help, and her revenue has quadrupled in the last two months on better conversion and more bookings.
The AI reads his app's numbers twice a week and sets the next week's strategy
The AI reads analytics, Search Console and Partner Center twice a week and produces an actions report, plus a weekly strategy review that sets the next week's plan.
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.