Analyzer agents trimmed his agent skill files by a fifth and found bugs doing it
Analyzer agents audited and trimmed skill files, cutting about 18 percent then about 600 more lines, and extracting bash into scripts turned up bugs.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasOpus runs his whole video pipeline: film, thumbnail, title, upload
The AI runs his entire video production pipeline via an AI plugin: full 5-minute explainer videos from one prompt, thumbnails and titles, auto-upload via the YouTube API.
OpenAI deleted my dot's VM and hours of work were gone
A person's OpenAI dot could not push its work to GitHub. OpenAI then deleted the virtual machine the dot was working in, and hours of work disappeared with it.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI proved a 2025 borrow-checker paper in Lean over 2 to 3 weeks
The AI was poked along over 2 to 3 weeks to formally prove a 2025 CS paper (borrow checker) in Lean, now used as the basis for a new systems language.
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.
I record 40 seconds. The AI edits the video and posts it everywhere.
A scripting skill picks his best idea and writes what he will say. He records about 40 seconds in one take, then the AI cuts the dead space, adds the graphics and captions, and after his review the video goes out everywhere.
The AI runs my wife's shop back office and replaced a $600 a month ads manager
For his wife's business, the AI reads hundreds of emails a day and prints her a short brief of what matters, files the rest, updates her website, runs her Square and her Google Ads, and prints a weekly report every Saturday night. It caught a licence expiry buried in the email, stays inside budget, and replaced a person who charged $600 a month to run the ads, with better results.
$600a month
Two frontier agents refused the security work that protects his customers; a third did it
The AI and the AI balked at early PHP CVE investigation and at testing PoCs, slowing protection of customers; he switched to GLM 5.3 to mitigate and later used AI for the fix.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
She replaced her whole agent stack with nine AI bots doing real work
Claire Vo ran AI for several weeks and shut down every the AI she had. Her nine bots include Chief, which sweeps six inboxes and several Slack workspaces, a family bot that prints a kitchen table newspaper for her kids each morning, a helpdesk bot getting five star reviews, and a bot that audits subscriptions and negotiates insurance.
A product marketer's icon audit, redirect map and status updates run in minutes
He runs product marketing at a SaaS company. The AI audited where old icons appear across 12 products, sites, decks and emails and produced a tracker of about 200 rows to assign out. It built the URL redirect map for a site restructure, runs a browser routine that pastes page text into a sheet, and writes quarterly status updates in 20 minutes instead of most of an afternoon.
Plain the AI moved his repo in 20 minutes while a senior spent weeks building agent skills
Threw plain the AI at a git repo move with no skills or tools and finished in 20 minutes while multitasking, while a senior spent 6 to 8 weeks building the AI skills for the same job and moved only 5 repos.
20 minsaved
Every company sent the same AI rejection, so I built a resume tool and got two interviews
He kept getting the same form rejection, clearly written by software, and no human seemed to read his resume at all. So he built a free tool with AI: add your resume and the job post, and it rewrites the resume with the words the screening software is looking for. Using it, he got two interviews in one week.
He said undo the work it just started; the AI cancelled his live production deployment run instead of the local edits
An engineer had just had the AI reapply local, uncommitted code changes. Separately, a GitHub Actions run he had triggered against production was mid-flight, in the middle of creating a replication subscription on a live Postgres server. He said undo the work it just started, meaning the local edits. The AI read it as the production run and cancelled it mid-statement, leaving whatever partial state the kill created. The local edits were not touched until he clarified.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Our developer vanished, so I rebuilt my wife's seminar signup platform with AI
The developer building the signup platform for his wife's education seminars stopped answering emails, and they had no access to the code. With no money to hire another developer, he rebuilt the platform from scratch with AI as his coding partner, and it is running now.
The AI caught a job applicant hiding white-on-white text in a PDF to fool AI screening
The AI flagged a job applicant PDF with hidden white on white text meant to manipulate AI screening, in his own hiring.
Draft an email to our lawyer about the new vacation policy
Newton had Kicker draft an email to his new company's lawyer setting out its vacation policy. He kept final wording and decisions for himself, using the Dot for first drafts of unfamiliar startup paperwork.
Banco BV Agents Cut Personalized Client Communication Time by 80%
Brazilian bank Banco BV uses AI Enterprise agents for personalized client communications. The time needed to produce them fell by 80 percent.
Day 9 of agents running a poster shop: 62 listings, 2 visits, $0
In episode 2 of his ‘Harness League’ experiment, Dan Mercede reports his agent-run Etsy poster shop (62 active listings) drew just two outside visits and no sales by day 9, with a scoreboard tracking visits by agent (The AI 83, the AI 80, the AI 71).
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
AI agent team narrates its own work as a podcast so he can monitor it
His team of AI agents, building a biotech-investor decision-support app, turns the agent chat history into a scripted ElevenLabs-voiced podcast episode after each unit of work so he can follow progress by listening; he caught the team planning a roughly $730 API test run instead of using his AI plan and stopped it.
It updates my QuickBooks from my online receipts for my contracting business
A small contracting business owner, replying to a day to day uses thread, says he has the AI updating his QuickBooks from his online receipts. Bookkeeping from scattered receipts is the classic end of week chore for a small contractor; his agent pulls the receipts and keeps the books current.
Run my 18-client creative agency on three bots
An agency owner runs an 18-client, $31,500-a-month creative shop on three the AI (Scout, Quill and Courier) instead of hires; the bots produced 50 concepts for about $1 of API usage, against a $6,000-a-month copywriter cost for 12. The three named roles cover finding, writing and delivering client work.
$31,500a month
The AI read almost 300 of my Keynote decks in under 20 minutes
He had the AI 4 analyse almost 300 of his own Keynote presentations, each with several hundred slides, in less than 20 minutes while he was on a train. He then posted what it found.
Audit my Shopify store and draft fixes through the connector
A creator connected the AI to a Shopify test store two ways (Shopify's own connector and Ryze) and ran three read-only or draft-only jobs: a product audit flagging drafts, out-of-stock items and missing SEO titles, SEO title and meta drafts, and a Black Friday collection plan with a proposed discount code. The video also documents what the connector refuses: no refunds, cancellations, payments or live-theme edits.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Triage every dependency update like a supply-chain investigation
The solo maintainer of the karasu modeling language runs dependency updates through an AI skill that investigates each Dependabot PR before anyone merges: release notes, the diff between tags, publisher or ownership changes, install-time scripts, lockfile edges and known advisories, written up as merge, hold or reject recommendations in a design doc. In the week of Oct 10–17 three triage rounds fed 88 merged PRs (16 from Dependabot) and 12 architecture decision records, and the process caught a rebuilt lockfile silently moving a package off the reviewed version.
His agent queries the database freely and triages bugs with the monitoring tools
Built a thin layer letting his agent query the database freely, used with CloudWatch and Datadog CLIs to triage bugs.
My agent scrapes 50 prospects a day and reaches out to 25 of them
A small business owner gives the AI access to his email accounts and phone lines, with a Notion table as its memory. Every day it scrapes for 50 prospects for his products and services and reaches out to 25 of them. He also sells parts of the same setup to his own clients.
Circa Runs Its Website, Grants and Marketing on the AI at 50 Posts a Week
Circa built and hosts its company website on the AI, uses it to improve search visibility, prepare grant applications (which covered five internships), and produce roughly 50 social posts a week versus about five through a conventional workflow. By September the startup reported nearly $100,000 in cumulative revenue.
His overnight agent workflow wrote usable code but cost more to fix than it saved, so he dropped it
His overnight workflow (The AI plans, Qwen executes unattended, the AI reviews) produced usable code but cost more the AI tokens fixing Qwen's issues, so he dropped it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An LLM wrote data library bindings for his language, perfectly sufficient first try
Asked an LLM to write Apache Arrow bindings for Lean; it knocked out perfectly sufficient bindings.
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.
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.