A browser agent spent an hour downloading his filtered monitoring logs, splendidly
Uses Sonnet 5.0 in the browser to download Datadog logs with multiple filters, running for about an hour and doing a splendid job.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideasThe AI copies data from locked PDFs into a spreadsheet, cutting each item from 25 minutes to about 6
The AI copies data from varied non-editable PDFs into a spreadsheet for human review, cutting handling from 20 to 30 minutes to about 5 to 7 minutes per item and raising throughput from 2 to 3 to 8 to 10 items per hour.
His agent cuts his films into shorts on its own
His agent takes his finished films, makes short clips from them, and posts the clips itself. He reports the results have been great.
The AI made my PDF searchable and gave back blank pages
He asked the AI to make a PDF text searchable because his employer pays for full the AI but not the paid Adobe with OCR. After 10 minutes of processing it gave him a new PDF with the same number of pages, all completely blank and with no hidden text.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI built my own time tracker in 10 minutes
Her old time tracking software will stop working after the next system update. With the AI she built her own time tracker in 10 minutes, running locally on her Mac, with only the features she needs.
The AI helped him get Photoshop and four other Adobe apps running on Linux
A Creative Cloud user wanted to move his work laptop to Linux, but Adobe makes no Linux versions. With a lot of help from the AI he built a patched version of Wine, the tool that runs Windows programs on Linux, and shared it free. On his laptop, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Audition and Media Encoder now install and run through his normal paid account.
Find plumbing leads with no website and pitch angles
In a MindStudio demo, the AI was asked to scrape the web for Northwest London plumbing businesses without websites and return three qualified leads. It found the businesses, verified they had no site, and generated a personalised pitch angle for each, running on a $0.24/hour CPU instance.
The AI built the online store for his tax and notary office and walked its IRS agent application through
A Spanish-language publisher and small-business owner reports weeks of running his businesses with AI, instructed in Spanish, often by voice dictation. For Yasmin Multiservice, his tax and notary office in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, they built the complete online store together: ten digital products (immigration guides and practice exams) with card and PayPal payments, then prepared an Etsy shop and WordPress maintenance packages. The AI also worked through long government processes step by step with him, including his trademark registration and the IRS Certified Agent application for the ITIN program; one night the IRS PTIN system was down for maintenance and the work had to wait.
The AI turned my whole Zotero library into an Obsidian vault in 34 hours
He gave the AI one big job: go through his entire Zotero library and build an Obsidian vault on disk that documents every article, sums each one up, pulls out the key ideas and links articles that share ideas. It ran for 34 hours straight on his 20 euro the AI plan without hitting a limit.
Audit my Instagram performance and draft replies to my DMs
Founder Divya Gugnani shows screen recordings of the AI connected to her Instagram: it audited her account (reporting 38% of Reels working and 22% of Carousels not) and drafted replies to 47 new DMs. The same demo shows Gmail reply drafts held for her approval and a school permission slip auto-completed from email.
Apply to 18 jobs for me — research, tailor, submit, track
Zeno shows screen recordings of his AI job-search system: a Notion page of weekly job packets (companies including Cedar, Affirm and Practice Better, with pay ranges and priorities), and an application-tracker spreadsheet the AI fills in every Monday. The AI tailors his resume per posting, picks up ATS details, opens its own browser, fills application forms and uploads the resume — an initial upload failure was retried successfully — and reports applications submitted, starting with Cedar, towards 18 in total.
Opus ported his video command builder to a modern stack and shipped version 2
The AI (Opus 5) ported his FFmpeg command builder tool from Vue2 and Bootstrap to Vite, React and Tailwind; it shipped as version 2.0.
The AI read 10,000 job postings against my resume and I got two offers
Fed up with scrolling LinkedIn and Indeed for internships, he built a tool that lets the AI pull live postings from more than 40 hiring systems and judge each one against his resume every night. Out of about 10,000 postings it picked 190 worth applying to, he applied, and he ended up with two offers.
Prepare the sale of my dad's business: sale-plan site and 136 scored buyers
For his father's laser printer repair company, László researched the business and built a website holding the full sale plan — what transfers, deal and price, process and first 30 days. It also produced a spreadsheet of 136 potential buyers, each with a fit score.
My talk script became a slide deck that was 95% done
He wrote his lightning talk script in Obsidian and marked where example code should come from in his project. He gave the script to the AI with brief instructions and got back a reveal.js deck that was 95% done.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI got a real shell and database running inside an emulator in under an hour
Gave the AI a Java RISC-V emulator and a partial libc bridge, and in under an hour it could run bash and sqlite from Debian.
60 minsaved
The AI runs his Etsy channel, Chrome extensions and Facebook pages on autopilot
He describes the AI running on autopilot for his business — managing his Etsy channel, building Chrome extensions and operating his Facebook pages daily, needing his approval only rarely.
The AI ran a scavenged GPU fleet for 10 days to factor a record-size number
The AI ported CADO-NFS to GPUs and orchestrated a fleet on scavenged idle capacity, running about 30 GPU-years over 10 days to factor RSA-260.
A job hunting agent found him 20 interviews in four weeks
His agent runs once a week: it finds companies on Google Maps, finds a real person's contact details on the web, and drafts a personal email for each one, which he approves before it sends. Across 200 companies it produced 20 interviews in four weeks, and he spends about an hour a day on the replies.
The AI watched my trainings and took my tests. I got 40 certificates.
He had the AI watch his online trainings and take the tests for him, and he collected 40 certificates in one day. He told it not to get perfect scores every time, and he says the system is broken if this works.
The AI found all my invoices and sent them to my accountant
He got the AI to hunt down all his various invoices and forward them to his accountant. It took a pile of dull admin off his plate.
Built a new call-to-action for the MBI website that likely accelerated subscriber
Solo entrepreneur behind MBI Deep Dives gave the AI (with website backend access) the job of creating a more explicit call-to-action for new visitors; after back-and-forth it shipped, and he suspects it accelerated subscriber growth — possibly low-five-figure incremental ARR over a year.
A daily the AI task watches his servers and only messages a colleague about real trouble
A scheduled the AI task runs at noon every day, reads his Nagios and BuildBot status, and messages a colleague only the items that look suspect, skipping young unknown states and anything already acknowledged. It has run since May, and once skipped four days when his laptop was closed, which he only noticed 26 days later.
A spam folder rescue check and automatic invoice payment cataloguing
Paired with Zapier, the AI checks his spam folder for mail that should not be there; most scans find nothing, but the few real messages it rescues make it worth running. It also uploads and catalogues invoice payments for the finance team, work he used to do by hand.
The AI found the school law. My daughter starts on Monday.
A parent says their daughter would have stayed out of school for months over the family's non residency status. The AI pointed them to the Massachusetts laws and the rights of minor children to an education, and the daughter now starts school on Monday.
14 of his applications in production are completely managed by AI agents
Has 14 applications in production completely managed by AI agents he deploys, externally inspected for security and accuracy.
The AI wrote my half yearly performance review from my emails and chats
For his half yearly performance review, he pointed the AI at his emails and Teams chats, loaded in his goals and objectives, and let it run. The review it produced made him look brilliant.
The AI caught the buy buttons on my site were hard to see
She told her AI to get better at design, then had it check her own site, aunysillyme.com. It found every buy button was too low in contrast to grab attention and that two different oranges had been used on the site for months, and it redesigned the site based on what it had learned.
The AI made its own email address and signed up for a site
In a Korean test of four AI assistants for office workers, the AI created its own email address and used it to sign up for another site. The video is a re-edit of an October 12 live stream where the creator tested the assistants on his own accounts.
The AI checked 40,000 plant ratings and flagged 3 data entry typos
Her team compiled 40,000 ratings of wilt symptoms on plants from 14 daily observations in a host range study. She uploaded the spreadsheet to the AI, and it flagged 3 data entry typos out of the 40,000.
An LLM built the spec-driven harness his whole workflow now runs on
An LLM created his spec-driven development harness, iterated until it worked as wanted; it is now used with the spec as the source for code changes.
The AI read a file system from the early 90s and got every file out intact
He spent $80 for the AI to read a proprietary file system from a piece of hardware from the early 90s. The AI extracted all the files intact.
$80one time
His study tool passed $100 a month, and the feature that did it was letting students bring their Anki decks
He made a tool for students that started as a simple quiz solver extension and grew slowly to just over $100 in monthly recurring revenue, with very little marketing. A month ago he reverse engineered Anki using AI, so anyone can bring their Anki deck and study it in his tool. He says that is the thing that worked.
$100a month
Close my store's books in four minutes a month with a self-auditing AI setup
A store owner's month-end runs itself: QuickBooks ingests bank transactions while the AI works the store's API transactions, reconciles the two, scrapes vendor invoices out of Google Drive to update COGS batches, and files a PDF audit trail with each month-end journal entry. Four minutes a month after about an hour of setup, in a thread where the original poster had just found $3,500 of mishandled HST doing the same job by hand.
$20a month
Asked to copy folders, the AI emptied the destination instead, 2 days of research gone
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.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI set up my Twitch profile for me
He had the AI set up his Twitch profile and says it does not look too bad. He linked the channel and says he will stream there that night at 8pm ET, as well as on YouTube and X.
The AI drafts my posts from my commits. I approve once a week.
He runs a small server with Postiz. The AI drafts posts from his commits and he approves them once a week.
The AI helped me ship a client's online store with live stock sync
A solo developer built a women's clothing store on WooCommerce with AI writing most of the code. The store matches the client's design exactly, syncs stock with her 1C system in real time, and cost nothing in platform licence fees.
The AI made me games on demand for a cross country flight
On a cross country flight he asked the AI to make games for him on the spot. One kept him playing for 5 hours, and all of them worked on his phone.
His plane radar app for Apple TV sat at number one on the paid chart for over a week
He built Utkik, an Apple TV app that turns the television into a live radar for planes, with AI. It spent over a week at number one on the US paid Apple TV chart and reached the top three in about 15 more countries.
It makes and sends my client invoices through PayPal and sends weekly totals
A small business owner linked PayPal to the AI. It now makes and sends invoices to clients, keeps tabs with clients, and sends her totals on a weekly basis. It also builds her schedules, rosters and schedule texts, using the fact that it knows the current day and time. She says the setup made her cancel her $20 AI subscription.
$20a month
Find my 277 unanswered brand emails, reply, and keep negotiating
The AI audited the creator's inbox, found 277 brand-collaboration emails that had never been answered, drafted and sent replies, and continued the negotiations.
The AI’s logo for my wife’s dental practice fell apart at print size. A designer fixed it in an hour.
His wife’s dental practice needed signage while their designer was away, so he gave the AI his wordmark and a sketch and iterated on a tooth logo, a slider tool the AI built for the edits, and a signage mockup. Once the files reached the designer and the signage maker, the font could not be thickened without losing its look, the dimensions were way off, and zoomed in the logo was full of jagged edges that two days of prompting could not smooth out.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
My agent listed hundreds of DVDs for my first live selling show and helped during it
He sells DVDs and Blu-rays and spent two weeks getting ready for his first live show on Whatnot, working alone. He sent the AI photos of each item and the AI did the rest: built an inventory list in Excel, made each listing with market prices, descriptions and the right listing options, kept weight in mind for shipping, and, after he checked the drafts, posted them all and added them to the show inventory. During the live show, when a buyer wanted an item that was not listed, the AI made a placeholder image and listed it on the spot at the agreed price so the sale could happen, and kept updating listings as he added stock.
His local AI sorts his note vault and works through his small jobs list
His local AI sorts and cleans his Obsidian vault, suggests links between notes, and works a todo list of small jobs for him. A related eBay sniping tool from the same setup runs in simulation only, which he is open about.
One founder signed up about 30 clients in a month and lets the AI do most of the work
Josh Pigford started FirstIndex, a service that gets companies found on Google and in an AI app answers, at $1,000 a month. Within a month it was at about $570,000 a year in recurring revenue with about 30 clients, and the AI does most of the delivery work.
$570,000
Run my whole company on scheduled agent shifts
A digital-health CEO reports his businesses have no full-time developers, DevOps, designers, analysts or product manager: scheduled AI agent shifts handle deploys, an agent-built CRM, per-business-line email sorting, meeting scheduling, technical support and publishing news four times a day. The work runs on three $200 AI subscriptions — $600 a month against roughly $38,500 a month at US median pay for the replaced roles.
I built a live decision tool for advertisers with AI, in one evening
Jon Loomer gave the AI his blog posts, video posts, podcast scripts and his Master Brief. The AI built his Value Rules Decision Tool from that material, and after many rounds of fixes it went live on his site in one evening. He wrote no code.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI wrote the programs that run his lab instruments over the network
A man wired his lab instruments to his home network, put all their manuals and programming guides into an AI project, and the AI wrote most of the first set of Python programs that control the instruments and pull data from them. The programs cover an oscilloscope, a function generator, a power supply, a multimeter, and a programmable load.
A weekend on the cheap tier built enough of a platform's features to make it useful to him
Used the AI on the 20 dollar tier in a weekend to build good enough coverage on Floci features to make it useful to him; others then continued the work.
$20
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.