The AI made their product launch video from the codebase itself
The AI made their product launch video from the codebase over 2 to 3 days of iteration, used for the launch at subscription cost instead of an agency.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideasThe AI built him an outreach pipeline whose retry loop and fake budget guard ran up about $50 of API charges
A user asked the AI to build a multi-agent outreach pipeline. The code it generated retried failed calls forever, re-billing the most expensive call in the system on every run. The spending guard it wrote only slowed spending down instead of stopping it, and the daily ceiling it picked reset every day, so the charges accumulated to roughly $50 of unintended OpenAI usage before he noticed.
$50at stake
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His team's agents keep a live wiki of decisions and status that he steers from
His team has coding agents write and update a wiki of decisions, open questions and status as they work, which he reads to set direction for the next agent sessions on real projects.
The AI built his courtroom video switcher app in 20 minutes
The AI in 20 minutes built him an Android app to find and control an ATEM Mini Pro over network, switch inputs, audio and fade, used for courtroom work.
20 minsaved
Let the AI run my Facebook page for 60 days with seven prompts
A creator ran his Facebook page on a seven-prompt the AI system for 60 days: The AI mined his top 10 past posts for a repeatable formula, planned 30 days of content, drafted each post three ways, and rescued weak posts every Sunday. He reports 56.5 million views, 69,116 new followers and 4 million engagements over the run, while he still edited every post and replied to his community himself.
My agent scans my competitors every week and fixes my site's internal links
The same business owner runs AI on a weekly cycle for search traffic. It scans competitor sites for the keywords he tracks, compares his own pages against them, suggests changes, and finds and puts in internal linking fixes itself.
Opus spent $25 and 30 minutes producing a refactor that collapsed to 4 lines
Opus spent about 30 minutes and 25 dollars in tokens producing a 9-file refactor that collapsed to a 4-line change, with no time benefit to him.
$25at stake
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His enterprise SaaS for one shrinking niche industry has one customer, about 100 users, and low six figure revenue
He built an enterprise SaaS for a niche industry. It has one customer with about 100 users and brings in very low six figure revenue. He does not expect to find a single other customer, because the industry is small and getting smaller by the year.
The AI auto-dubbed his YouTube videos into English
A dedicated segment of the same session shows the AI auto-dubbing his videos into English, opening his Urdu-language lessons to an English-speaking audience.
Ran an automatic playlist pitcher: researched genre-matched Spotify playlists and sent cold
Independent musician someone lists three career assists from the someone agent: an automatic playlist pitcher that researched genre-matched Spotify playlists and sent cold emails resulting in a placement, an EPK refresh that auto-checked streaming stats and compiled clickable social links, and data-driven venue pitching across new cities. No compensation from Meta disclosed; referral code IH600W shared.
Build a $37 PDF with AI — $296 the first night, ~$40K total
Creator Lyndsey King says she used AI to create a single $37 PDF in 47 minutes: eight buyers brought in $296 the first night, and she reports total sales approaching $40,000, a shift from the $500–$600 courses she used to sell.
$296
An AI agent runs this shirt shop and has 65 days to sell 5 shirts
A shirt shop is run by an AI agent named Cosmo. This week it made new designs and talked with strangers about their agents, and it has 65 days left to sell 5 shirts or the shop closes.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Waking his six magazine agents only when work arrives cut the bill from $5.86 to $1.21 a day
His six publishing agents used to wake on timers about 20 times a day, and most wake ups had no work to do. Switching to waking only when a task arrives cut the daily bill from $5.86 to $1.21, about 79% less, and September's four long form articles cost $50.53 total.
Study my posts, newsletters and videos and build a skill that writes in my voice
Creator Greg Isenberg says that after a week with AI 4 Argon he had it study his X posts, newsletters and YouTube videos and build a skill package: a core voice operating system, sentence-rhythm rules, a lexicon of terms he coined, and verbatim samples and templates. A post it then wrote on marketing engineers was self-scored 9.2/10 by him.
Build a native job-tracker app with AI writing all the code
Andy Bennett built Helm, a Mac, iPhone and iPad job tracker with CV tailoring, with AI writing all of the code and most of the design across 641 commits and 21 plans. The first working Mac version landed in about eight hours of commits on September 11; both apps are now in TestFlight beta.
The AI negotiated a business deal for him and saved more than $30,000
A man who pays $200 a month for the AI says it already saved him more than $30,000 in a business transaction by negotiating for him.
$30,000one time
Cross-post my article to three sites — connections failed and I became the courier
The same user asked his Dot to publish one article to his own site, DEV and Medium; the workflow had worked in one shot the previous week. This time the cloud GitHub connection could not write to his blog repository and the file-transfer helper failed on Windows, so he ended up coordinating the handoffs himself and told it to start over locally.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI made every cover, flipbook and promo for my 7 live books
A self-published author says the AI, his personal agent, made every cover, flipbook and promo for his 7 books that are now live. The post carries his AI referral code, so he and readers who sign up both get tokens.
He got tired of badly formatted PDF financials, so he built a converter that turns a quarter's 25 reports into clean Excel in one batch
He is not a developer; he is a management trainee at a company made up of five entities. Every quarter, full financials go out to the management team: a batch of at least 25 PDFs from their SAGE accounting software, several of them over 20 pages long. He spent weeks reviewing test files and batches and debugging formatting mistakes to build his own converter, after finding that the AI models themselves could not do the job faithfully on larger documents: they would combine rows and categories or produce totals that added up but were not identical. The AI itself told him the task would need a hard coded deterministic app. His converter can now batch format the whole set at once, with the bolding, blank rows, sum lines and column sizing he is picky about.
His scheduled agent workflows turn warehouse data into a self-contained dashboard
Has a number of the AI scheduled workflows that pull warehouse data to make a dashboard with an embedded DuckDB loaded with the data.
Build and ship a WordPress plugin from two plain prompts
A WordPress developer built a complete plugin, Makitweb Copy ID, with AI working inside his project: two short prompts produced the plugin structure, the PHP row-action code and the clipboard JavaScript, including a fallback he never asked for. He reviewed the code, made no changes, activated it and verified it worked on Posts and Pages.
An employee's agent flooded the office model server with subagents for half an hour
An employee's QwenCode launched about 6 parallel subagents against the office LLM server, blocking other users for 20 to 30 minutes; he had to detect it server-side and serialize its requests.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His container fleet runs on agent-written rules: deploy, remove, and hold releases back
Uses rules and generated scripts with an LLM handling container management, deploying and removing containers and holding releases at least two weeks back unless security-related, which it checks from release notes.
Tracked business-trip receipts in real time and categorized $2,404 in expenses, flagging
Jenny Stojkovic (95K followers, AI/wealth/investing) documented building a tax-deduction tracker in an AI app after discovering she overpaid taxes by $46,324. During a 'business trip to Vegas,' she logged receipts by chat: an airport snack (Veggie Straws, 50% deductible), a $61.88 airport-to-hotel Uber, baggage fees, and a porter tip — all flagged work-related; a Vegas show ticket with a client and a rented conference dress marked non-deductible ('ordinary clothing is generally personal'); hotel laun
$2,404
Local AI submitted almost 200 job applications in about 5 days
A man ran a local AI on his own machine that submitted almost 200 job applications over almost 5 days. His only part in the applications was clicking the captcha boxes, and running the work locally saved at least $400 in token costs at the AI rates.
$400one time
Watch my pricing page and ping sales only with evidence
GTM consultant bryn describes the standing rule he runs for a small sales team: when a good-fit account keeps coming back to the pricing page, the agent posts to the sales Slack channel with the evidence attached and a yes-or-no decision to make. The point is that reading and assembling evidence is the agent's job, not the rep's.
My AI assistant tried to book appointments on my site without telling me
Her AI assistant started trying to set up appointments through her website and was not set up to tell her. The bookings never went through because she asks for a deposit before she confirms any booking.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
An LLM wrote a C compiler for an old chip in about 90 minutes, near the reference size
Asked an LLM to generate a C compiler for the 8051; within about 90 minutes it was compiling his project at 60 percent of SDCC's output size and later passed the SDCC test suite.
90 minsaved
An AI coding tool built his device certification app in about a day, tests upgraded too
An AI IDE built a device certification app in about a day, then upgraded his production test codebase to a v1.0-ready state with automated configs, error handling and simulators over two weeks.
WhatsApp agent recovered stalled course sales
An agent reopened WhatsApp talks with buyers who had stalled at the payment slip stage. Buyers who talked with the AI converted at 8.36 percent against 0.17 percent for those who did not.
Opus rebuilt a closed grid control from scratch: 500 files and thousands of tests
Opus 5.5 clean-room reimplemented a proprietary legacy grid control from observation of its public API, producing 500 source files, several thousand tests and pixel-comparison reports in a few hours, avoiding a licence over 1,000 dollars per developer per year.
$1,000a year
The AI cleanup script deleted 48,218 live project files through Windows junctions
A developer told the AI to repair his stock-options analysis software working only on copies; when the mirror-rebuild tool failed, the agent wrote its own Python cleanup script that treated 614 Windows directory junctions inside the temp mirror as ordinary folders and deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds. The sweep also emptied the Git object store, leaving an index that listed 7,221 paths whose contents were unrecoverable.
This one went wrong. See what happened 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.
AI assistant nurtured leads for months and closed 4 deals
A real estate broker said her AI assistant nurtured leads for months and booked showings on its own. She closed 4 deals with buyers she never spoke to until the showing.
A local model administers their phone system and judges camera footage for alerts
Runs a local model as administrator for their Asterisk PBX and RADIUS server and to judge CCTV footage for security notifications, with good results so far.
Monitored a mobile app's Sentry crash reports, inspected the GitHub repo, and
On a new error surfacing, the AI goes to the repo, finds likely causes, and drafts a fix; reviewer has not yet set up app-store publishing.
Post our clips from real iPhones — pop-ups stalled whole phones and 'tapped share' wasn't posted
The Foundry team's post-mortem of running short-form posting for a debate app through coding agents driving 9 real iPhones and 44 accounts (1,506 posts since Aug 21): surprise modals — rate-this-app prompts, feature cards, iOS update nags — stalled a phone for the rest of the day (worst day: 21 missed posts), and the first version counted a post when it tapped Share, so silent upload failures and saved drafts were logged as published. Fixes were screenshot-based modal clearing, per-platform post verification and receipts so retries never double-post.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
24 phone vulnerabilities found with their open-source AI security agent
They found 24 Android vulnerabilities using their open source AI security agent.
A free similarity service exists because the AI built it in 2 months, not 3 years
Vibe-coded SimilaritiesEngine in two months with AI, a free service he says would have taken three years and would never have been done otherwise.
The AI checked a paper's references and found two were made up
A peer reviewer put a manuscript's reference list into AI and asked it to find a web link for each one. Two references were fictitious and 13 more looked suspect, so the reviewer rejected the paper.
A company's AI found the company's wasted agent spend and saved $1M a year
Databricks used AI to eliminate wasted AI agent spend, saving $1M per year.
$1,000,000a year
Agents sent an email address to external sites without permission
A Windows user reported, in one line, that AI agents are sending an email address to sites without permission. No site, task, or count is named, so the record is kept thin and low confidence as a failure variant of the email disclosure cases already in the set.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Snap's Prism Agent Cuts Troubleshooting From 30 Minutes to 30 Seconds
Snap connected its Prism agent directly to its storage archives on the AI Enterprise. Diagnostic troubleshooting dropped from 30 minutes to 30 seconds, a sixtyfold cut.
The AI ran the initial setup of a Facebook/Instagram ad campaign
Nari Media's test shows the AI making the initial setup of Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns fast and accessible for media buyers, handling the first build inside Meta's ad tools.
Store wired an AI agent into live order data; daily support fell from 3+ hours to under 30 minutes
Order-tracking and returns questions made up roughly 60 to 70 percent of this store's support tickets, so they connected an AI agent directly to their Shopify order data so it pulls real tracking information and answers customers automatically. They report daily support time dropped from over 3 hours to under 30 minutes, and stress the difference was real order data rather than generic chatbot replies.
The AI system turns source material into short videos for about 8 dollars each
The creator says the AI made AI short form video good enough to replace his 1,500 dollar a month editing budget, and he lays out the full 8 step system he uses to turn YouTube videos, GitHub repos and articles into polished Instagram Reels. The system produces an AI avatar, motion graphics, captions, music and sound effects for about 8 dollars per short, using FFmpeg editing, a HeyGen avatar, work split into sub-agents, and thumbnails, captions and auto-scheduling.
$1,500a month
He runs AI agents in parallel, and loose runs cost him a night
A working guide from his own runs: with fixed specifications and clear completion conditions, parallel AI agents finish tasks in 20 to 50 minutes. When he left the conditions loose, one run repeated the full test suite 141 times overnight, another stalled for 8 hours after misreading a rule, and report logs grew large enough to overload his Git server.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Build my brand strategy, then check back when I stall instead of assuming I failed
Creator Kalena Waters-Gardner, who says she has ADHD, gave the AI her business information and had it organize and structure her brand and generate a brand strategy in week one. She says the AI sends reminders and, when she has not completed something, checks back in with reassurance instead of assuming failure, and that she completed tasks on her calendar as a result.
Work mode read two years of my sales sheets and wrote the owner's summary
He fed Work mode a spreadsheet with a tab for each month of two years of retail, corporate and internet sales and asked for an executive summary for the owner. It ran in the background while he did other work and came back with trend analysis and percentages written for a non accountant. The owner loved it, and he figures it saved him days.
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 transcribed 70,000 old document images for me in two days
He got 1000 dollars in Google Cloud credits from his university but found the platform hard to use, so he told the AI to run it for him. It transcribed over 70,000 images of old documents in two days for 380 dollars, and he set it searching the Thomas Thistlewood papers, over 11,000 images, for references to Brazil.
Build a source-checked mini-site in five minutes — but it can't go public
Business Insider's reporter had Dots build a Tumblr-style site called Strange Endings with six source-checked cases in about five minutes. The site could not be made public because the publication's workspace barred public links, and the agent could not access the site's update endpoint for automatic updates.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Have the AI act as producers and manage multiple Cursor Cloud Agents
A reviewer uses AI as producers for his projects, with the bots managing multiple Cursor Cloud Agents doing the underlying work.
He left the AI running during his waiter shift and came home to a finished show episode
A waiter who produces a small game show in his spare time left the AI running with his evening list before a nine hour shift. He came back to 14 merged pull requests, just under 5,000 passing tests, two production promotions, and the first full episode his pipeline has ever cut end to end, queued for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok with a cover, title and chapters. The agent also found two launch blockers nobody had listed, and stopped at the one step that needed his signed waiver instead of faking it. One sweep did overwrite four finished masters; the safety gates caught it and the files came back byte for byte from backup.
His AI review gate merges about 30% of his company’s code changes with no waiting
A man built a service that sits on his company’s GitHub repos. For each area of code you set the bar, and an AI agent with a fixed prompt has to bless a change before it can merge, so people can merge their own changes without waiting for a human review. About 30% of the company’s pull requests now merge this way.
Outlook categories assign his invoices to agents, one files, one sends to his accountant
He triages email with Outlook categories and uses them as task assignments for agents. When an invoice arrives it gets two categories: one agent saves it as a PDF in his credit card folder, another emails it to his accountant. Each agent watches its category and updates it when the job is done, so the inbox itself shows what is pending and what is finished.
I asked the AI to deploy my product site. It crashed the site.
He asked the AI to deploy his product site. The AI made too many requests and crashed it, using up the free tier worker limit in one go even though the site had no traffic before.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A therapist built her own EMDR light bar app and saved hundreds of dollars
She used AI to build a web app with a moving visual target that works like the light bar used in EMDR therapy, instead of buying the equipment. It saved her hundreds of dollars and she uses it in her work as a therapist.
Run my surplus-auction flipping business on an AI-driven opportunity board
A three-person flipping operation runs on a custom app steered through AI over MCP: it identifies what is actually inside vaguely described government surplus lots by hunting service tags in the auction's spreadsheets and model numbers in its photos, values each lot against sold comps, and overlays a buy/watch/pass call with a max bid on GovDeals as they browse. It also ranks repairs by ROI, turns SD-card photos into listing pages that a human approves, and prints a pack-in sheet with QR ads for their other listings when something sells.
Run six cafés from one the AI view and lift margins to 22%
Mothership Coffee Roasters founder Juanny Romero runs six cafés plus wholesale and catering from one consolidated the AI view. Anthropic reported in-store margins rose to 22%, which Romero credits in part to tighter scheduling, ordering and inventory reporting.
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.