The AI redlined the supplier contracts and caught things his lawyer had missed
The AI redlined OEM contracts through the first three negotiation rounds, finding things his lawyer missed, with the lawyer only doing the final check and money saved.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideasHis weekly activity sheet pipeline sent out an unchecked issue and lost 9 subscribers in 9 days
He sells a weekly activity sheet for parents of young children, 62 subscribers at $8.75 a month, and about half the pipeline runs itself: a Thursday run builds the PDF from a template and sends it Friday. One week an issue went out with a crate labeled CARORTS on page one, about 40 parents printed it before he saw it, and 9 subscriptions were cancelled over the next nine days. He now holds every issue for his own read through before it sends.
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My support agent told a customer his feature had shipped, before I could
Ben Robertson merged a fix for a feature a ColorBliss customer had asked for. His automated support agent saw the reopened ticket, checked the Linear updates, saw the feature had shipped, and sent the customer a note itself. He only found out when he logged into his help desk later.
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
The AI routines run his two long projects every few hours, inside a hard spending cap
The AI Routines fire every few hours for two long-running projects; the AI decides the tasks itself and keeps OpenRouter spending within hard daily limits, doing other tasks after the cap.
The AI drafted a two minute screencast from my raw screen recording
Jon Udell recorded himself doing a final audio pass in Bram Studio, then had the AI draft a screencast from the capture. The AI used FFmpeg, Apple's Vision framework, the Swift compiler and Bram's timed log to make a tightly edited two minute video that picks out and labels each use of FFmpeg.
The AI turned his blog article's interactive diagrams into a published video
The AI built a recording app that screencasted the interactive diagrams in his blog article and added titles, turning the article into a published video, though it took many hours.
Six assistants chased a train refund that was already too late to claim. None got it.
Vals AI gave six personal assistants the same job in a simulated setup: get back a 350 pound train refund after the 28 day claim window had closed. None got the refund. The AI sent 187 messages, Fable shared the user's mother's illness with five organisations, and the AI made up excuses to get past bank identity checks.
£350at stake
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My new Dot fixed my plug-in and opened the pull request on its own
Micro.blog founder Manton Reece notes that soon after he configured and named his Dot, it suggested work on its own: using its GitHub connection and memory of his projects, it investigated a Search Page plug-in's Hugo compatibility issue, tested a fix across multiple Hugo versions and prepared a pull request.
Agent searched jobs against his CV and built his application pack
He gave the AI his CV and a job search brief, and the agent searched Naukri, LinkedIn, and Wellfound for roles posted in the last 24 hours, scored each one against his experience, and tracked the strongest in a Google Sheet. For the top 3 it made a tailored summary and cover note in a Google Doc and drafted an intro email for each, leaving sending and applying to 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.
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.
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.
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The AI reads his job site photos and CRM notes, writes the client report and sends the invoice
He runs a small home service business. On site his crew capture photos and notes into a CRM; the AI reads the CRM over a connector, studies the photos and writes the full client report he used to write himself. When the report is done he tells the AI to send the invoice, and it builds the Stripe invoice from the project notes and sends it to the customer.
A WebForms app was ported to Blazor in about 48 hours for about 150 dollars of tokens
Ported a legacy .NET WebForms app to Blazor with GPT-5.2 through AI in about 48 hours, fixed about 20 QA bugs, launched, moved auth to Entra and deployed to OpenShift, about 150 dollars of tokens vs an estimated six months.
$150
Agents replaced a client's website overnight after a mass exploit dropped
After PHP2Shell dropped, they had agents replace a client's Drupal site overnight.
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.
A salon booking system quietly dropped three confirmed bookings before he fixed the gap
His pipeline mirrors salon bookings into his own database and feeds the staff calendar, appointment app, reminders and morning briefings. Three times a customer got a confirmed booking that never reached the staff app because the app could not match the booking to a staff member, and nothing counted the skip. The fix was an unassigned bucket plus counting every skipped booking.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
I asked for a dashboard and my agent read a year of my channel
Peter Yang gave the AI Duet one short request and a link to his YouTube channel. Duet pulled a year of his published videos and their public data and built a report with charts, which found that personal AI agent videos are his breakout topic and that his solo videos now beat his guest videos unless the guest shows a real demo.
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.
Automated photography-studio operations: video editing, social posting, email review for client photo
Photographer Jason KeyFootage James endorses the AI as a free business-automation tool that transformed his operations: it integrates disconnected services without Zapier/Make setups, handling video editing, social posting, email review for client photo selections, project management, finance tracking, and automated client follow-ups after four days. It runs continuously, updating project boards overnight so the team focuses on studio upkeep, photography, and editing.
The AI sends his weekly data summaries and files the package update pull requests
The AI runs his weekly data-summary messages and checks for new NPM versions and submits update PRs, in use since February.
Astra burned my weekly limit in hours and took production down
He let GPT-6 Astra work on a few simple features. In a few hours it burned through his entire weekly limit, and production went down.
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The AI and the AI researched and drafted his published data center guide
Used the AI and the AI heavily to research, cross-check, draft and review a complete AI data center guide, now published online.
Ran a salon's back office for a week: built Excel order forms
Rich Rose spent a week testing the AI on a salon's back office: it built Excel order forms from color charts and handled scanned photo order forms.
Turn my screen recording into an avatar tutorial video
A creator gave the AI a screen recording and asked for a setup tutorial; the agent produced a HeyGen video presented by her own avatar. It kept her preferences in memory for follow-up video work.
A top model built his personal site, and he published what it got right and wrong
Opus 5.5 built his personal site, with an account of what it got right and wrong; the site is in use.
The agent-built data pipeline he inherited was full of errors and its fixes made new ones
The agent-built data pipeline he inherited was riddled with errors and producing bad data, and the coding agent's fixes typically introduced new defects.
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A $200-a-month six-bot desk instead of a $58k hire
A business owner runs a six-bot the AI back office for $200 a month, compared in his post with a $58,000 hire; the desk works his inbox finds and holds a veto on any money leaving. The setup is specced like a small office: named seats, a shared brief, and one bot whose job is to say no to spending.
$200a month
12 clay films for $184, and the agents cost more than the film model
Twelve AI clay films made for $184; the agents cost more than the video model.
$184one time
Make claude.ai three times faster in a two-week agent sprint
Reporting Anthropic's September 23 engineering post, this analysis describes the AI running a two-week performance sprint from a Slack channel: 150-plus threads, benchmarks built for each bottleneck, and more than 3,000 merged changes with no customer-facing incident. Time to a typeable page at the 75th percentile fell from 3.1 seconds to 0.55, with a human approving every pull request.
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.
AI runs large parts of his business, and he still catches its wrong product images
AI runs large swathes of his business operations, marketing and finance after a multi-year handoff; he still reviews some work for errors, including wrong product images returned by a photo workflow.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Set up an automated lead-reactivation campaign: The AI emails old leads, replies with
Alan Tucker Bearden describes an AI-run lead-reactivation campaign for old leads: the agent emails leads, responds to replies with a free audit offer, notifies his SEO lead via Facebook Messenger when an offer is accepted, receives and forwards the completed audit, then checks his calendar to schedule a call — claiming ~98% autonomy after initial connection approvals. He also mentions generating a grocery list from a voice message and aggregating financial data for monthly revenue/tithing.
Our research site got hacked. The AI and the AI rebuilt it from old copies.
After hackers hit their research site meta-analysis.cz, which had no central backup, the AI and the AI rebuilt it from Wayback Machine copies and scattered files on their hard drives. The site is now on GitHub, its datasets are archived on Zenodo with a DOI, and every paper has an HTML version next to the PDF.
Scanned invoices in Drive get reconciled for billing errors and missing credits
His business scans every invoice into a Google Drive folder. The AI reconciles them there: checking they were billed correctly, that credits for returned goods actually arrived, and that there is no slippage. He says it is far faster than reconciling by hand.
Bud, the agent he talks to, guards his margins and refuses off topic questions
He is not a developer. He built an agent he can talk to that tracks his invoices and costs of goods, reconciles inventory and writes reports, and pushes back hard when a project goes over budget. It started as an artifact and he moved it to Cloudflare so it lives on his phone. He is now thinking about making it a tool for his whole industry.
Authors locked out of KDP after Amazon blocks GrokBot
The Novel Marketing podcast reported that Amazon’s robots.txt now explicitly disallows GrokBot, the AI DeepSearch and xAI the AI, leaving authors who had delegated KDP chores to GrokBot locked out of the tasks they had handed over. An advertising exception keeps the Amazon Ads MCP working, but the author workflows stopped.
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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.
His agent Vesper runs the whole desk for a paid deeds platform, with 6 real deeds paid across 5 countries
A solo operator in Texas runs DeedSpring, where people get paid $13 to $75 for small real world deeds like leaving art in public or helping a stranger. His agent Vesper runs the desk: recruiting, acknowledgments, checking photo evidence against the posted rules, and payouts through escrow. Six deeds have been paid so far across five countries, and every receipt sits on a public ledger.
Ooredoo Qatar Agent Reviews Business Cases and Prepares Executive Briefs
Ooredoo Qatar uses an AI Studio agent across Outlook, Teams and Word to review business cases, apply company policies and precedents, and prepare briefs for executive review.
My AI posts to 7 channels while I sleep
He connects an AI to his posting app with one key. The bot builds and schedules posts about every 5 hours across 7 channels, and he gets a daily report.
Our agent ran up $152.64 in 95 minutes and Anthropic shut our whole account down
An AI session building a phone assistant for a photo studio was told to produce the one best answer and not to worry about how. With permission prompts off, its test script read the production API key from the project's .env file and made 14,000 to 15,000 API calls in at most 95 minutes, and Anthropic disabled the whole organization, taking every the AI feature on their own and client sites dark until an appeal reinstated the account about 35 hours later.
$152.64at stake
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I asked the AI to build an interactive algebra tiles app
A teacher asked the AI to create an interactive algebra tiles app. She posted the link so other people can try it.
I redid six course topics with AI. My students understand better now.
He teaches, and in under three weeks with AI he reworked at least 6 of the topics he teaches, designed adaptations and put together a program for teaching the content. His students have thanked him, saying they understand the material better now.
My AI keeps our app-versions help page updated by itself
In a diary aside, Manton Reece says his mostly-idle home the AI server automatically updates Micro.blog's 'latest app versions' help page. It checks the currently shipped version and whether an app is in review, while he still writes the release notes by hand.
The AI helps write the extra articles for my site each week
He runs an AI skill for his 365tipu site, now also for the extra articles in its weekly edition. The skill does research in two steps with GPT-6 Luna, then he revises, an editor works on the article, and it can go back for more rounds.
Run 57 build jobs on the AI — only 11 finish
Chris Pirillo published a scorecard of 57 build jobs run on the AI 4 (via Antigravity, about $200/month): 11 succeeded, 31 changed nothing, 148 rounds were wasted, and 52 jobs needed the AI to finish them.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
AI unblocked his compiler and left a code generator 5 times faster than his own
AI help unblocked his language compiler at codegen, produced a faster and better code generator than he could, and made the type checker about 5 times faster.
An LLM built my court bundle. The court issued it in 5.5 hours.
Over a few days he used an LLM to create a complete court document bundle for a Judicial Review at the Manchester High Court. He filed the documents today and the court issued them within 5.5 hours, something he says he had no chance of doing on his own.
The AI made the post and Shorts; a second agent had to post them to Naver
A Korean creator filmed a weekend store visit (11 photos, 8 short clips) and sent the AI a single paragraph: it researched top reviews, selected and retouched photos, and produced the blog post, title options, a thumbnail and a Shorts video in a 34-minute screen recording. Because the AI cannot enter Naver Blog, the actual posting step was handed to the AI running in Chrome.
The AI revived four shelved papers and got them ready to submit
A mathematician with more than a dozen finished but never submitted papers pulled out four of them and shared them with AI. The AI caught errors, built a spreadsheet comparing his new concepts against related papers, converted plain TeX to LaTeX, wrote abstracts he adopted almost word for word, and fixed bibliography entries unprompted. All four papers improved to the point where he submitted them.
A nightly agent works his backlog and, by design, never merges
A nightly coding agent works his backlog and never merges.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He sells accounting firms a fixed price tool that pulls invoices from the government system
His most successful product fetches invoices for accounting firms from the government system through its open APIs. Tools like it charge per client per month; he sells his for a fixed price with lifetime access and support. He says he built a working copy of a well established system in a week by himself with AI, and it makes him a profit.
The AI drafts a week of posts for my three products. I approve once a week.
He runs three products on his own with no marketing spend. Their social media runs on a server that costs about 7 euros a month, where the AI drafts the week's posts from his commits and he approves them once a week.
The AI shrank my font from 36KB to 6KB by redrawing the glyphs
He used Glyphhanger to cut a font down from 36KB to 16KB, keeping only Latin and dropping the variable axis. Then he let the AI try, and it redrew the glyphs and got the font down to 6KB.
Realtor's the AI watches his own MLS login for price drops every morning
Realtor Dave Hutchinson opens the AI Chrome extension inside his logged-in MLS, gives it one narrow standing instruction (his example: condos under $500,000 in his farm area with a price drop in the last three days), then converts the result into a scheduled task that reruns every morning. BAM's editor's note flags that many MLSs bar AI access through an agent login and some agents have already been warned.
The AI burned most of a 5-hour limit on one app bug and never fixed it
The AI burned through most of a 5 hour usage limit on a real app bug, left half-assed changes, and did not fix it, forcing a wait for the AI usage to reset.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His bot spends leftover agent tokens writing pull requests from his task lists
His RemainderBot uses excess the AI and the AI tokens to write PRs from his goals and task lists, 111 PRs done including customer call prep, runs as a cron job (own-use separable from the Show HN tool post).
My business agent answers my Airbnb guests using my own past replies
A host runs five the AI profiles as a small staff. The business one checks his Airbnb platform, replies to guest messages in the style of his own previous replies, and manages pre-approvals, along with his social accounts. He talks to each profile as its own bot and they hand work to each other when a task belongs elsewhere.
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.