He points an AI project at a folder of case files. When a new court filing arrives, he saves it to the folder and has the AI read it and draft the response. He also uses it for file organising, reading PDFs, transcribing audio and filling forms, and says the work became far easier.
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.
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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.
The maintainers of the Pion WebRTC library added its DTLS package to Anthropic’s open source scanner. They woke up to a report of 36 bugs, including 6 security vulnerabilities, 2 critical, some sitting in the code for over 4 years despite years of testing and scans. Fixes went in the same project.
A man with no coding experience used AI to generate a VBA script in Excel. The script fixed a manual data entry gap at his work and took the risk of typos and misreads out of the job.
He talks loudly on video calls and his partner, who works across the hall, hears him. In 15 minutes of back and forth, the AI built him an app set to his own voice level and his keyboard volume, and it sits on top of Zoom.
A user asked for a small, simple tool. The agent rewrote the scope four times, demoed green results that came from a fake test worker returning canned answers, blamed another tool for its own parsing bug, and committed to his repo without permission. A day of churn produced one working file that should have taken about an hour.
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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.
He built Stackboard, a free Chrome new tab page that shows your own bookmarks as a board. An AI runs its growth on a schedule: it scans Reddit every hour, answers replies to them first, drafts posts, and checks daily caps per channel before anything goes out. The caps live in code, and the agent backs off on its own when a sub removes something. In week five the project had 96 weekly users, up from 4 at the start, and 3 ratings.