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
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,695 ideasScript, voice and animate my videos with AI (replacing a $480/mo editor)
Duggan says he replaced a $480/mo Upwork video editor with an AI pipeline: The AI scripts the video, ElevenLabs provides the voice, and Remotion/HyperFrames handles the animation. He says the reel itself was produced this way.
$480a month
The AI built and runs my landing page review business. No paying customers yet.
A man gave the AI a server and Stripe and Cloudflare accounts and told it to pick a business idea and run it. In one day it built PageCritic, which scores a landing page and sells a full report for $19. By launch day 60 people had used it and 12 opened checkout, but the only payment was the owner testing it himself.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Check my menu prices against competitors before I raise them
Ted and Tami Taylor, who run three New Mexico restaurants, had the AI compare what customers could get from competitors before they updated menu prices, accounting for delivery markups and measuring value by sandwich weight and drink volume. The analysis helped them avoid increases that would have made some products uncompetitive; Ted says they would otherwise have skipped the research.
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 audited my login setup and found a key bug no linter could
He gave the AI access to his Auth0 tenant to check his JWT validation. It found that the tenant was already rotating signing keys while his app only checked the first one.
Track my whole job hunt and score every posting against my résumé
A recent graduate on a visa timeline (Business Insider essay, via B17 News) built an AI project that tracked her applications, extracted the skills and keywords from each job description, and scored her résumé for gaps before she applied. The dashboard she had the AI build shows the funnel that ended in a job: 186 applications, 44 cold outreaches, 19 interviews, six take-home assignments, three final rounds and one offer.
An overnight update turned his 1,000-line script into 180 scripts and 100,000 lines
Asked GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra overnight to update a 1,000 LOC Python script, woke to 180 Python scripts and about 100,000 lines of unmanageable code.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI turned one planned change into 4 merge-ready pull requests in 15 minutes
Handed the AI a planned multi-module change and came back to 4 PRs ready to merge in 15 minutes; the work would have taken most of a day.
An AI coworker handles his mom's wedding venue inquiries and cut the reply time to five minutes
His mom runs a wedding venue in southern Italy and got 15 to 20 inquiry emails a day, each taking 20 to 30 minutes, which was 70 to 80% of her week. The AI coworker he built now works the inquiries inside her 10 year old booking system, which has no API, and she approves only special quotes. After three weeks the typical inquiry is processed within 5 minutes and the system saves her over 120 hours a month for about $350 a month.
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.