Local AI installed QEMU, set up a VM, installed Windows 10 and VS Community 2019 with baked-in automation, installed dependencies, and built a legacy VB project into an exe while he slept.
A man bought a used piece of industrial machinery and the $1,500 control software did not come with it. With no coding experience at all, he asked the AI on the web to build a control app, and in under an hour he had a working app packaged as a .deb file for Linux. It cost him nothing because he used his brother's AI subscription.
He runs AI with DeepSeek on his own project. It started by opening issues when it found problems; he has since given it the access to submit pull requests with the fixes, and it now does both.
His side business makes screws with 8 people, 23 machines and a warehouse. Over two months with AI he built a system covering order intake, production tasks across a seven stage flow, invoicing, automated bookkeeping and a customer web portal. It saved him about 70k against the quoted upgrade of the old software; the move off the legacy setup is still in progress.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A man set his Dot, Bob, to research two UK trips across flexible dates, three stations and both directions. Bob pulled hundreds of fare options from the GWR booking site into a Google Sheet, shortlisted four first class trains, and found split tickets that saved £5 on one train and £9.40 on another.
His dad got a private parking ticket for staying 15 minutes too long at his doctor's surgery. The AI drafted the POPLA appeal, it cited the Equalities Act, and his dad saved £100.
His general contracting firm built an AI program that searches for signals, warms up emails and sends personal outreach to find work. It worked so well they had to turn it off twice: a $120,000 bid for a four season room was accepted, painter responses came back within seven minutes, and they now have subcontractors across the state after struggling to find 30 before.
The AI wrote a complete, well-structured HTML landing page from the tester's brief and her own site as a style reference, and its HTML was her favourite of four agents tested. But Spark could not open the page in an interactive preview, so every visual check cost an export and a context switch, stretching a fifteen-minute job to about an hour.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.