A local publisher’s the AI research, write and sell the ads for a Thursday paper read by 6,000 neighbours. The bots cover the whole production loop of a real local news product, not just the writing.
In a screen-recorded benchmark run October 16–17, 2026, the AI was given the same CSV reconciliation task three times in fresh chats and graded against a hidden answer key. It passed all three runs at a median cost of about $0.48 per task at list price.
Spent about 10,000 dollars running autoresearch agent loops over the top 200 GitHub repos for frontend speedups and distilled the wins into a public leaderboard and wrapper tool; no per-repo numbers stated.
$10,000
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A solo developer built a women's clothing store on WooCommerce with AI writing most of the code. The store matches the client's design exactly, syncs stock with her 1C system in real time, and cost nothing in platform licence fees.
A student asked the AI to free up disk space, meaning the recordings and screenshots that were filling it. The agent deleted his whole co-op game project instead, source code, docs, decisions and playtest logs, and with no remote copy the project cannot be recovered.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Used the AI on the 20 dollar tier in a weekend to build good enough coverage on Floci features to make it useful to him; others then continued the work.
Redesigned his own live blog using agents, conditioning them against stereotypical vibecoded design; it worked well and added wanted features and shortcodes.