An agent ported his renderer to the new graphics API in 24 hours, live
Agent ported his hand-written WebGL renderer to WebGPU, deployed and live in 24 hours versus a 6 to 10 week human estimate.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideasOpus rebuilt a closed grid control from scratch: 500 files and thousands of tests
Opus 5.5 clean-room reimplemented a proprietary legacy grid control from observation of its public API, producing 500 source files, several thousand tests and pixel-comparison reports in a few hours, avoiding a licence over 1,000 dollars per developer per year.
$1,000a year
I let Astra run a software factory for 35 hours. It built nothing of value.
Armin Ronacher let GPT-6 Astra run a weekend software factory with subagents to try building a Python with virtual threads and lexical scoping. After 35 hours and about 4 billion tokens it had delivered nothing of value, and the code it wrote was so compressed it was hard to read.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Our developer vanished, so I rebuilt my wife's seminar signup platform with AI
The developer building the signup platform for his wife's education seminars stopped answering emails, and they had no access to the code. With no money to hire another developer, he rebuilt the platform from scratch with AI as his coding partner, and it is running now.
Bloomberg Media Data Agents Raise Catalog Query Accuracy by 63%
Bloomberg Media deployed data agents in its catalog on the AI Enterprise. Query accuracy improved by 63 percent.
Made $600 selling two short client research reports that the AI compiled, compared
John Merphy made $600 selling two short client research reports: The AI compiled the research, compared sources and formatted the docs; he reviewed and delivered. Part of $1,150 total that month.
$600
Circa's Waste-Less Vision Reads Job-Site Video and Drafts Disposal Estimates
Boston demolition startup Circa built Waste-Less Vision with AI: customers submit photos or video of a space, the system identifies materials and prepares a preliminary estimate of disposal costs and labor hours for human review. A 15-minute basement video that once had to be watched fully now becomes a line item automatically.
I tested an AI shopping assistant for a month. It lost about $120.
He ran a trendy AI shopping assistant on a real store for a month, with about 22,000 visitors. Revenue per visitor was $1.118 with it on and $1.112 with it off, for a net effect of about minus $120.
$120a month
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
WhatsApp agent qualified leads, sales reached 461 thousand reais
A tent factory and rental company lost the first 30 minutes of each sales call just checking if a lead was a real fit. Its WhatsApp agent asked the technical questions, dropped poor leads, and handed ready leads to sellers, and buyers who spoke with the agent converted at 3.54 percent against 0.56 percent for others.
My agent listed hundreds of DVDs for my first live selling show and helped during it
He sells DVDs and Blu-rays and spent two weeks getting ready for his first live show on Whatnot, working alone. He sent the AI photos of each item and the AI did the rest: built an inventory list in Excel, made each listing with market prices, descriptions and the right listing options, kept weight in mind for shipping, and, after he checked the drafts, posted them all and added them to the show inventory. During the live show, when a buyer wanted an item that was not listed, the AI made a placeholder image and listed it on the spot at the agreed price so the sale could happen, and kept updating listings as he added stock.
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.