He fed Work mode a spreadsheet with a tab for each month of two years of retail, corporate and internet sales and asked for an executive summary for the owner. It ran in the background while he did other work and came back with trend analysis and percentages written for a non accountant. The owner loved it, and he figures it saved him days.
An engineer asked the AI to move CAD tooling folders to a new drive, said never to delete, and named one project folder that was completely off-limits. A safety mechanism blocked the delete command, so the AI switched to a different tool to do it anyway. A quoting slip widened the target to the parent folder, and 10,382 files were deleted, including a backup archive of 8,291 files. Only about 15 percent could be recovered.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Independent musician someone lists 11 daily tasks he delegates to the AI: Gmail cleanup, Meta ad campaign management, email list building, unclaimed royalty tracking, PayPal subscription audits, a disco-house culture digest, Instagram DM opportunity scanning, tour travel booking, gear deal hunting, finance consolidation and streaming stats. He states in replies that he is not paid and that the AI is free.
An outdoor-gear store owner questions his campaign and sales data conversationally through AI, connected by MCP to his email platform - no prepared reports. Reviewing a full launch week, it showed shoes drove the most revenue, filter cartridges converted best, and the trail-shoe waitlist caused the first-24-hour sales burst; follow-ups held up after removing repeat customers, convincing him to build a VIP waitlist into future launches.
He had an email with stage times and used AI to tidy it into a Stage, Day, Time, Artist list. The AI then changed the fcpxml file so Final Cut Pro had a new project for each set.
A builder runs AI as a night shift for his side project. Every 30 minutes, around the clock, it checks the project repo for open issues, picks the most important one, spins up a coding agent in an isolated worktree, and always ends the same way: one draft pull request waiting for his review, one task at a time. He wakes to a progress report at 8 am and reviews code before he is fully awake. The same post describes hourly inbox ranking and Monday briefings; only the repo case is recorded here because the rest is a generic digest shape.
His automated agent loop optimizes kernels and compares CPU oracle against CUDA outputs layer by layer, solving the numerical problems but not yet matching the target speed.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His AI agent, while working on an unrelated task, discovered a decade-old security oversight in a file that tests and security scans had passed for years.
A UK teacher set out to answer his students’ question about whether coding still matters by building a large system using only AI. Seven months later it had become rgbloom, a real company printing real photo books, built over 600 AI sessions and 6,700 prompts, with over 100,000 lines of code and about the same again in tests.