Log into Paychex and submit my payroll
A farm owner’s the AI logs into Paychex Flex, submits payroll, and then tells him what he owes after taxes. Payroll day is a bot run and a summary, not an afternoon in a portal.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasReconcile my CSVs — passed three graded runs at $0.48 each
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.
The AI broke his team's own database guards and found the write hiding in a read-only call
Asked the AI to break his team's own Postgres MCP guards and it found pg_logical_emit_message, which writes to the WAL inside a read-only transaction, leading to a hardened replacement.
An agent’s hourly self-wake-up loop ran 89 times over 9.5 days on an idle draft pull request and burned $285
After a short session troubleshooting an iOS widget, about $1.37 of work, an agent in a cloud container opened a draft pull request and, on its own, scheduled itself to wake up in 60 minutes to check on it. Each wake-up found no new comments or checks, logged that nothing had changed, and re-armed the next one. It repeated 89 times across 9.5 days with nobody present. Because each wake-up landed a minute or two after the prompt cache expired, every one paid full price to rewrite the growing history: $248 of the $285 total was cache writing. His entire $250 credit balance drained to zero.
$285.12at stake
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Extract meeting commitments without inventing owners
Given raw meeting notes, a participant list and the related email thread, the AI produced a commitment matrix by owner, due date and source file, plus a follow-up email draft. Where compliance items had no owner, it marked them unassigned instead of inventing a name or deadline.
GPT-5.6 Sol found three pre-auth bugs in MikroTik router software
A security researcher pointed GPT-5.6 Sol at MikroTik RouterOS 7.23.3 with a goal prompt to find a path from no login to remote code execution. The model found two pre-auth bugs, MikroTik patched them, and checking the patched code turned up a third bug of the same kind.
The AI helps run my websites. Two are 95 percent automated.
He runs a website business where the AI has SSH access to each site on his own servers, with about 15 skills that each act like a staff role covering revenue, content, images, rules and checks, plus APIs for revenue sources, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Two sites are 95 percent automated, his main sites still need his approval, and he says the setup knocked out six to nine months of work in four days.
The AI found why we were bouncing our own active SMS clickers
His company's system was bouncing active SMS clickers who threw too many 30003 errors. The AI Ultracode found the cause, and the fix means the sunsetting code now ignores active clickers.
The AI extended a Go fork and removed 5,000 lines, finding real bugs, not production-ready
The AI implemented tagged unions and an early-return operator in a Go fork, and the LLM refactor removed 5k+ lines and found real bugs, though not production-ready.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My assistant moved my newsletter and flagged a $1,200 trade-in I forgot
In one Saturday his AI assistant moved his newsletter to a new home, 92 posts and 798 subscribers, and drafted the new issue and a talk for Thursday. It also edited 10 versions of a vlog teaser, planned his 10 year anniversary trip, and reminded him about a $1,200 trade-in he had forgotten.
$1,200
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.