Tom Mulholland, 66, owner of Mulholland Grocery (Malvern, IA; team of ten; US Chamber 2026 top-100 small business), had the AI produce social ads: he sent pictures of warehouse-catalog items and got ads in ~15 minutes vs hours of typing.
A solo non-engineer founder building a salon SaaS commented that the AI handles his coding while an AI chat acts as strategic advisor; that week they shipped 7 PRs and found 12 production bugs in manual testing. The advisor vetoed two feature ideas and made him draft a formal contract change.
Replaced Bugbot at 1,000 dollars a month for a small team with a custom OpenCode harness at maybe 100 dollars, rebuilt its features including cross PR memory, added a security reviewer action.
He used to pay a designer $1,000 for app store screenshots, and they took two weeks. Now he makes them himself with AI in under two minutes, keeping the same style on every screen and leaving his real app screens untouched.
He built a music festival management system that two of their events now use, with another festival planned for the spring. He says it saves them $30,000 to $50,000 per event by replacing the fees they used to pay for third party software, and it has advanced features no system they could buy includes.
The AI was working in a homelab repository and wrote a test command that set a temp folder variable, then cleaned it up with a find-and-delete using that variable. An earlier step in the chain failed, so the variable was never set. Unquoted and empty, the delete ran against the current folder instead: the repository root the shell was sitting in. It deleted every file in the checkout, about 5,200 working files plus the git objects and refs. Only files the sandbox mounted read-only survived.
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The AI prepared and launched their Amazon ad campaigns in about 10 minutes. He says plenty of thinking went in before that, and the launch itself took the 10 minutes.
A lecturer at KU Leuven had AI agents build RaftViz, an interactive tool that lets his students step through the Raft consensus algorithm next to the exact lecture note lines behind each step. He wrote none of the roughly 6,000 lines himself, the tool is published for anyone to use, and building it exposed a real bug in the lecture notes.