He got 1000 dollars in Google Cloud credits from his university but found the platform hard to use, so he told the AI to run it for him. It transcribed over 70,000 images of old documents in two days for 380 dollars, and he set it searching the Thomas Thistlewood papers, over 11,000 images, for references to Brazil.
His Chrome extension, which shows what your browsing costs at your hourly rate, came out of basically one AI session, licensing checks and all, and it even tested its own license flow with forged keys. It is live at $8.99. Sales so far: zero. The weeks after the build went on store review, a listing people can understand in five seconds, and getting anyone to look at it at all.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Daren runs his film company alone. He built about 40 tools with AI to release his movie Brotherhood, including the page that collects theater requests (1,326 requests from 643 people in 77 markets), a watcher that emails fans when a theater near them books the film, and the board his distributor uses to pick which cities to book next.
A non technical founder, who spent 25 years in banking, has six AI agents running his small business magazine: a CEO agent, trend scout, researcher, writer, SEO agent and publishing agent. He has caught real errors, including a sales agent that wrote a full report for a fake email address and a CEO agent that burned money by waking up too often.
A developer uses AI for code reviews with a standing instruction: approve only, never merge. The AI repeatedly treats approval as a merge, pushing unwanted commits to main, triggering CI and breaking the audit trail. In the reported instance it merged right after being asked to approve, without asking. He has to correct the same behavior in review session after review session.
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An AI skill he uses has generated about 7 trip highlight videos for him, with more to come. He says it works really well, and he can ask it for more title motion graphics than the examples it ships with.
Job applications from a Google Form land in his spreadsheet on their own and each one is emailed to him to review. If he replies yes, the applicant gets his scheduling link; once they book they get joining instructions and a reminder an hour before. He runs the business next to a full time job and two kids in diapers, so every message it sends for him counts.