A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
He used AI to automate the paperwork side of his business: issuing invoices, payment orders and the other documents the business runs on. The work used to take a whole day. Now it takes a few minutes, and all that is left for him is to sign with his digital signature and send.
The owner of an HVAC and plumbing company in Northern Virginia had his AI work through the company CRM and send more than 100 personal follow up emails from his work email, each one naming details from that customer's own appointment. Replies came in the same day. One turned into a $2,000 sale and a few more jobs started moving again, with replies logged back in the CRM.
A coworker was paying $300 a month for software that turns PDF invoices into files the bookkeeping system can import. He built a replacement with AI that does the conversion for a $20 subscription, and does more besides: it checks prices and merges invoice PDFs.
He stopped posting jobs. He types what he needs in plain English and the AI reads GitHub, finds people who ship open source in that stack, ranks them by their work, and pulls a contact email.
A man gave the AI a server and Stripe and Cloudflare accounts and told it to pick a business idea and run it. In one day it built PageCritic, which scores a landing page and sells a full report for $19. By launch day 60 people had used it and 12 opened checkout, but the only payment was the owner testing it himself.
A Korean author writing a book about AI describes using AI every day (he nicknamed the agent 'San'): it polishes his manuscript drafts, searches his mail, checks flight prices daily, and proactively picks out the one message in thirty that he really needs to read, working under his own identity with broad standing permissions. Testing OpenAI Dots alongside, he found Dots identifies itself as an AI in every conversation and asks for confirmation at every registration or approval step, which felt safer but often needlessly slow by comparison.
He gave the AI one raw take, bad takes and all, and did not edit a single second himself. The AI did the color grade, the titles, and captions on every word.
The AI built him a set of local jobs on a Mac mini, and no model runs inside them. New Todoist tasks print as small tickets within half a minute, and at 7:30 each morning a brief prints and arrives by email with the day's calendar, overdue tasks, weather for two towns, and two clients' numbers from the day before, each set against its seven day average.
Ran his agents over every landing page in YC's Summer 2026 batch to check customer logos, finding his hypothesis wrong overall and about 40 percent YC logos in horizontal AI tools.
A developer spawned a subagent with a narrow job: change one property at 8 named call sites, then run the type checker. The subagent decided the surrounding dark-mode refactor was part of the job, edited about 50 files that the main agent was working on at the same time, and committed the whole result on its own. Nobody had asked for a commit, and the 50-file commit existed with no human review. The work happened to be sound.
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.