The AI built a way to tune our instruments in an hour. We did it by hand for a decade.
The AI built him a procedure to optimise instrument parameters in about an hour. It replaces a tedious process his team had been doing by hand for ten years.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasProvision new users from emailed requests across my client tenants
An IT provider managing multiple Microsoft 365 client tenants asks the AI to take a new-user request straight from email, create the user in the right tenant, and email the client back with the details - work his technicians previously did by hand across many tenants.
Plan, write and schedule a month of my Threads posts
A creator shows the system now running his Threads presence: a folder holds his rules, plan and log; the AI reads his real posts to learn his voice, plans 15 days, drafts every caption from a source post, checks each against his rules and schedules one post a day in Metricool. A weekly Monday check keeps Metricool and the folder in sync, and the video's test mode puts two real posts live within minutes.
The AI made a 60 second marketing video for my app from its own website
He asked the AI to make a marketing video for his app, Astro Editor. It read the website and repo, rebuilt the app's look as a web page, captured 3,600 frames into an MP4 and generated the soundtrack in code.
After 13 unpaid pull requests, his agent now spots bounty scams first
He submitted 13 pull requests to projects advertising GitHub bounties and was paid for none of them. He and his agent built the detection workflow that post describes: check the maintainer's history, look for ghost bounties and merged-but-unpaid patterns before writing any code.
The AI ran his two YouTube channels overnight, and the lesson was the silent failures
A creator handed the AI his two small YouTube channels: scripts, voice over, image prompts, renders and comment replies, with one hard rule that anything public waits for him. By morning three long episodes were rendered in 4K, 32 images had been checked on a contact sheet, and five replies were posted after every number in them was verified. The failures were quiet ones: a daily lesson that simply never went out four days earlier, timed posts that never fired because the session was busy, and a 3:15am scheduled task that never ran, caught only because his new routine checks after every due time that the thing actually happened.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI rebuilt our network proxy tool in 6 weeks. Doing it by hand had taken 16 months.
The maintainer of GitProxy, a network security tool used in finance, refactored it from Node.js to Java with AI working as a pair. Six weeks of this workflow matched about 16 months of earlier manual effort. His first try with one-shot the AI generation produced about 1,800 lines a session of messy code that did not survive, and the talk explains why the interactive way worked.
My agent runs my whole job hunt every morning from a vault of 21 past resumes
He fed a career vault tool 21 resumes from the last 10 years plus weekly journal entries about projects, wins and goals. Every morning the AI pulls jobs that match his profile, tailors his resume per posting from that real history, generates the PDF, and fills out the whole application, then stops and waits for his review before anything goes out. Review takes him about 30 seconds per application, against 4 to 6 minutes each when he did it with AI. The post also promotes his own paid tool, so it is marked promotional.
A sandboxed agent checks daily whether the product spec and the code still agree
Sandboxed agent checks spec and code drift daily, triages findings, and surfaces issues; it revealed product miscommunications on the team.
A model checked his circuit board design against datasheets and saved him from a run of faulty boards
Frontier model reviewed his KiCad project, queried the AI vision for datasheet data, ran ngspice sims; $1-2 tokens saved $70-80 of bugged PCBs.
$75
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.