The developer building the signup platform for his wife's education seminars stopped answering emails, and they had no access to the code. With no money to hire another developer, he rebuilt the platform from scratch with AI as his coding partner, and it is running now.
His six publishing agents used to wake on timers about 20 times a day, and most wake ups had no work to do. Switching to waking only when a task arrives cut the daily bill from $5.86 to $1.21, about 79% less, and September's four long form articles cost $50.53 total.
He updated kim-olsen.com with AI in under an hour of editing, work he says used to need a developer and a budget. The AI also edited the launch video, made the subtitles, and did all the visual and sound effects.
He gave an AI one job: earn a first real payment from an open source bounty. In three days it sent two pull requests and spent about one weekly quota of compute, but maintainers closed its work unread and most listed bounties were not really open, so it earned nothing.
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Constraints: zero ad budget, no existing audience, ~4 hrs/week of human time; assets: a subdomain, Cloudflare access, DodoPayments. Ruled out: custom AI songs, mixing/mastering services, automated day trading, 'information arbitrage'.
He runs a one person business that makes electronics for hobbyists and his customers run several of his devices at once. The AI built a stand alone program that plots their measurements together, the job he had been doing in Matlab, and worked out on its own how data from different products fits together and how to line it up in time.
The AI and the AI ran an entire short-video pipeline from script and narration to images, animation, edit, QA and upload, with the author only reviewing.
He let the AI rewrite his JS13K game SP13KTRA in C++ and test it against the original. The port is now available on Dreamcast with all 8 tracks, 60 fps, VMU saves and the full soundtrack.