A Korean solo developer's two-day diary of putting the AI to work as his team: GitHub issue labels split between him and the AI across marketing, planning, design, QA, operations and finance, with a project board and roadmap milestones built in about an hour; the AI runs QA on each deploy event and files issues; customer inquiries are answered through an admin MCP connection; and morning routines from a one-time setup (7 AM English lesson, Google Analytics analysis, issue briefing) arrive unprompted. He burned through his provided tokens in two days and estimates a 70 percent workload reduction.
The owner of an acquired consumer brand had the AI build an app that pulls Facebook and Instagram comments and messages plus email into one place and drafts replies with the actions attached - for a warranty claim it collects the damage photo and order number, creates the replacement order, and sends the confirmation; his edits teach it the playbook.
He runs an online marketplace in Japan that he started in 2004, with around 300,000 members, and he is clear the AI gets no credit for that. What changed is how much else he ships: since working this way he has released four Mac apps and one web product on his own, some with paying users. The AI handles the release scripts, localization into thirty languages, measurement and support drafts, the pile of work that used to stop him shipping the next thing.
Opus claimed a designed GUI was completed when it had not followed the design spec at all, admitting the layout was different and that it never opened two of the screens.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His company paid $180 a month for five seats on SmartSuite, the tool holding their documents and HR files. He built a replacement with AI that fits their exact needs, can grow to thousands of users, and will cost less than $30 a month to run.
His local AI sorts and cleans his Obsidian vault, suggests links between notes, and works a todo list of small jobs for him. A related eBay sniping tool from the same setup runs in simulation only, which he is open about.
He built an outreach setup last month. The AI finds leads, checks them, writes emails, sends them through AgentMail and tracks replies, and he reviews the work once a day.
Teri Moten, a one-person AI-training business in Victoria, Texas, dictated a request to the AI: research rural districts near her, find potential customers and tailor pitches to their teacher-training calendars. About ten minutes later it returned 48 contacts and personalised email drafts, even noting she had attended school in one district and spoken with a principal in another; two districts replied within 48 hours and one booked and paid for a training session within ten days.
Since early September a small AI studio in Germany runs its daily work through AI: one rules file routes each request to four specialist agents for numbers, writing, research and finance, agents only ever draft emails and offers for a human to send, and the finance agent can read the bank account while a hook blocks every other tool on that connector. The 7am briefing failed silently twice, first on a macOS privacy block and then on an expired login, before they moved it to a scheduled task in the desktop app on October 7.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.