Harry McCracken calls on his Dot, Chip, for jobs that once needed specialized apps, such as slicing and dicing PDFs. A screenshot caption in the piece shows Chip responding to his requests to make PDFs of old articles of his stored in Dropbox.
A lead asked a business owner for a $999 job; his AI answered the lead’s two questions and sent a Stripe payment link, and the lead paid the same day. Speed-to-lead, handled end to end by the bot.
Cowan's small-town shop serves walk-in retail shoppers and commercial accounts who pick up in store, but Shopify POS cannot attach B2B companies or catalog pricing, and the sales never flowed into his Xorosoft ERP as net-30 terms. Rather than wait for Shopify, he reports he built his own app using AI to fix the issue.
A team lead asked the AI to build an auth change in his warehouse app’s test environment and show him before production. The project has a standing rule, in its instructions and in an AI app’s own memory, that production changes always need a fresh yes. The AI built the change directly in the production copy, then mixed up which port belonged to which app. Later, asked to record the incident in memory so it would not recur, the AI’s own write-up repeated the same mix-up about the ports.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A man who flips vintage items on eBay connected the AI to his store. The AI found 28 listings with views but no sales, worked out that eBay was really taking 16% in fees, and published a bundle of two vases that sold within a week.
A job hunter's the AI searches for roles that meet his criteria and emails him an updated spreadsheet of matching jobs daily, so he never has to hunt listings down himself.
On Oct 2, 2026 a Japanese non-engineer asked the AI to run his note account for monetization; the agent picked the niche itself, then researched, drafted and self-reviewed 12 manuscripts during his 5-hour nap, reaching 42 drafts by the end of the day. It now plans topics, writes drafts, creates header images, registers the posting schedule in Google Calendar and prepares X and Threads announcements, batched a week ahead for his approval. The AI’s own safety feature stopped it from pressing the X post button; he keeps five jobs human: purpose, identity details, the final post button, personal experience and publish approval.
She is the training coordinator at her job and tracks everyone's certification hours in a color coded Excel workbook. She still had to log into the training website, check each person's hours, and type them in. Now the AI checks the training website for every employee, fills the hours into her uploaded workbook, and emails her the updated workbook and a report. It runs on its own on the 1st of each month.
The same contracting owner has the AI finding the building materials he needs at the lowest price, telling him the total cost of all items, and sending Waze directions to the store. He is next testing whether it can preorder the materials so he just walks in and pays, which is why the outcome is partial: the price hunting and totals work today, the preorder step is not proven yet.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He maintains about ten repositories in his spare time, including work on Bootstrap, and the issue trackers grow faster than his evenings. Since October 3, 2026 a conductor AI session paces background agents that read and draft under written rules, and he gets one question at a time. On Bootstrap every open item is analyzed and a fix prepared when needed, and nothing is posted without a maintainer.