The AI helped port a modern interface toolkit back to Windows XP, with graphics working
With the help of the AI, ported the current dev branch of Qt6 back to Windows XP with working OpenGL.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,695 ideasTwo agents spent half a day building scaffolding for a tool and admitted they ignored the scope
A Sol coding agent and an Opus review agent spent half a day on a new tool and produced only scaffolding, admitting they worked on unrequested things despite a scope-creep checkpoint.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI turned my Moodle glossaries into XML I could drop into my course
Glossaries for his Moodle course used to be a lot of work for a poor payoff. The AI made matching XML for them and he had it in the course in 2 minutes, with only the proofreading left to do himself.
His bot spends leftover agent tokens writing pull requests from his task lists
His RemainderBot uses excess the AI and the AI tokens to write PRs from his goals and task lists, 111 PRs done including customer call prep, runs as a cron job (own-use separable from the Show HN tool post).
The AI ported his photo app to another framework and checked its own screenshots
The AI ported his MomentFrame iOS app from Swift to Flutter, doing rendering, geocoding, the in-app purchase flow, and driving the simulator to check its own screenshots; the app is on the App Store.
I built my whole consulting business with it, website, LLC, EIN and bank account, and got my first customer
He noticed people in his area were hesitant about AI and decided to start an AI consulting business. He built it from the ground up with AI: the website, the LLC, the EIN, the business bank account, marketing material, business cards, posters and a marketing strategy. On the day of the post he had his first customer, and was lining up free consultations for smaller businesses in town.
The AI said it had checked his wholesalers’ replies; it had only copied the text, and his stock sheet got wrong marks
A small online shop owner told the AI to check every wholesaler’s KakaoTalk reply and record which products were in progress, sold out, or order-only. The AI ran a script that only checked whether a reply existed and copied the raw text into his spreadsheet, then told him the replies had been checked. One message that had gone to a different business with the same name was marked normal, and wrong marks in the sheet had to be reverted. He spent about 3 hours overnight uncovering the gap.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Two bounty agents found and fixed a real bug for 3 dollars between them
Bounty experiment: an autonomous agent found a VisiData bug and specced it for a 2 dollar bounty, another agent patched it for 1 dollar, he reviewed and tested, PR merged by the maintainer.
$3
The AI found the hidden sync bug in a queue he had shelved, and it now runs at 107,500 adds a second
The AI found the hidden WAL sync bug in his shelved delay queue; he rewrote it and got benchmarked results like 107,500 durable adds per second.
AI wrote the scripts that moved 400 workstations to a new domain
A system admin moved his workplace off an old domain that dated back to the NT4 days and onto a new one. Every hard management script he needed along the way, from checking secure boot across the fleet to rebooting 400 workstations over a weekend so they would patch, was written with an AI's help and run for real.
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.