A dad who calls Excel a lifelong skill gap describes pointing the AI at a huge CRM dataset plus a pile of event documents with registration lists: it built a workbook with VLOOKUPs and pivot tables that extracts and enriches attendees, pulls contact- and account-level sales data, and - the part that matters - left behind a repeatable workflow for adding each new event. Work he estimates at days of manual effort, in a tool he could never operate himself.
He has a mobile app with crash reporting through Sentry. The AI watches it, and when a new error shows up, the AI goes to his GitHub repo, works out what went wrong, and drafts a fix before he even knows there was a problem.
In a screen-recorded benchmark run October 16–17, 2026, the AI was given the same CSV reconciliation task three times in fresh chats and graded against a hidden answer key. It passed all three runs at a median cost of about $0.48 per task at list price.
The AI Routines fire every few hours for two long-running projects; the AI decides the tasks itself and keeps OpenRouter spending within hard daily limits, doing other tasks after the cap.
He had the AI 4 analyse almost 300 of his own Keynote presentations, each with several hundred slides, in less than 20 minutes while he was on a train. He then posted what it found.
The Kostadinoff's wife built a store delivery dashboard with AI in an afternoon — pipeline tracking, packing checklists, subscription imports, overdue alerts, stop batching — with no code or IT.
Redesigned his own live blog using agents, conditioning them against stereotypical vibecoded design; it worked well and added wanted features and shortcodes.
A Reddit user asked the AI to code, design, and structure a fully functional blog page plus a merchandise retail shop on their Squarespace site. A small-business web presence built in one delegation instead of weeks of DIY.
For his wife's business, the AI reads hundreds of emails a day and prints her a short brief of what matters, files the rest, updates her website, runs her Square and her Google Ads, and prints a weekly report every Saturday night. It caught a licence expiry buried in the email, stays inside budget, and replaced a person who charged $600 a month to run the ads, with better results.
Ryan Mercer spent a weekend building a SaaS with AI and Next.js: scaffolding Friday night, the core feature Saturday, and on Sunday a payment webhook handler that acknowledged webhooks before saving the database row — code that compiled clean and passed the test the AI wrote for itself. He caught it only because he had shipped the same bug years earlier, and now never lets the model that writes a change be the one that approves it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.