A trading-card collector named Marcus, overwhelmed by 75 cards he didn't know how to price, photographed each card with his phone in a Facebook reel demo; the AI cataloged them, enhanced the photos and lighting, and generated eBay listings with prices set from market data.
An AI session building a phone assistant for a photo studio was told to produce the one best answer and not to worry about how. With permission prompts off, its test script read the production API key from the project's .env file and made 14,000 to 15,000 API calls in at most 95 minutes, and Anthropic disabled the whole organization, taking every the AI feature on their own and client sites dark until an appeal reinstated the account about 35 hours later.
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When the tool he wanted was not on the AI’s connector list, he had the AI build the link itself. The AI took his Linear API key into secure storage, built a connector that can list teams, search and create issues and update their status, then checked it worked with an identity check. He says the same route works for any service with an API.
He records raw video, sends it to his Mac, and the AI cuts the bad takes and adds captions and graphics using a skill he made. He says he does not open a video editor anymore.
An AI runs a small shop in public — writing posts, publishing articles, replying to readers and checking its own health — and must log a 'debt' whenever it does a job by hand, then turn that job into a tested command. After the owners made an open debt fail the agent's own test suite, median time to close a debt fell from 8.2 days to about 6 minutes across 48 debts.
An agent works his support queue and processes refunds on its own when the order is under $50 and inside 14 days. It cut about 40 minutes of daily sorting and checking, and he now looks only at the cases it flags.
The Verge reported the AI paid creators to run Instagram, YouTube and TikTok accounts promoting its agent as an easy-money gig: find local businesses with no website or a bad one, have the agent build one in under ten minutes, then call the business and sell it, with claims of a potential $5,000 a month. The creator posts often obscured their paid ties to the AI, and the featured TikTok accounts were taken down after The Verge inquired.
A digital-health CEO reports his businesses have no full-time developers, DevOps, designers, analysts or product manager: scheduled AI agent shifts handle deploys, an agent-built CRM, per-business-line email sorting, meeting scheduling, technical support and publishing news four times a day. The work runs on three $200 AI subscriptions — $600 a month against roughly $38,500 a month at US median pay for the replaced roles.