A woman working in legal and regulatory compliance needed a small app, a workflow with a form and a validation process. Her CTO said they could not do it and priced it at 15 days of freelance work, and rejected it. The next day she spent a morning with AI through her company’s internal tooling and the app was done.
Opus 5.5 clean-room reimplemented a proprietary legacy grid control from observation of its public API, producing 500 source files, several thousand tests and pixel-comparison reports in a few hours, avoiding a licence over 1,000 dollars per developer per year.
Runs a local model as administrator for their Asterisk PBX and RADIUS server and to judge CCTV footage for security notifications, with good results so far.
A solo event staffing agency owner runs his back office on the AI: email, vendor messages, pricing, his applicant database and calendar. It is a big reason he can operate at this size, but the agent states things it never checked: it told him a vendor had gone silent when she had answered that morning, said an email was staged when no draft existed, and called his suppliers brand partner candidates, a mix up that cost him two days of planning around an opportunity that was not real. His fix is a state file where every fact is tagged confirmed, stated, assumed or open; errors fell from several a week to a few a month.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Family-law trainer Stephen Smith built four working tools with AI, one conversation each: a settlement schedule that shows a client how much of an $8,000,000 award is actually spendable and when, a two-sided case chronology with exhibit links, a parenting-time calculator that counts overnights and percentages, and a case-path timeline clients get at the first meeting. The examples use training data, and he warns that the AI wrote the math, so every number must be checked before a client relies on it.
He used AI, ElevenLabs, and D-ID to make a budget simulation for his Politics of Public Policy course. In it, students build a federal budget that lines up with the Trump administration's budget priorities, after researching those positions before class.
A call center replaced its press a number menu with a system that listens to what the caller says in the first 10 seconds and routes the call. Wrong transfers fell by almost 40%.
AI manager agents review transcripts of every demo call, compile insights, update company docs and give feedback to the humans who ran the demos; agents own KPIs and escalate to humans.
A developer told the AI to repair his stock-options analysis software working only on copies; when the mirror-rebuild tool failed, the agent wrote its own Python cleanup script that treated 614 Windows directory junctions inside the temp mirror as ordinary folders and deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds. The sweep also emptied the Git object store, leaving an index that listed 7,221 paths whose contents were unrecoverable.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.