He asked his AI to edit an entire video and it did the work, from picking the takes to lowering the music in the quiet parts. The video is the third in his series about building his toolstack with an agent.
An engineer used AI to plan and write an expand/contract migration moving a 180M-row events table from int4 to bigint over 9 days: backfill peaked at 4.1 seconds of replica lag and the final swap locked for 1.4 seconds, with zero downtime. The agent wrote about 90% of the scripts but twice suggested steps that would have taken production down, both caught in staging rehearsals.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Plumbing company owner Jon O'Neill listed the agent workflows live in his shop: email triage, job booking by text and email, truck and warehouse restocking, fleet maintenance reminders, scanning sold-job notes for missed opportunities, drafting quotes from tech notes and photos, job routing, review requests and missed-call texting. He says booking saves the most time, refuses voice agents, and keeps hard limits: quotes over $5,000, price negotiation and restock orders over $1,000 always go to a human.
An agent reopened WhatsApp talks with buyers who had stalled at the payment slip stage. Buyers who talked with the AI converted at 8.36 percent against 0.17 percent for those who did not.
A team ran an AI pipeline over a usability test of an investment app and saved about half a day of manual analysis. Every claim the AI made about the screen was checked against a video frame, and two claims that did not hold up were left out of the report.
Josh Pigford started FirstIndex, a service that gets companies found on Google and in an AI app answers, at $1,000 a month. Within a month it was at about $570,000 a year in recurring revenue with about 30 clients, and the AI does most of the delivery work.
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.
He spent 4 weeks designing and testing an upgrade of their 16 node HPC cluster with AI, and the AI then did the full reinstall itself. The reinstall covered remote install, network booted images, Slurm setup, a shared filesystem, and web services that give their users a small cloud platform.
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.