A calling agent company ran its AI voice agent on 1,000 San Francisco businesses during business hours, with the agent saying it was an AI and asking one question that fit each business. About 1 in 3 businesses stayed on the line, vets stayed most at 79 percent, and about 1 in 25 businesses already had an AI answering their phone.
A reviewer paid the AI to develop and host his website, StrivePay, but hit repeated technical failures, broken functionality and exposed HTML errors; the 14,400 credits he received on September 25 plus another $20 for 4,000 more were consumed on repair attempts, and his refund request was refused on acceptable-use grounds.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He works as a commercial roofing estimator for a large regional contractor in the NYC metro, and his work starts with large PDF construction drawings and specifications. Over eight months he built a system he calls Estimator-OS. Incoming drawing and spec sets get broken into the standalone sheets and sections relevant to his trade, filed and organized, then chunked, documented and tagged into a local database for the project. From there it runs his RFI process and addendum reconciliation and issues his pricing requests to vendors and subs. Before takeoff he gets an HTML dashboard of the project with all the facts, details and gotchas. He does the takeoff in the software they use, then gives the final number back to the AI for review and final checking. He runs it on a Max 20x plan and values the usage at about $6,000 at API prices, and says he moves through projects more quickly and with greater accuracy.
He had the AI set up his Twitch profile and says it does not look too bad. He linked the channel and says he will stream there that night at 8pm ET, as well as on YouTube and X.
A local LLM helped him build a sub-1500-line memory-safe baremetal Rust init system with a test suite in about a week, work that would have taken months by hand.
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%.
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.
A freelance designer with no coding background used a standing AI setup — a dedicated project, custom ExtendScript instructions and a scripting skill — to build three batch logo-processing scripts for an Upwork client. The client paid $640, left a five-star rating and became a repeat client.
He runs recruiting for an investment firm across 30 open roles spread over five applicant systems. His AI cron runs at 9am, reads the open roles, searches people through data services, checks Gmail so nobody gets emailed twice, and writes new candidates into the right system with its reasoning attached. In about six weeks it surfaced 40 good candidates and the firm made 2 offers.
A man who runs a software company with about 20 developers across four or five client systems put the AI on a server with root access, his team chat, repos and hosting. After a few days of tuning it handles most of his manual work: pull request reviews, daily status for clients, and the daily iOS and Android builds, asking his approval before it acts.