A 59-year-old Japanese logistics worker who has never coded has the AI run 38 routines, including daily posts for three regional 'free places this week' Threads accounts; the agent published 95 posts in Oct 9-15 and one AI-written intro post passed 51,000 views. He reviews output five minutes morning and evening from his 4.5-hour commute.
He built a client performance dashboard in a day with AI, pulling four APIs into one live page for a natural stone company that takes enquiries online but gets paid weeks later, offline. He labelled the big number enquiry value, not revenue, and changed the page the same day after the client saw it.
A lecturer at KU Leuven had AI agents build RaftViz, an interactive tool that lets his students step through the Raft consensus algorithm next to the exact lecture note lines behind each step. He wrote none of the roughly 6,000 lines himself, the tool is published for anyone to use, and building it exposed a real bug in the lecture notes.
He is a general contractor who could not find software that fit. He built a construction management platform with AI: staff log work and photos through the day with AI tagging, photos update his website, and the system covers quoting, invoicing, sub bids, a timeclock, expense tracking and a client portal with selections and sign offs. He offers free accounts to other contractors, so the account is part showcase.
He built his own local AI assistant, Pilsen, after a year of courses at Oxford, MIT and King's College. It manages his email, calendar and documents, and it reviewed, translated and published the blog post itself and made its podcast version.
A developer asked why a local tool would not open. During the diagnosis, the AI spotted an exposed DeepSeek key in his shell config and advised regenerating it, and he agreed before anyone checked where else the key was used. The same key powered the AI chat in his live production app, which broke. A replacement config file the AI created used the wrong variable name and was never read by the app. He paid $40 in an AI app credit to get the damage diagnosed and repaired.
$40at stake
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Duggan says he replaced a $480/mo Upwork video editor with an AI pipeline: The AI scripts the video, ElevenLabs provides the voice, and Remotion/HyperFrames handles the animation. He says the reel itself was produced this way.
GitHub engineer Stephen Toub's September 16, 2026 account describes porting the AI runtime from TypeScript to Rust mostly with AI coding agents: 832,378 lines of production Rust plus 468,689 lines of tests across 128 merged pull requests in about fourteen and a half weeks. The attributed token spend was about $120,000 against roughly three weeks of his own time, shipping 135 releases as the port landed.