A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Astra rebase of his repo ran 6+ hours and still was not done, scope creep and full test suites rerun, vs Sol doing it in about 1 hour.
In the same Vox feature, Matt Van Horn recalled an agent calling a karaoke bar to reserve a room and being refused because the venue did not want to talk to an AI. He completed the reservation through Fo, a service that adds human help.
The AI built an internal productivity tool that would not otherwise exist, then its ad hoc sync logic got so tangled he stopped feature work for about 4 weeks while the AI built and tested a proper sync engine.
He does not write code himself. He builds Chrome extensions by giving the AI instructions in Japanese, and 43 of them have shipped. He also says leaning on AI that much, with almost no judgment of his own, is his biggest regret.
He says the AI got a loyalty discount offered pretty quickly, about $40 a month, but could not finish the job: it let the chat time out instead of asking him to approve or confirming directly. Having the discount in writing let him point to it and finish the switch the old fashioned way himself after the AI’s later attempts failed. He still counts the $40 a month as saved.
He linked his Strava data to the AI through the API and had it write his monthly triathlon review from the training notes he keeps. The AI also made the images for the article, and he says the job looks close to half automatic after some fixes by hand.
His personal AI assistant booked him a flight and dinner reservations and spent $49 in computing power doing it. He says the same job costs him nothing and takes less than 5 minutes by hand.
Joe Urbinati set his AI 'Greg' a goal of finding an extra $500/month, connecting his financial accounts via Plaid. Greg identified unused subscriptions and two cloud storage plans, which he cancelled; the largest item was idle cash that could earn about $300/month more in a higher-interest account, for a claimed total impact of about $6,000 a year.
He spent an evening trying to teach the AI to drive a car. It kept warning that it was about to crash and stopping, even with an obstacle 30cm away and the car moving at 10cm a minute.
His agent researched a prospect and sent the email. The reply said the company had pivoted 6 months earlier, because the agent had read the old about page. The research saved him time, but the stale facts cost him the reply.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.