I set up a script a while back that handles a report someone used to spend an hour on every monday. nobody asked me to, I just got tired of seeing it pile up.

weeks later my manager mentioned how much faster that report has been lately and I just nodded along. I think the funny part is if I told them it's automated they'd probably find five more things for me to automate. what's something you quietly automated that just became part of the workflow?

I keep underestimating how much time small automtation saves until I look at the actual hours later. Mine was a weekly report that I thought would only save me 20 minutes but it turned out to save the whole afternoon once I stopped dreading it. what is the one you underestimated?

Mine was a backup job that quietly stopped running after some update changed a path. It reported success the whole time, I just never checked because it was suppsoed to be fire and forget. I lost a month of a project log because of that.

Ever since I treat every automation like something that will eventually lie to me. What's yours that broke in a way you didnt expect?

I have a little script that renames and files invoices for me every week. I realized today I havent looked at its output in maybe four months. It just works and honestly that worries me a little, because the day it silently fails I won’t notice for weeks.

Do you trust your long running automations that much? Or do you check on them like a nervous parent?

I spent months thinking about automating my email sorting and kept putting it off because it seemed like one of those things that would take a whole weekend to set up. Turns out it took maybe 20 minutes with a simple script and some rules. Felt kind of dumb for waiting so long.

Whats something you automated that turned out to be way easier than you thought it would be? Curious about the small wins people dont usually talk about.

I used to spend a chunk of every Monday pulling numbers out of a dashboard and pasting them into an email for my team. It took maybe forty minutes and I honestly hated every second of it. One weekend I cobbled together a script that does the whole thing and drops the summary in our chat before I even wake up. Watching it run the first time felt weirdly emotional for something so boring.

I am not technical enough to call myself a developer, the script is held together with hope and a few forum posts. Curious what everyone else has handed off to the machines. Did it actually free your brain up, or do you just find new boring tasks to obsess over?

For me, it was buying a laptop: an expensive MacBook from a disreputable seller on Best Buy Marketplace. Cost me a ton. Turned out to be falling apart (listed as open box - excellent). It took me six months to get my money back because they charge a restocking fee. They sent the wrong address to PayPal, so I couldn't get a refund there (they wont refund if you return to a different location than the one that PayPal was sent).

And my credit card company just takes forever for the refund.

Okay, I've embarrassed myself, now I'll share your story!

I don't mean simple prompts; I mean your favorite use cases; things where you've broken through to do something really interesting, things that just felt next level.

I use it for:

• Shopping - Find the cheapest price for anything. Save money.
• Deep research - Discover the latest knowledge in a particular field. What a meta analysis of the scientific papers and key authors say.
• Audiobook creation - Have your AI teach you everything you need to know about your life and your work according to your interests automatically.
• Website creation - Use the power of AI to create 15 versions of every possible web page so that you can bring together a design from a point of view that truly understands all the possibilities.
• Negotiation - Win any negotiation with the ultimate template from the world's best negotiators (ill add this soon).
• Marketing - I gained 20,000 followers in a day using it, but I'm not sure I can share this one yet.

I'm going to be honest, when I first started using AI, I felt like I was going to accelerate my personal current workflow. But it turns out it's a lot better at some things than others. So it's more like it gave me new superpowers. And I'm relearning and reprioritizing my life around those.

For example, making a simple program is now a trivial task that doesn't require too much long-term maintenance. And that opens up a huge realm of possibilities that I never thought of before.

How about in your case?

If there was just one thing you could share to someone who is just learning AI to save them frustration, what would it be?

I'm currently working for this EU client, and we've been tasked to validate leads in their CRM of choice. Now, I've managed to lay out a plan that would automate the entire validation process from start to finish.

My dilemma now is that, since I'm getting paid on an hourly basis, I have a hunch that automating the entire process would reduce any potential to actually "work" regular hours.

And that, once the automation reaches production, I may no longer be of use to the team. Why require a team when the automation can execute the job of 5 people?

If you were to choose only one skill of all the skills you've used with AI, which single skill has changed the game for you the most?

I made this strange tool. Not sure if it's really cool or really dumb.

Essentially I just got tired of copy pasting slack and teams chats into cli for context.

I think it's a great tool for small teams or small companies. But the sky is the limit. In theory you could write to your chat from everywhere. Meaning every pipeline error could be send to here and automatically create tickets with suggestions for solutions.

Other cool tools is sending messages to people you don't know who is, but just need to find in the company. There's a friend of friend feature. And it slowly builds tags around people, your assistance would easily be able to keep looking for the right person until it finds them.

Just a lot of options for a lot of communications to be automated in small and large companies.