I built 6 useless (and useful) things with AI in 30 days
I got laid off in March 2026. The day HR handed me the 30-day notice, I had a small panic attack, then opened my laptop and started building things. Here's the deal: I had 30 days before severance ran out, and I wanted to see how much I could ship with AI tools before the money (and motivation) ran dry. I gave myself a single rule — every project gets a 7-day deadline, otherwise I kill it. I built 6 things. One has real users. One broke in production. Two I never opened again. This is what happened, in the order I built them. 1. AI Buddy (Chrome sidebar) — shipped, 15 users A Chrome extension that puts an AI assistant in a sidebar. Select text on any page, hit a keyboard shortcut, it goes to the AI, reply shows up without you leaving the page. Works with GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek. No login, no credit card. Time: 11 days (April 1–11). Status: Live on Chrome Web Store. 15 real users as of June 28, 2026. Rating 4.2. What I used AI for: 90% of the code (500 lines of JavaScript, written in Cursor). The README, the Chrome Web Store description, the marketing tweets — all AI-drafted, then I rewrote the parts that sounded like AI. What went wrong: The first version had a Stripe integration. AI wrote 90% of the webhook signature verification. I had to rewrite it from scratch. Also the model-picker UI went through 5 revisions because AI kept proposing what looked right but didn't work. → Chrome Web Store 2. Weekly report generator — personal use only Every Friday at 4pm, a script grabs my git commits, Slack messages, and Linear ticket changes, throws them at GPT-4, and asks for a "manager-readable" weekly report. I review, tweak, send. Time: 2 days. ~200 lines of Python. Status: Running for 11 weeks. Has 1 user. Me. Cost is $0.12/week. What I used AI for: The prompt. It's surprisingly tricky to get GPT-4 to write a weekly report that doesn't sound like a robot. The single most useful line: "if you don't have data, write 'no progress this week' — don't make things up." T