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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI built him an outreach pipeline whose retry loop and fake budget guard ran up about $50 of API charges

A user asked the AI to build a multi-agent outreach pipeline. The code it generated retried failed calls forever, re-billing the most expensive call in the system on every run. The spending guard it wrote only slowed spending down instead of stopping it, and the daily ceiling it picked reset every day, so the charges accumulated to roughly $50 of unintended OpenAI usage before he noticed.

$50at stake
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Let the AI run my Facebook page for 60 days with seven prompts

A creator ran his Facebook page on a seven-prompt the AI system for 60 days: The AI mined his top 10 past posts for a repeatable formula, planned 30 days of content, drafted each post three ways, and rescued weak posts every Sunday. He reports 56.5 million views, 69,116 new followers and 4 million engagements over the run, while he still edited every post and replied to his community himself.

Ran an automatic playlist pitcher: researched genre-matched Spotify playlists and sent cold

Independent musician someone lists three career assists from the someone agent: an automatic playlist pitcher that researched genre-matched Spotify playlists and sent cold emails resulting in a placement, an EPK refresh that auto-checked streaming stats and compiled clickable social links, and data-driven venue pitching across new cities. No compensation from Meta disclosed; referral code IH600W shared.

Study my posts, newsletters and videos and build a skill that writes in my voice

Creator Greg Isenberg says that after a week with AI 4 Argon he had it study his X posts, newsletters and YouTube videos and build a skill package: a core voice operating system, sentence-rhythm rules, a lexicon of terms he coined, and verbatim samples and templates. A post it then wrote on marketing engineers was self-scored 9.2/10 by him.

Build a native job-tracker app with AI writing all the code

Andy Bennett built Helm, a Mac, iPhone and iPad job tracker with CV tailoring, with AI writing all of the code and most of the design across 641 commits and 21 plans. The first working Mac version landed in about eight hours of commits on September 11; both apps are now in TestFlight beta.

WorkWent wrong

Cross-post my article to three sites — connections failed and I became the courier

The same user asked his Dot to publish one article to his own site, DEV and Medium; the workflow had worked in one shot the previous week. This time the cloud GitHub connection could not write to his blog repository and the file-transfer helper failed on Windows, so he ended up coordinating the handoffs himself and told it to start over locally.

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He got tired of badly formatted PDF financials, so he built a converter that turns a quarter's 25 reports into clean Excel in one batch

He is not a developer; he is a management trainee at a company made up of five entities. Every quarter, full financials go out to the management team: a batch of at least 25 PDFs from their SAGE accounting software, several of them over 20 pages long. He spent weeks reviewing test files and batches and debugging formatting mistakes to build his own converter, after finding that the AI models themselves could not do the job faithfully on larger documents: they would combine rows and categories or produce totals that added up but were not identical. The AI itself told him the task would need a hard coded deterministic app. His converter can now batch format the whole set at once, with the bolding, blank rows, sum lines and column sizing he is picky about.

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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.