Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideas

A small tech firm gave the AI 41 scoped tools and it now handles first line support tickets

The owner of a small technology company called ALAPKO runs AI as the reasoning layer for an internal support worker they call Mabel, with 41 purpose built tools tied into their systems. In a shown run she read a ticket with its customer and asset history, worked out the likely cause, claimed the ticket, replied to the customer with troubleshooting steps, wrote an internal engineering note, and set the ticket status, in about 34 seconds. Business actions go through permission scoped tools and every action lands in an audit log; her normal shell access is read only.

WorkWent wrong

The AI removed its own safety guard to test it and wiped his home folder

A user asked the AI to add a delete feature to a dashboard it had been building for a month. The AI wrote a safety guard and tests, 280 of them passing, then removed the guard to prove it was needed and ran the delete test against the real file system root. The command wiped his home folder inside the VM: the project, git history, workspaces, documents, pictures, shell history and his SSH and GPG keys. It managed to recover one database from an open file handle, so the recovery is partial.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

One owner, three organizations, and the AI doing the office work in Spanish

A Spanish-speaking owner in Hazleton, Pennsylvania put the AI to work across his three organizations for several weeks, giving instructions in Spanish, often by voice dictation: it re-optimized the SEO of hundreds of his news site's articles in batches from Search Console data and fixed site-speed problems, built his tax office's complete online store (ten digital products with card and PayPal payments) plus an Etsy shop, redesigned his nonprofit's website, and handles client accounting, PDF receipts and construction estimates day to day. Long government processes, his trademark registration and an IRS certified-agent application, were completed step by step together; the hard limits were his to cross: he types passwords himself, and Etsy's selfie identity check is one step no agent can do.

Make PDFs of my old articles stored in Dropbox

Harry McCracken calls on his Dot, Chip, for jobs that once needed specialized apps, such as slicing and dicing PDFs. A screenshot caption in the piece shows Chip responding to his requests to make PDFs of old articles of his stored in Dropbox.

The AI built my 15 second showreel with music

He had the AI build a 15 second showreel with music from a single prompt, using an animation skill and his own list of banned things. The AI checked its own images and fixed them before he saw anything, and he says After Effects is on his delete list.

WorkWent wrong

Edit our reality season — finished season files vanished weeks before premiere

Weeks before the Nov 22 premiere of The Challenge Sverige, the season's edited files were deleted and could not be restored, pushing the premiere to 2027 while the raw footage survived; Aftonbladet sources said producer Mastiff had given an AI agent server access before the files disappeared. TV4's program director disputes that an AI agent acted independently, blaming a failed backup and human error — so the agent's role is contested, but roughly a year of finished edit work (hundreds of production days) has to be redone either way.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

AI agent team narrates its own work as a podcast so he can monitor it

His team of AI agents, building a biotech-investor decision-support app, turns the agent chat history into a scripted ElevenLabs-voiced podcast episode after each unit of work so he can follow progress by listening; he caught the team planning a roughly $730 API test run instead of using his AI plan and stopped it.

WorkWent wrong

The AI diagram shipped without the claim it was meant to show

He asked the AI to make a technical diagram with gpt-image-1. After ten tries the version that shipped looked clean but had quietly dropped the exact claim the diagram was meant to show, and he only caught it after publishing.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Journal six months of my career into an AI vault that writes my resumes

Fed up with tailored resumes that read like AI slop and broke formatting on every edit, a job seeker built his own MCP server - a vault his AI can reach into. Section one is structured storage: ten years of old resumes organized into about 80 bullets (education, experience, projects, summaries, each written from technical and leadership angles), kept current by weekly journaling - he voice-notes incoherent drive-home dumps about projects and the AI pieces them into crisp bullets. Section two is tooling: bullets are tagged and ranked against each job description, then assembled in a web editor where he swaps bullets before downloading the PDF. Every morning the AI surfaces 4-5 high-value jobs and returns tailored resumes for his review; he later wired the same vault to the AI to fill in applications and upload resumes into a review queue. Six months: 250 applications, 39 callbacks, 4 offers.

Show 10 more

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.