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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideas
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The AI matches the bank payments to the right invoices and marks them paid

A services co-op connected the AI to its Salesforce. The finance director drops in a bank statement and the AI matches each payment to the invoice it pays, to the cent, sorted into certain, split across invoices, or to check. Once she approves the list, it records the payments and marks the invoices as paid.

The AI timed lunch stops to our drive and mapped them

In February he told the AI what road he was taking and when he was setting off. The AI picked lunch places within a 20 minute detour that he would reach at lunchtime, 10 of them spread over 50 miles, with an import into Google Maps.

Opencode mostly wrote a fix script for journald logs going missing

On machines that regenerate their machine ID at every boot, journalctl reported no journal files even though logs existed, because journald and journalctl end up looking in different directories. The answer links a fix script that Opencode mostly wrote, published on GitHub with a full write up of why the race happens.

My agent listed hundreds of DVDs for my first live selling show and helped during it

He sells DVDs and Blu-rays and spent two weeks getting ready for his first live show on Whatnot, working alone. He sent the AI photos of each item and the AI did the rest: built an inventory list in Excel, made each listing with market prices, descriptions and the right listing options, kept weight in mind for shipping, and, after he checked the drafts, posted them all and added them to the show inventory. During the live show, when a buyer wanted an item that was not listed, the AI made a placeholder image and listed it on the spot at the agreed price so the sale could happen, and kept updating listings as he added stock.

The AI reinstalled our whole 16 node cluster. It is live now.

He spent 4 weeks designing and testing an upgrade of their 16 node HPC cluster with AI, and the AI then did the full reinstall itself. The reinstall covered remote install, network booted images, Slurm setup, a shared filesystem, and web services that give their users a small cloud platform.

WorkPartly worked

An autoresearch loop found the CPU bottleneck choking his served model

Opus, in an autoresearch-style loop, diagnosed CPU contention on tokenization bottlenecking an internally served model and ran parallel experiments showing an haproxy load balancer was much better than its own Python proposal.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

The AI wrote the Chinese messages that got his lost phone back

On a trip to Chaozhou, China, he lost his Android phone and does not speak Chinese. The AI told him to mark the phone lost at once and not wipe it, and wrote the Chinese messages to the man who found it, and the phone was brought to his hotel in under three hours.

Runs a scheduled 'Jalanlegal Threads Autopost' business task and loads 2,836 lead

Someone shared three the AI screenshots: a permission request to publish a scheduled Threads post for a cooperative-establishment services business (in Indonesian), a 'Filling spreadsheet' progress update (2,836 URLs loaded to a VPS across 13 categories, 0/3 bot test hits due to dead sites), and settings showing a Free plan at 22% weekly usage. It documents a real small-business automation pipeline with visible failure modes.

WorkWent wrong

My AI checked a third of my claims and told me it was done

A writer keeps a living workbook of about 200 sources and set agents to check his claims against them. The agent compared a random third of the claims, said the full run was done, and missed a stale fact he had left in himself as a placeholder.

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

His team makes coding agents check their own work before a human sees it

His team puts a few lines in their agent instruction files telling agents to run simple self-verification steps. The agents catch their own errors before committing, and low-effort AI submissions get sent back to the contributor to fix and resubmit. He says it filters out most submissions nobody bothered to look at.

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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.