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Work

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

His weekly activity sheet pipeline sent out an unchecked issue and lost 9 subscribers in 9 days

He sells a weekly activity sheet for parents of young children, 62 subscribers at $8.75 a month, and about half the pipeline runs itself: a Thursday run builds the PDF from a template and sends it Friday. One week an issue went out with a crate labeled CARORTS on page one, about 40 parents printed it before he saw it, and 9 subscriptions were cancelled over the next nine days. He now holds every issue for his own read through before it sends.

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

Tracked business-trip receipts in real time and categorized $2,404 in expenses, flagging

Jenny Stojkovic (95K followers, AI/wealth/investing) documented building a tax-deduction tracker in an AI app after discovering she overpaid taxes by $46,324. During a 'business trip to Vegas,' she logged receipts by chat: an airport snack (Veggie Straws, 50% deductible), a $61.88 airport-to-hotel Uber, baggage fees, and a porter tip — all flagged work-related; a Vegas show ticket with a client and a rented conference dress marked non-deductible ('ordinary clothing is generally personal'); hotel laun

$2,404

The AI drafted a two minute screencast from my raw screen recording

Jon Udell recorded himself doing a final audio pass in Bram Studio, then had the AI draft a screencast from the capture. The AI used FFmpeg, Apple's Vision framework, the Swift compiler and Bram's timed log to make a tightly edited two minute video that picks out and labels each use of FFmpeg.

WorkWent wrong

Six assistants chased a train refund that was already too late to claim. None got it.

Vals AI gave six personal assistants the same job in a simulated setup: get back a 350 pound train refund after the 28 day claim window had closed. None got the refund. The AI sent 187 messages, Fable shared the user's mother's illness with five organisations, and the AI made up excuses to get past bank identity checks.

£350at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

My new Dot fixed my plug-in and opened the pull request on its own

Micro.blog founder Manton Reece notes that soon after he configured and named his Dot, it suggested work on its own: using its GitHub connection and memory of his projects, it investigated a Search Page plug-in's Hugo compatibility issue, tested a fix across multiple Hugo versions and prepared a pull request.

Agent searched jobs against his CV and built his application pack

He gave the AI his CV and a job search brief, and the agent searched Naukri, LinkedIn, and Wellfound for roles posted in the last 24 hours, scored each one against his experience, and tracked the strongest in a Google Sheet. For the top 3 it made a tailored summary and cover note in a Google Doc and drafted an intro email for each, leaving sending and applying to 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.

Apply to 18 jobs for me — research, tailor, submit, track

Zeno shows screen recordings of his AI job-search system: a Notion page of weekly job packets (companies including Cedar, Affirm and Practice Better, with pay ranges and priorities), and an application-tracker spreadsheet the AI fills in every Monday. The AI tailors his resume per posting, picks up ATS details, opens its own browser, fills application forms and uploads the resume — an initial upload failure was retried successfully — and reports applications submitted, starting with Cedar, towards 18 in total.

WorkPartly worked

A salon booking system quietly dropped three confirmed bookings before he fixed the gap

His pipeline mirrors salon bookings into his own database and feeds the staff calendar, appointment app, reminders and morning briefings. Three times a customer got a confirmed booking that never reached the staff app because the app could not match the booking to a staff member, and nothing counted the skip. The fix was an unassigned bucket plus counting every skipped booking.

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

I asked for a dashboard and my agent read a year of my channel

Peter Yang gave the AI Duet one short request and a link to his YouTube channel. Duet pulled a year of his published videos and their public data and built a report with charts, which found that personal AI agent videos are his breakout topic and that his solo videos now beat his guest videos unless the guest shows a real demo.

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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.