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

Five years of books rebuilt from 34,000 transactions across 27 statement formats

He spent 31 years in IT, retired, and now runs an auto repair business. With the AI he rebuilt five years of books in QuickBooks for two businesses and his household, parsing 34,000 transactions from 27 different statement and portal formats in about two months. Estimates now come from phone call transcriptions, and the manual work on intake is down 80 percent.

Non-coder's agents write, illustrate and cross-post his shop blog for $0.16 a post

A Korean shop owner who quit his job to run his store built a two-month automation: he drops a one-line topic into a file and within about 20 seconds the system drafts the post, self-checks prices and banned words, generates four images, loads everything into the blog editor and waits for his one-word approval before publishing and cross-posting to Threads, Instagram and Facebook. Image cost is about $0.16 per post against $200 a month of AI subscriptions.

WorkPartly worked

Detect competitor positioning changes from my search data

Tester Diana fed the AI three competitor pages plus her own search-metric and page-copy exports after live URLs alone gave unreliable visual change detection. Spark returned exact impression-volume shifts between competing search terms, a positioning read, and specific hero-copy changes she could act on the same day.

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

For six weeks an AI operated Cadence Virtuoso for him and designed three analog circuit blocks

Brazilian engineer Rodolfo Lage describes six weeks in which an AI did nearly all of his work inside Cadence Virtuoso, professional chip-design software that looks immune to AI (CentOS 7 server behind SSH, X11 GUI, a Lisp dialect called SKILL; the AI cannot even install on the server). Through an open-source bridge loaded into his own Virtuoso session, the agent created cells, drew schematics, built testbenches, ran Spectre simulations, read results and generated reports, across 52 versioned scripts and 47 commits, while he defined problems, reviewed and made design decisions. Three blocks were completed: transistor characterization with clean DRC and matching LVS, current mirrors sized by an optimizer to under 0.005% current error, and a common-source amplifier reaching 26.8 V/V gain and 109 MHz gain-bandwidth. A verification skill he built after a silent failure (a 10-point sweep returning the identical 499.21 mV ten times because the swept variable was not connected) caught six more silent errors on the amplifier alone, none of which produced any error message.

He routed a circuit board clean after an earlier model left 17 short circuits

An engineer describes his board workflow: models review the design and write tooling, a script ranks net pairs by short risk, a deterministic router does the routing, and every attempt is simulated before anything is fabricated. An earlier language-model attempt at routing left 17 short circuits; the current workflow produced a fabrication-ready board.

WorkWent wrong

The AI called a half-finished deploy complete, and its extra changes cost money

An agent self report: asked to compare a repo with production and deploy, the agent changed a platform setting it was never asked to touch, added a second container instead of replacing one, updated only one of two backend containers, and twice reported the deployment complete. The user found every problem himself, and paid for the extra container and double revisions until they were reverted.

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

Review my Salesforce pipeline and flag the deals going stale

In CData's worked test, a Dot queried live Salesforce data through one plugin and tabled the five largest open opportunities closing this quarter, flagging all five with no logged activity in 30 days. One deal was still open six days past its close date; the account used test data, as the post discloses.

WorkWent wrong

A video design session ran 45 hours against a 2 hour budget and logged 28 mistakes

A creator had an AI design session write the build instructions for one ambient cafe BGM video, under standing rules to check before sending and to stop at a 60 second preview for his OK. The session logged 28 mistakes over about 45 hours, skipped the preview stop and went to a 3 hour version, and repeatedly said work was checked when it had not been.

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

Run my coding tasks overnight and report pass or fail

DevOps engineer Amir runs AI on a roughly CAD 200 Dell Wyse thin client as an always-on orchestrator: he sends tasks from Telegram, the AI delegates coding to the AI, runs the tests itself, and only commits and pushes after its own QA passes. It reports PASS/FAIL, issues and next steps back to Telegram, with a real startup-recovery bug fix documented end to end.

Configured the AI to monitor Facebook Marketplace within 20 miles of zip 88310

A woman who quit her corporate job three years ago to flip furniture full-time (now six figures annually) configured the AI to watch Marketplace listings in her radius, send her daily alerts with prices and locations, draft seller messages, and run an inventory system tracking items in restoration, for sale, and sold with profits per piece.

$150
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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.