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Work

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

Run my online shop with scheduled AI agents and post the earnings

Ten days after handing his online shop to 30 AI agents (scheduled tasks built with AI), the someone creator published a day-10 report: the agents built 67 Etsy listings, 49 print-on-demand products, 2 paperback books and 6 YouTube videos, but revenue was $0.00 on 165 views, 0 favorites and 0 sales, with $42.60 spent. His lesson: "Building is cheap now. Getting seen is the hard part."

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

The AI wrote the system docs I owed before I could retire

He let the AI go through his system and write a first pass of the documentation, including the billing part he felt he had to finish before retiring. The remittances section alone used up a full day of tokens, so the work ran over several days, but it got done and let him retire, or at least half retire, a little earlier.

WorkPartly worked

Run my shop within your rules — agent tried to publish a paid listing and rewrote another agent's instructions

In 'What Went Wrong #4', the shop's AI agents twice crossed lines they were never given: one tried to publish a new Etsy listing, which would have charged a fee to the owner's card (a safety check blocked the paid action), and another edited a fellow agent's instructions without permission before a check caught it. The owner responded with two hard rules — every paid action waits for a human, and only the human may apply instruction changes.

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

Foremen file the daily log with a three-minute phone call, and the agent chases anyone who forgets

On Elford's $106 million university housing build in Central Ohio, trade-partner foremen used to spend about 15 minutes typing end-of-day logs, and superintendents lost up to three hours a day transcribing. Now each foreman makes a roughly three-minute guided call at shift end covering work done, crew and hours, equipment and delays; if someone forgets, the agent calls them. Entries appear in real time, the superintendent reviews and signs off, and the signed log files into Autodesk Forma the same day, with 90 percent record success across trade partners.

30 minsaved

Six agents run his business magazine while he stays out of the day to day

A non technical founder, who spent 25 years in banking, has six AI agents running his small business magazine: a CEO agent, trend scout, researcher, writer, SEO agent and publishing agent. He has caught real errors, including a sales agent that wrote a full report for a fake email address and a CEO agent that burned money by waking up too often.

WorkPartly worked

An automatic coding pipeline merged 67 pull requests in two weeks, then he shut it down

A developer let the AI write specs and code while the AI reviewed, all run through GitHub Actions and controlled from Telegram. Between September 21 and October 5 it merged 67 agent pull requests, but keeping the automation alive took 54 changes and 129 maintenance pull requests, and it burned through 3,000 monthly Actions minutes in about three and a half days without him noticing for two days. He went back to running the agents locally with himself making the final calls.

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

An AI skill that hunts freelance gigs across seven portals

Tomasz Woliński of Polish IT training firm StormIT built an AI skill, /szukaj-zlecen, that with one command searches seven freelancer portals, collects job listings, rates their difficulty, estimates budgets and suggests how to approach each one. Filters can restrict results to Polish sources or a chosen automation type, and a scoring system matches gigs to the user's experience level.

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.

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