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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas
WorkPartly worked

An agent runs a social account end to end and the honest numbers are flat

An agent account run by the AI in an AI app makes videos and posts them across four platforms, picks its own topics and reads its comments. Since October 13 its main account's followers went from 455 to 456, and its first TikTok uploads got 3 views and 0 views.

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

Make claude.ai three times faster in a two-week agent sprint

Reporting Anthropic's September 23 engineering post, this analysis describes the AI running a two-week performance sprint from a Slack channel: 150-plus threads, benchmarks built for each bottleneck, and more than 3,000 merged changes with no customer-facing incident. Time to a typeable page at the 75th percentile fell from 3.1 seconds to 0.55, with a human approving every pull request.

WorkPartly worked

I gave it 30 days to make $100 from nothing; on day one it shipped a live game deals service

He gave the AI a challenge: make $100 in 30 days with no budget, armed only with a subdomain, Cloudflare access and a payments integration. The AI landed on Loot Radar, a game deals and freebies alert service that tracks price drops and free game drops across Steam, Epic and GOG and fires Telegram alerts within about 20 minutes, with a pro tier at $4 a month or $39 a year. The site is live and taking sign ups, payments wired. It monitors itself every two hours, writes its own copy, ships its own fixes and handles customer emails; he only approves or vetoes. The $100 itself had not landed yet on day one, so the outcome is partial.

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

The AI revived four shelved papers and got them ready to submit

A mathematician with more than a dozen finished but never submitted papers pulled out four of them and shared them with AI. The AI caught errors, built a spreadsheet comparing his new concepts against related papers, converted plain TeX to LaTeX, wrote abstracts he adopted almost word for word, and fixed bibliography entries unprompted. All four papers improved to the point where he submitted them.

WorkWent wrong

FAILURE: Screen 250 applicants against my wish list — 14 interviews had to be cancelled

Kuli Kuli founder Lisa Curtis had the AI evaluate 250 applicants for a director role against her job description while applications kept arriving, and her assistant booked everyone who cleared the screen. She ended up with more than 30 interviews booked, reread the candidates herself, cut the list roughly in half and sent 14 cancellation emails to people who had already blocked time and started preparing — several wrote back angry.

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

Built a 'Piggy Bank' agent that scans Messenger, Instagram, email, and card

Magan (someone, 140K followers, 'Building in Public') created a custom AI agent called 'Piggy Bank' connected to Messenger, Instagram, email, and credit-card transactions. It scans sources to find all subscriptions (which she can cancel), reads Instagram DM chat history to track brand-deal payments, and generates a ledger showing how much she's owed, plus spending insights and payment reminders.

He built his own YouTube studio with AI and it cuts his filming for him

A creator who could not afford an editor paid for the AI Max and built his own post production studio, about 31,000 lines of code. Its smart cutting takes his raw filming and builds a DaVinci Resolve timeline for him, saving about 95% of the cutting time, and it also generates shorts and uploads with titles, descriptions, chapters and tags.

WorkWent wrong

A batch file the AI wrote deleted 1,068 files in my project

The AI wrote a Windows batch helper as a UTF-8 file with LF line endings. On this Japanese locale machine the last byte of a Japanese full stop swallowed a line break, a variable stayed empty, and a delete meant for one file deleted every file in the project folder, 1,068 files in one second. 123 files could not be recovered.

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

Turn my blog posts into finished short-form videos

The same studio's agent Timmy orchestrates more than 20 tools to turn blog posts into short videos: Veo generates scenes, ElevenLabs synthesises a custom voice, and automated captioning, lip sync and final assembly finish the piece. The pipeline runs inside the studio's normal the AI production setup.

A $200-a-month six-bot desk instead of a $58k hire

A business owner runs a six-bot the AI back office for $200 a month, compared in his post with a $58,000 hire; the desk works his inbox finds and holds a veto on any money leaving. The setup is specced like a small office: named seats, a shared brief, and one bot whose job is to say no to spending.

$200a month
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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.