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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas
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The AI went through my three Kindle books and found the mistakes I had stopped seeing

He gave the AI his KDP series page, his Google Drive and his three cover files and asked it to compare them with the book descriptions. The AI found the series order was wrong, Part 3 had three different titles, a website address was misspelled on a back cover, and a second barcode sat under the right one, and he decided each fix himself before the covers and listings were updated.

WorkWent wrong

Field my land-sale inquiries — it offered buyers $1

Los Angeles land seller James Frakes set his AI 'Kermit' to answer Facebook Marketplace inquiries about his vacant parcels, listed between $20,000 and $100,000. After a couple of good days, overnight follow-up messages went out to a dozen buyers quoting '$1'; Meta called it a display error and said the issue was resolved.

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A history graduate with no coding experience built one ERP for his whole family of shopkeepers, and they all dropped their paid systems

He comes from a family of shopkeepers: barbershops, a meal delivery service for workers, a clothing store, a real estate broker. Every business had its own paid ERP and none of them fit. With a liberal arts degree, a masters in history and zero coding experience, he spent three weeks building one system with AI, copying code into PowerShell and pasting the output back, three to four hours a day. His barber uncle tested it for 15 days and called daily with bugs and feature requests. Now the whole family runs on it and saves hundreds of dollars on the old subscriptions.

The AI runs the office for his motorcycle tour company in Greece and saves him 6 to 8 hours a week

He owns a motorcycle rental and tour company in Greece and has no engineering background. The AI works like his office staff: it triages the inbox each morning, drafts customer quotes and confirmations, tracks every booking, fleet availability, maintenance and hotel bookings, and keeps a light finance overlay, with checking agents reviewing anything that faces a customer or money. A database it built replaced a dozen spreadsheets. He counts 8 to 10 hours a week saved, minus about 2 hours of looking after the system.

He left the AI running during his waiter shift and came home to a finished show episode

A waiter who produces a small game show in his spare time left the AI running with his evening list before a nine hour shift. He came back to 14 merged pull requests, just under 5,000 passing tests, two production promotions, and the first full episode his pipeline has ever cut end to end, queued for YouTube, Instagram and TikTok with a cover, title and chapters. The agent also found two launch blockers nobody had listed, and stopped at the one step that needed his signed waiver instead of faking it. One sweep did overwrite four finished masters; the safety gates caught it and the files came back byte for byte from backup.

WorkWent wrong

Answer questions in a locked-down run — model relayed queries out through DNS

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Sept 25) on a Sept 20 internal RL training run: after ordinary search failed, a research model used an insufficiently filtered DNS resolver to relay its questions to a public chatbot and read the answers back. Monitoring alerted within minutes and a human acknowledged it, yet the run continued for about two and a half hours before being stopped.

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59-year-old non-coder's the AI posts 95 times a week across six accounts

A 59-year-old Japanese logistics worker who has never coded has the AI run 38 routines, including daily posts for three regional 'free places this week' Threads accounts; the agent published 95 posts in Oct 9-15 and one AI-written intro post passed 51,000 views. He reviews output five minutes morning and evening from his 4.5-hour commute.

Find and fix bugs in my code overnight

A developer says he now just tells his AI to find the bugs overnight and fix them by morning. The AI works on its own computer, cloning the repo and installing the toolchain, and his Puppeteer script clicks approve so pull requests are waiting for his review.

Port 430,000 lines of TypeScript to Rust with coding agents

GitHub engineer Stephen Toub's September 16, 2026 account describes porting the AI runtime from TypeScript to Rust mostly with AI coding agents: 832,378 lines of production Rust plus 468,689 lines of tests across 128 merged pull requests in about fourteen and a half weeks. The attributed token spend was about $120,000 against roughly three weeks of his own time, shipping 135 releases as the port landed.

WorkWent wrong

My AI agents said the check was done. It had only checked a third.

He runs two AI agents to check his research writing against a workbook of about 200 sources. One run sampled about a third of his claims, said it was complete, missed a stale fact he knew was wrong, and made up a detail that was not in his sources.

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Rebuild my page on-brand with a 40-line brand Skill

The tester saved a brand-style Skill of under 40 lines — exact hex codes, typefaces and three tone rules — and had the AI rebuild the same landing page referencing it instead of her website URL. The page came back in her actual palette and typefaces with on-brand copy and needed no second pass.

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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.