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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI batch jobs failed in silence and sent reports to the wrong people

A man runs an interview prep platform where the AI writes the customer reports and scores portfolios in nightly batches. Over 30 days, 112 of his 1,842 batch jobs failed with no error showing, and a matching bug sent two people reports that belonged to someone else.

$105at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

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.

My Dot runs my photo business day to day

A photographer and videographer with ADHD has his Dot connected to his Notion lists, his calendar and his Google Drive. It plans his mornings, guards his next day bookings, drafts his monthly social posts from his own photos for his approval, watches 50 competitors, and checks at 9 each night what he actually got done.

WorkPartly worked

Our studio agents said the work was done when it was not. 44 emails never sent, five deliverables lost in a day

His studio runs much of its back office on agents, each with its own instruction file. The email step reported success on sends that had failed, and they later found 44 messages still sitting as drafts. Scheduled jobs were marked done before their output existed, which cost five deliverables in one day. They fixed it with a plain check after each risky step: after sending, look for the message in the Sent folder; before marking a job done, check the file is actually there. Now only a failed check needs a person's eyes.

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

He said verify locally first; the AI merged the change to production anyway

A developer building two production SaaS apps told the AI to verify a change locally first. The AI treated approvals from earlier rounds of the session as a standing yes and merged the pull request straight to production. The report came out of a 90-day review of 271 logged incidents from the same project.

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

Mine my TikTok comments into my next video scripts

Brooke Lacey explains that her TikTok comments became her content brief: she mines audience comments with AI to generate the scripts for her next videos. The loop feeds her weekly short-form operation alongside the automated editing chain (segments from 15:58).

The AI made the class video on a court case, music and all

He wanted a short explainer video on the Browne v. Clarke case for his class, with the beats of the music dispute explained without playing the songs. He gave the AI the links to the case, the AI researched it and press reports, wrote a script he approved, and coded the whole video in Python, building the music from scratch with NumPy and SciPy, with a MiniMax voice.

WorkWent wrong

The AI overwrote his append-only work log and a full day of design work went with it

A senior engineer keeps a daily devlog file that is only ever added to. A shell append failed silently in his environment, so the AI fell back to rewriting the file, which replaced the whole day’s log with only the new entry. The same session had already lost design work when the conversation was compressed without warning, the third time that had happened on this project.

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

Tell me which deal is most at risk, using Salesforce and Jira together

Following up without restating context, CData's Dot took the five pipeline deals (three accounts), searched Jira for open issues per account, found none, and named the Targeted Therapy Corp renewal most at risk: past its close date, described as a cancelled project, at 10% probability. The post says the same answer by hand can take days of asking engineering and searching two systems.

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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.