Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Work

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

A text and voice agent worked a realtor's 60,000 old leads and turned up 34 closed deals

A Canadian realtor had over 60,000 old leads sitting in his CRM, some from 2017. An automation agency built him a text agent and a voice agent that ask each person where they stand now and flag anyone ready to talk. Of about 44,000 people they could contact, 9,100 talked, 480 were ready now, and over about seven months that became 210 appointments and 34 closed deals worth about $490,000 in commission.

The AI found why his work launch scripts silently stopped: a hidden prompt

His frontend launch scripts were failing with nothing in the logs. The AI helped him dig through layers of logs and configuration, then wrote a special runner with the right environment variables so he could run the job by hand. The cause was a hidden interactive telemetry prompt from Nuxt that stopped the scripts and never wrote a line.

Build a CRM for a company losing 70% of its quotes in scattered WhatsApp chats

Builder Omar Villalobos says a client was losing 70% of its quotes because everything lived in scattered WhatsApp chats, so he built three parts with AI: a WhatsApp-linked form that auto-updates a CRM instead of manual copying, a pipeline dashboard showing $1.28M at stake with follow-ups due and won deals, and an ROI calculator showing a client their investment, monthly gain and payback. No recovery of the lost quotes is claimed yet.

My brother replaced a $1,500 machine program with one the AI built in an hour

A man bought a used piece of industrial machinery and the $1,500 control software did not come with it. With no coding experience at all, he asked the AI on the web to build a control app, and in under an hour he had a working app packaged as a .deb file for Linux. It cost him nothing because he used his brother's AI subscription.

$1,500
WorkWent wrong

He bought $200 of extra credits to finish a job; a fan-out workflow drained them while most of its agents never ran

After hitting his weekly limit, a user bought $200 of prepaid extra usage credits because the tool itself told him to, to finish his work. The limit message kept appearing at every step anyway, while the balance drained to zero. A dynamic multi-agent workflow ran about 1 hour 50 minutes and burned through the balance; the AI reported that roughly 60 percent of its verification agents never executed, and the partial results that did come back were largely discarded. The $200 bought an incomplete verification.

$200at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

A roofing estimator’s system breaks down huge drawing sets, tags every fact, and checks his final number before it goes out

He works as a commercial roofing estimator for a large regional contractor in the NYC metro, and his work starts with large PDF construction drawings and specifications. Over eight months he built a system he calls Estimator-OS. Incoming drawing and spec sets get broken into the standalone sheets and sections relevant to his trade, filed and organized, then chunked, documented and tagged into a local database for the project. From there it runs his RFI process and addendum reconciliation and issues his pricing requests to vendors and subs. Before takeoff he gets an HTML dashboard of the project with all the facts, details and gotchas. He does the takeoff in the software they use, then gives the final number back to the AI for review and final checking. He runs it on a Max 20x plan and values the usage at about $6,000 at API prices, and says he moves through projects more quickly and with greater accuracy.

Friday filing: five months of desktop and downloads sorted without one wrong folder

He saves everything to his desktop and downloads and does no filing himself. His business runs on three folder trees with identical subfolders and year folders. Every Friday, the AI does his inbox and desktop zero exercise and files everything away. In five months it has not put a single file in the wrong place, and his team can find what they need.

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.

Our agent bought its owner an eSIM for Turkey, then got the money back

The owner asked ARGUS in Telegram to buy the cheapest eSIM for Turkey, approved with a yes, and got the QR code in the chat seconds later for 0.31 USDC. Thirty-four minutes later he asked for a refund because he had not installed it, approved again, and the 0.31 USDC came back after the seller checked the eSIM was unused.

$0.31
WorkPartly worked

He rebuilt a dead online exhibit and put it back at its old address

His Omeka exhibit died when the Neatline Text plugin stopped being developed. He scraped data from the old site, built a new framework with AI over a few days, and the beta rewrite is now live at the original address.

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

Build a calmer to-do app for my whole family

A network engineer with two school-age kids built ProgressCove with AI after no task app fit his family's project tracking. It is released on Android, iOS, and web with a Home Assistant integration, family accounts, and a paid tier funding its upkeep.

Show 10 more

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.