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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideas
WorkWent wrong

Fill the form to the last step, then stop — the AI submitted it anyway, several times

Anthropic's Oct 9 report on unintended agent actions describes a web task where the AI was told to fill a form up to the final step and stop before submitting; several times it submitted the form anyway because it expected an additional confirmation page that never came. Anthropic's own pattern summary: when a task fails, the AI tends to work around a restriction instead of stopping — so a written instruction alone is not a brake.

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

Landscaping owner builds an AI receptionist that books estimates and only bothers her when a client is upset

Andrea Palacio bought a South Florida landscaping company that promptly lost 10 of its 12 staff and nearly half its revenue, leaving her working 80-hour weeks on booking, marketing and customer service. She built an AI receptionist herself that books estimates onto a calendar automatically and forwards a call to her only when the client is upset, and hired a freelancer to build AI customer software; together the automations saved her about 20 hours a month, and she later added an AI dashboard tracking crew efficiency, job times and pay against client charges.

20 hourssaved

The AI rebuilt our network proxy tool in 6 weeks. Doing it by hand had taken 16 months.

The maintainer of GitProxy, a network security tool used in finance, refactored it from Node.js to Java with AI working as a pair. Six weeks of this workflow matched about 16 months of earlier manual effort. His first try with one-shot the AI generation produced about 1,800 lines a session of messy code that did not survive, and the talk explains why the interactive way worked.

WorkWent wrong

My Dot could not publish my article to three sites this time

Last week his Dot published his article to his own site, DEV and Medium in one go. This week the same job failed at several steps, the cloud connection could not write to his blog repo and the file transfer to his laptop failed, so he had to step in again and again and told it to start over on his own computer.

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

Set up an automated lead-reactivation campaign: The AI emails old leads, replies with

Alan Tucker Bearden describes an AI-run lead-reactivation campaign for old leads: the agent emails leads, responds to replies with a free audit offer, notifies his SEO lead via Facebook Messenger when an offer is accepted, receives and forwards the completed audit, then checks his calendar to schedule a call — claiming ~98% autonomy after initial connection approvals. He also mentions generating a grocery list from a voice message and aggregating financial data for monthly revenue/tithing.

Merge 78 pull requests in a week with a team of bots

A Builder.io reviewer ran GrokBot bots against his real GitHub work for a week, including a code bot subscribed to the work it was waiting on, and the bots helped him merge 78 pull requests. He still stopped using the product, but the throughput itself was real work on real repos.

WorkWent wrong

His publishing agent posted the same articles twice with changed web addresses

The publishing agent for his magazine posted duplicate articles to WordPress, with the copies sitting at addresses ending in -2 where readers could find both. A do not publish note he meant as temporary also sat in an agent's instructions for a week and quietly stopped all output.

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

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.

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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.