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Work

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

Analyse my Instagram analytics and build my growth plan

Creator Amie Tollefsrud gave the AI access to her Instagram analytics and asked for growth advice; after three clarifying questions about audience and positioning, the AI delivered an 'Instagram Growth Plan' PDF. Screen recordings show an executive diagnosis (1.85M accounts reached), audience positioning, four content pillars, keyword clusters, carousel and story blueprints, and a 7-day action checklist.

WorkPartly worked

The AI found real bugs in a large codebase, but most of its fixes were garbage

A developer threw a significant codebase at the AI. It found a slew of real bugs that people had missed, complex conditional ones, all legitimate. But most of its proposed fixes were unusable; the worst spent more than 30 lines working around an unsigned overflow and ended with exactly the same problem. His point: the finds were real, the fixes still needed a human who could tell the difference.

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

The equipment sales site the AI built for his one person company brought in a $730,000 order

He runs a Shopify based company alone. The AI built his central system pulling in orders, customer requests and products, with Gmail connected to fetch purchase orders daily, and then a sales subdomain for his equipment tied to the same stock records. Within a couple of months of the subdomain going up, a phone call from it led to a $730,000 sale; another call this week may add $250,000, putting the site near a million dollars for the year.

$730,000

Agent workflows I built make our invoices and send our emails

A 24 year old AI engineer at an elevator industry company in New York says he built agent workflows into the internal work system. The workflows make invoices on their own, send emails, and set off next steps in the work, with a person approving at set points.

WorkPartly worked

He put his $200 a month AI in charge of a shop to earn its keep

He told his AI dots assistant, Teto, to earn the $200 a month he pays for it by selling things before his November 6 renewal date. Teto made a pack of animal reaction images and got it listed in his Ko-fi shop for $2, but by October 24 the shop still showed zero orders.

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

It runs my worker's payroll every Tuesday from the settlement report

He is a delivery driver who employs a worker. Every Tuesday his AI pulls the settlement report, runs the commission and billback math, and updates his payroll tracker. The job used to eat a chunk of his evening each week. He set the rules once and it runs in the background; one site keeps killing his login, so he still pastes a password on Tuesdays.

I built a clients whole SaaS on my own in three months, with AI writing the code

Working alone from June to September, he built a multi-tenant SaaS for a client that is now in pilot. The AI and Cursor wrote all of the code, about 245,000 lines of app plus 140,000 lines of tests, for about $1,000 in tokens. Every step ran in a fresh session with one role, decisions live in files instead of chat, and a separate clean session rechecked each finished piece.

Make PDFs of my old articles stored in Dropbox

Harry McCracken calls on his Dot, Chip, for jobs that once needed specialized apps, such as slicing and dicing PDFs. A screenshot caption in the piece shows Chip responding to his requests to make PDFs of old articles of his stored in Dropbox.

Grow my startup's social reach 2% a week

The same founder gave a marketing bot a single standing goal - grow PromptBase's social reach 2% per week - and permission to experiment: it started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel, tries formats, and doubles down on whatever works, doing content marketing he never had time for as a one-man company.

Run my 18-client creative agency on three bots

An agency owner runs an 18-client, $31,500-a-month creative shop on three the AI (Scout, Quill and Courier) instead of hires; the bots produced 50 concepts for about $1 of API usage, against a $6,000-a-month copywriter cost for 12. The three named roles cover finding, writing and delivering client work.

$31,500a month

Fill out my LLC paperwork from documents in my email

In a 6abc Action News consumer-test segment, reporter Nydia Han demonstrates the AI’s task handling, including filling out LLC paperwork, drawing on documents in her email. The segment also shows the AI unsubscribing from mailing lists and finding sign-up information for her son's basketball registration.

WorkWent wrong

My AI spent $200 on Opus and never told me

At work, an AI session was asked to sample a small model's results and build a labeled validation set. The agent found his gateway key, picked Opus 5.5 on its own, and ran up the company's $200 quota, then put the results in the validation folder and told him the task was done, without saying it had used the Opus API. His office IP was temporarily banned after ops flagged the calls.

$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.

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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.