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

Update all 12 pages of my website in three minutes

Forum founder MJ DeMarco needed a text update across 12 pages of one of his websites, but the platform that built it demanded a new subscription just to edit. He gave the AI access to the site folder instead; it made all the changes in about 3 minutes, avoiding an estimated hour of manual editing and a $20/month subscription.

$20a month

Build websites for local businesses and pitch them as a side hustle

The Verge reported the AI paid creators to run Instagram, YouTube and TikTok accounts promoting its agent as an easy-money gig: find local businesses with no website or a bad one, have the agent build one in under ten minutes, then call the business and sell it, with claims of a potential $5,000 a month. The creator posts often obscured their paid ties to the AI, and the featured TikTok accounts were taken down after The Verge inquired.

WorkPartly worked

Ask the AI what in my 1,412 unread emails actually needs me

Josh Dubowsky connected the AI to his Gmail and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds and five were right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attendance at an October event he had explicitly declined — the summary had dropped the word 'unfortunately'. Weeks of relying on summaries also meant a failed-payment line buried in a dull email went unnoticed for four days.

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

Close my store's books in four minutes a month with a self-auditing AI setup

A store owner's month-end runs itself: QuickBooks ingests bank transactions while the AI works the store's API transactions, reconciles the two, scrapes vendor invoices out of Google Drive to update COGS batches, and files a PDF audit trail with each month-end journal entry. Four minutes a month after about an hour of setup, in a thread where the original poster had just found $3,500 of mishandled HST doing the same job by hand.

$20a month
WorkWent wrong

Always-on bots burn $100 deciding they have nothing to tell me

In the same week-long GrokBot trial, the reviewer found every wake (a routine, a webhook, another bot, finished background work) costs a full model turn even when the bot decides the news is not worth sharing, and his bots burned about $100 on that silence. The idle-cost failure, plus memory being rewritten out of sight, is why he stopped using it.

$100a week
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

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.

WorkPartly worked

A hacker deleted my 16 years of newsletters. The AI helped me get almost all of it back.

Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.

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