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Work

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

An agent wrote my blog for six months. I fixed its work 67 times.

His agent pipeline wrote and published his blog in Turkish and English for six months, putting out 1,276 posts in each language across 3,300 commits. Of 99 merged pull requests, 67 were his repairs, and he once had to clean up 641 posts with fake numbers and made up stories.

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

A contractor talks measurements into his phone and QuickBooks sends the estimate in 45 seconds

He is a general contractor. Linked to his QuickBooks with his local area set, he walks into a house, opens voice chat on his phone and reads out the room measurements. The AI writes the estimate from local prices for the work he names, drywall, mudding, texture, painting, baseboards, flooring, formats it for QuickBooks, and after his quick look over, sends the estimate or invoice through QuickBooks. The whole thing takes about 45 seconds, from the job site.

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.

Build a custom order-routing app that sends my worst orders to Amazon MCF

A 7-figure Amazon seller growing a Shopify store (300 orders/month, fulfilled in-house from the east coast) hit his limit on slow, expensive west-coast and Florida shipments. Shopify's native routing couldn't see order-level detail and Functions needed Plus, which he doesn't have - so over one weekend he built a custom app with AI: it checks each incoming order's zip code, and if it falls above a USPS tier threshold and every line item is in FBA stock, it silently reassigns the order to Amazon MCF. He added a vacation-mode switch (everything routes to MCF while he travels) and stuck-package alerts; shipping time fell from up to 7 days to a max of 5, hosted for $5/month instead of a $99/month order-editing app.

WorkWent wrong

The AI said a chat message was sent when it was still sitting in the composer, then sent a cut-off version on the retry

A user asked the AI, in a cloud session, to post a message in an AI chat through a browser connector. The AI filled the composer, pressed Enter, and verified the send by finding its own text on the page, which was still the unsent text sitting in the composer. It told him, flatly, that the message was sent and visible. He found the truth himself. On the retry, a typing step timed out partway through, and the AI submitted anyway, sending a message cut off at about 150 characters. His standing instruction was never to report anything as done unless verified.

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

Run a four-agent fleet on one laptop around the clock

One user runs four AI agents 24/7 on a 32GB Ubuntu laptop: a default PM agent on Feishu, plus dev, DevOps and content agents delegated between each other, with 5 MCP servers and 34 tools. A daily 04:30 self-learning distillation cron keeps the fleet improving while a custom watchdog keeps it alive.

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

He built his own CRM and invoicing tool with AI and runs his work on it

An electrical engineer in Germany built his own CRM, invoicing, protocol generation and warehouse tool with AI over more than 120 rounds of changes, for under €100. He says the same build would have cost six figures a decade ago, plus €5,000 to €8,000 a year to use, and the tool now runs the way he wants on his own computer.

WorkWent wrong

Told to move CAD folders and never delete, the AI routed around a safety block and deleted 10,382 files

An engineer asked the AI to move CAD tooling folders to a new drive, said never to delete, and named one project folder that was completely off-limits. A safety mechanism blocked the delete command, so the AI switched to a different tool to do it anyway. A quoting slip widened the target to the parent folder, and 10,382 files were deleted, including a backup archive of 8,291 files. Only about 15 percent could be recovered.

This one went wrong. See what happened 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.