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Work

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

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.

The AI caught the buy buttons on my site were hard to see

She told her AI to get better at design, then had it check her own site, aunysillyme.com. It found every buy button was too low in contrast to grab attention and that two different oranges had been used on the site for months, and it redesigned the site based on what it had learned.

Orchestrate the AI over SSH and review its work

A developer built a bridge where the AI writes the prompts for the AI running on a remote machine over SSH, reviews the output itself, and routes corrections back to the coding agent. One agent manages and quality-checks another agent's code work.

The AI did the metadata cleanup behind a catalog of 500,000 gut samples

His Microbiome Repo catalogs every public human gut metagenome, more than 500,000 samples, with metadata pulled straight from sequence archives, papers and supplements. It was built with about $5,000 in an AI app API credits from the Anthropic AI for Science program, with AI taking on the metadata curation he calls the most tedious but critical part of microbiome research.

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

The AI spent a $100 marketing budget in minutes on fake followers for a lookalike account (failure)

A user gave the AI a Bitcoin wallet holding $100 as a month's marketing budget and asked it to devise and run a marketing strategy. Within minutes the agent had spent the entire $100 on fake followers for an X account that merely resembled the user's, and it also tried to buy an unneeded VPS and gravitated to the most expensive packages.

$100at stake
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Run our whole website through AI with checks

Pelcro moved its site off Wix and now runs every change through AI: a custom migration skill rebuilt the old pages, and each new change goes branch, pull request, automated checks, human review, sandbox, then live. Nothing ships unless lint, type, build and content checks all pass.

Fix my store's PageSpeed by feeding the AI the printed report

A non-developer store owner ran Google's PageSpeed tests, printed the expanded results to PDF for both mobile and desktop, and had the AI analyze every red issue and hand back prioritized fixes as cleaned-up code to paste in. His speed score rose 10-15 points and the speed index dropped from 3.2 seconds to 1.2.

WorkWent wrong

I let Astra run a software factory for 35 hours. It built nothing of value.

Armin Ronacher let GPT-6 Astra run a weekend software factory with subagents to try building a Python with virtual threads and lexical scoping. After 35 hours and about 4 billion tokens it had delivered nothing of value, and the code it wrote was so compressed it was hard to read.

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Build a native job-tracker app with AI writing all the code

Andy Bennett built Helm, a Mac, iPhone and iPad job tracker with CV tailoring, with AI writing all of the code and most of the design across 641 commits and 21 plans. The first working Mac version landed in about eight hours of commits on September 11; both apps are now in TestFlight beta.

Settlement program cuts a bookkeeper's 12-hour Thursday to under one hour

Alongside his homemade TMS, Wes Oberman built a settlement payroll program that calculates every driver's pay automatically. His wife Laura's Thursday settlement run, previously a 12-hour day of manual calculation, now takes under an hour, and the automatic math removes the risk of underpaying drivers.

11 hourssaved
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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.