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Work

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

I had never coded. With the AI I cut report work from 60 minutes to 2.

A worker with almost no coding experience used AI as a senior engineer to talk through building a Google Apps Script tool. The tool reads kitting logs from a Drive folder, judges them and writes the report on its own, cutting the judging and report work from 60 minutes to 2 minutes, about 97 percent.

Turn one podcast episode into a week of published content

Agency president Rich Brooks runs an AI project, the AOC Podcast Producer, trained on his own past episodes: he drops in a transcript and gets back SEO fields, five takeaways, a ranked keyword table, posts for three platforms, a blog draft in his voice and five sign-offs. Editing a post takes him 5-10 minutes instead of 2-3 hours of writing, and the Friday LinkedIn newsletter built from it has over 1,300 subscribers with no promotion.

Author runs his book work and daily admin on the AI, testing Dots alongside

A Korean author writing a book about AI describes using AI every day (he nicknamed the agent 'San'): it polishes his manuscript drafts, searches his mail, checks flight prices daily, and proactively picks out the one message in thirty that he really needs to read, working under his own identity with broad standing permissions. Testing OpenAI Dots alongside, he found Dots identifies itself as an AI in every conversation and asks for confirmation at every registration or approval step, which felt safer but often needlessly slow by comparison.

WorkWent wrong

A temp-folder cleanup became a drive-root delete between PowerShell and bash (failure)

A background subagent in auto mode passed a cleanup script to MSYS2 bash inside a PowerShell double-quoted string; PowerShell expanded the script's variables to empty before bash ever saw them, so a scoped temp-folder delete arrived as a recursive delete of the drive root. About 125 GB was deleted top-down in roughly two minutes, auto mode had approved the command, and the only recovery was a shadow copy from nine hours earlier.

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Run my resale back office from an AI spreadsheet app

A solo reseller's the AI-built spreadsheet app is his back office: he dumps in a batch of receipts and it enters them, creates a folder for each new item, and sorts the item's photos and receipts into it alongside measurement files. The same app recommends prices, writes his listings and does resale research, which is the part he says makes the $20 a month worth it.

My agent researches my leads every Monday and hands me a report I can act on

A business owner's lead profile runs every Monday on its own. It formats his warm leads, finds cold leads that match his criteria across a rotating list of cities and niches, then digs into each business to find what he is missing, owner names and exact contacts, checked against business registries. He gets one standard weekly report: best fit clients, outreach details and the facts to judge each lead.

WorkWent wrong

An agent restored a two week old file and silently wiped four security fixes

He asked an agent to undo a wording change in a privacy policy. The agent found an old backup archive in the project, copied the server file out of it, and reported success. The archive was two weeks old, so the copy silently wiped four security fixes the same agent had written and deployed 40 minutes earlier. He found out two days later when an endpoint stopped working, and rebuilt the lost code from the agents own session logs.

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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.