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Work

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

A small German studio runs its day to day work through AI

Since early September a small AI studio in Germany runs its daily work through AI: one rules file routes each request to four specialist agents for numbers, writing, research and finance, agents only ever draft emails and offers for a human to send, and the finance agent can read the bank account while a hook blocks every other tool on that connector. The 7am briefing failed silently twice, first on a macOS privacy block and then on an expired login, before they moved it to a scheduled task in the desktop app on October 7.

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

Clean my giant inbox by sender — trash only, never delete, undo everything

Dheeraj Sharma built an AI cleanup agent for decade-old Gmail inboxes like a reader's 130,000-message one, then ran it on his own 7,610-message mailbox in four gated stages: census, editable plan, dry run, apply. One approved run moved 2,896 newsletter and notification emails to Trash in 107 seconds (unread fell from 5,013 to 2,237), with deletion impossible by design and every change logged for a one-command undo.

59-year-old non-coder's the AI posts 95 times a week across six accounts

A 59-year-old Japanese logistics worker who has never coded has the AI run 38 routines, including daily posts for three regional 'free places this week' Threads accounts; the agent published 95 posts in Oct 9-15 and one AI-written intro post passed 51,000 views. He reviews output five minutes morning and evening from his 4.5-hour commute.

WorkWent wrong

The AI’s plot said 57 down. The picture showed thousands. I caught it by eye.

In his daily bioinformatics work, a volcano plot the AI’s script made had a subtitle saying 57 down while the blue side of the plot showed thousands of points. He told the AI to find out why, and the AI traced it to an inner join that pulled the up and down counts from a different comparison than the one plotted, then admitted the mistake.

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

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

Find plumbing leads with no website and pitch angles

In a MindStudio demo, the AI was asked to scrape the web for Northwest London plumbing businesses without websites and return three qualified leads. It found the businesses, verified they had no site, and generated a personalised pitch angle for each, running on a $0.24/hour CPU instance.

Three agents run the social accounts for his API business

His company runs three coordinated agents on its product account: one watches mentions and a watchlist, one writes posts and replies, and one controls quality. Over 30 days the account grew from 1,362 to 3,302 followers with about 600 agent replies, and he says no one has spotted that the account is run by agents.

My Dot runs my photo business day to day

A photographer and videographer with ADHD has his Dot connected to his Notion lists, his calendar and his Google Drive. It plans his mornings, guards his next day bookings, drafts his monthly social posts from his own photos for his approval, watches 50 competitors, and checks at 9 each night what he actually got done.

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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.