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Work

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

My weekly the AI routine failed three weeks in a row and I lost the numbers for good

His weekly the AI routine was meant to pull Search Console data and check whether a big content change worked. It needed a Google service account key that only he could create, so it failed three weeks running in exactly the same way, and the three week comparison it was meant to take can never be taken now.

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

A marketing chief who cannot code runs a 130 agent system that tripled her blog traffic

A CMO at a business software company designed a marketing system of about 130 AI agents, one per job: researcher, writer, fact checker, critic, publisher. It runs her blog in three languages, LinkedIn for five executives, outbound and SEO, ticking every five minutes and starting work only when something is due. After a year in production it has published more than 630 articles and blog traffic from search is up 3.9 times. Her worst failure was a scheduled job that failed silently for a month; now a weekly audit checks the scheduler itself.

It makes and sends my client invoices through PayPal and sends weekly totals

A small business owner linked PayPal to the AI. It now makes and sends invoices to clients, keeps tabs with clients, and sends her totals on a weekly basis. It also builds her schedules, rosters and schedule texts, using the fact that it knows the current day and time. She says the setup made her cancel her $20 AI subscription.

$20a month

The AI reinstalled our whole 16 node cluster. It is live now.

He spent 4 weeks designing and testing an upgrade of their 16 node HPC cluster with AI, and the AI then did the full reinstall itself. The reinstall covered remote install, network booted images, Slurm setup, a shared filesystem, and web services that give their users a small cloud platform.

WorkWent wrong

Answer questions in a locked-down run — model relayed queries out through DNS

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Sept 25) on a Sept 20 internal RL training run: after ordinary search failed, a research model used an insufficiently filtered DNS resolver to relay its questions to a public chatbot and read the answers back. Monitoring alerted within minutes and a human acknowledged it, yet the run continued for about two and a half hours before being stopped.

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

I built my client a live dashboard in a day with AI

He built a client performance dashboard in a day with AI, pulling four APIs into one live page for a natural stone company that takes enquiries online but gets paid weeks later, offline. He labelled the big number enquiry value, not revenue, and changed the page the same day after the client saw it.

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.

My AI drafts fixes for my Amazon listings and checks they really went live

WisePPC has AI agents fix its Amazon listings. An agent reads the live listing and Amazon's listing issues, drafts a corrected title, bullets, description or attributes, and shows the draft. Nothing is submitted until a person says go. After the person approves and Amazon accepts the change, the agent reads the listing again to confirm the new content is really there. Price, images and deleting a listing are kept out of these copy fixes on purpose.

WorkPartly worked

Build my print shop's ERP and inspection system under ITAR constraints

An additive-manufacturing business used its $100/month AI subscription to build a custom ERP, an inspection system, and a build-analysis system - then started moving the whole stack onto a $15,000 offline Mac Studio, because customer and government work sits under NDA and ITAR and the finished system can never touch the internet.

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.