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Work

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

Write my boutique's strategies and watch my numbers for me

April Polk, founder of Columbus clothing brand JaeLuxe Shoetique and a solo operator with no employees, runs her AI (named Chase) plugged into QuickBooks, Klaviyo and Canva. She told the New York Post: Chase revamped her brand guidelines, overhauled her website, corrected her email flows, writes her strategies and looks at her numbers, telling her when she needs to change something or put more funds behind it. Polk was one of 35 owners Meta invited to test the product pre-launch.

The AI built a searchable idea finder for my own site, in my own styles

Diana ran her own Website Builder Skill in an AI app inside her site files and asked for an idea finder for her article listing 25 ways to use AI. The AI read the article and her live stylesheet, worked out her colours and fonts on its own, placed the finder right after the article links, and kept all 25 ideas searchable and filterable. It tested the result in a headless browser against her live styles and found no style changes across the 453 elements on the page.

Landscaping owner builds an AI receptionist that books estimates and only bothers her when a client is upset

Andrea Palacio bought a South Florida landscaping company that promptly lost 10 of its 12 staff and nearly half its revenue, leaving her working 80-hour weeks on booking, marketing and customer service. She built an AI receptionist herself that books estimates onto a calendar automatically and forwards a call to her only when the client is upset, and hired a freelancer to build AI customer software; together the automations saved her about 20 hours a month, and she later added an AI dashboard tracking crew efficiency, job times and pay against client charges.

20 hourssaved
WorkWent wrong

The AI re-ran its document script and wiped out 40 minutes of his Word edits

A session generated a Word document with a script. The user then edited the document in Word for about 40 minutes and saved. When he asked for one more change, the session re-ran its script, which rebuilt the whole file from its older in-memory content and replaced the file on disk. His 40 minutes of edits were unrecoverable, because the write went through the shell, where the tool’s read-before-write protection does not apply.

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

He built his company's whole strategy planning tool alone in under a month after the VP found the bought ones too expensive

His VP of engineering reviewed two or three strategy tools on the market and they were prohibitively expensive, so he asked if it could be built instead. He built it alone in less than a month: long term objectives broken down into annual objectives, improvement priorities, projects, milestones and tasks, with bowler charts tracking the KPIs, full project management tools, and containerized staging, development and production environments. It cost roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in an AI app credits. The VP then put his own name all over it, and made him replace his own name in the about section with the name of the organization.

I built an online game on a Raspberry Pi between farm jobs. It made $3,000.

A New Zealand sheep farmer who had only made small scripts before installed the AI on a Raspberry Pi server and, over more than 1,000 prompts, built a working online game with a persistent world and real players. In its first three months it took about $3,000 from paying customers, and he still runs it from the farm.

$3,000

The AI rebuilt the Jupyter kernel I use every day

He used Deno's Jupyter kernel all the time for exploring TypeScript libraries and automations, and was going to miss it. He pointed the AI at the problem and the result is cdp-kernel, Deno's Jupyter kernel extracted to run notebooks on any V8 runtime, now on GitHub.

WorkPartly worked

My dot turned my meeting notes into a follow up and sent it

Diana asked her dot Sparky to turn a real meeting record into decisions, owners, dates and a follow up message, and told it not to invent commitments and not to send anything yet. It invented nothing, but the follow up came back as plain chat text, and she had to ask twice before it made a send ready draft. When she told it to send, it sent at once.

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

Agent workflows I built make our invoices and send our emails

A 24 year old AI engineer at an elevator industry company in New York says he built agent workflows into the internal work system. The workflows make invoices on their own, send emails, and set off next steps in the work, with a person approving at set points.

I gave an agent a server and $90. A month later it had taken in over $2,600.

He set up an agent called Cairn on a small rented server with about $90 in a wallet that needs both their signatures to move. The agent built its own website, keeps a public journal and ledger, wrote a manual on running agents like itself, and made over $2,600 in a month from paid questions, book sales, audit work for other agent owners and donations.

$2,600
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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.