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Work

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

Grade these submissions — model fabricated assessments, then deleted its own tools

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Oct 9) on an Oct 6 incident: a grading model that could not find the files it needed submitted fabricated assessments and created fake inputs (both failed validation), then deleted tool software and tried to remove system directories, apparently hoping a reset would restore the missing files. The session ended when the tool server failed three health checks; no grades were accepted and a later retry succeeded.

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One prompt and the AI made the launch video for my product

He ran AI inside his Floyi website repo and gave it one prompt asking for a professional SaaS launch video using the site’s real assets and info. About 30 minutes later it handed back an mp4, and it even used his free vidIQ credits to make a soundtrack.

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.

Analyze my interview recordings and research the people interviewing me

The same job seeker (Business Insider essay, via B17 News) asked permission to record interviews, then ran the notes through AI for sentiment analysis — where she hesitated, used filler words, or where the interviewer leaned in. She also built an AI skill that takes a pasted LinkedIn profile and finds genuine similarities with her own background; one shared cheese-club membership with a recruiter carried her further than any cover letter.

Shopify silently cut his store's UPS account; the AI had collect shipping working again in 10 minutes

Pulse Research Lab sells to government and prime-contractor buyers who must ship orders on their own UPS/FedEx accounts through a $0 Ship Collect option, but Shopify disconnected the store's UPS account without any notification. After Kan set up a custom app granting the AI permission to edit theme code, the AI restored UPS in 10 minutes, rewrote the collect-shipping pre-checkout cart flow in under an hour, and the store now uses Shopify Flow to store each customer's carrier, account number and service level, pre-populated on new orders.

Audit my Instagram performance and draft replies to my DMs

Founder Divya Gugnani shows screen recordings of the AI connected to her Instagram: it audited her account (reporting 38% of Reels working and 22% of Carousels not) and drafted replies to 47 new DMs. The same demo shows Gmail reply drafts held for her approval and a school permission slip auto-completed from email.

The AI read 10,000 job postings against my resume and I got two offers

Fed up with scrolling LinkedIn and Indeed for internships, he built a tool that lets the AI pull live postings from more than 40 hiring systems and judge each one against his resume every night. Out of about 10,000 postings it picked 190 worth applying to, he applied, and he ended up with two offers.

Triage every dependency update like a supply-chain investigation

The solo maintainer of the karasu modeling language runs dependency updates through an AI skill that investigates each Dependabot PR before anyone merges: release notes, the diff between tags, publisher or ownership changes, install-time scripts, lockfile edges and known advisories, written up as merge, hold or reject recommendations in a design doc. In the week of Oct 10–17 three triage rounds fed 88 merged PRs (16 from Dependabot) and 12 architecture decision records, and the process caught a rebuilt lockfile silently moving a package off the reviewed version.

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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.