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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideas
WorkPartly worked

An AI searches for jobs while I sleep

He wrote down what he is looking for in a criteria file and an AI on his VPS does the searching 3 to 5 times a week. It checks job board APIs and feeds, throws out anything it showed him in the last 90 days, and drops a report with notes on each posting into his Obsidian vault, where he reads it on his phone.

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

Build me an autonomous business: VibeCheck, in 2.5 hours

Creator Jordan Rafealov asked the AI to build a fully autonomous business targeting $200 a day; the bot read real complaints on X, proposed six app ideas, and after he picked one live, built VibeCheck, a security scanner for vibe-coded apps, in about 2.5 hours including the name, plan and domain purchase. The video doubles as a funnel for his paid community.

WorkWent wrong

The AI deleted every SSH key on one of his machines

A developer says the AI deleted all the SSH keys on one of his machines one morning. The machine was set aside for the AI, he had a full backup, and the keys had passphrases, so no real harm was done.

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

An AI runs growth for his Chrome extension behind a one word approval

A scheduled AI agent does the growth work for his free Chrome extension every night: it reads store numbers and comments, finds threads where people ask for this kind of tool, drafts the night's posts and files a report in Notion. Nothing public goes out until he replies go. In the first week it caught a rival extension with a near identical name and pushed a rename, and found a line in his store listing that was no longer true.

Sunday lesson planning went from up to six hours to fifteen minutes

He teaches part time at a private school. Lesson plans go in six weeks ahead, and every student now gets a personal differentiation plan, which used to be done per group because per student was not feasible. The Sunday session that took four to six hours now takes fifteen minutes, plus short daily reviews of content and parent comments.

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.

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

His mouse and keyboard finder site made $130 in its first month

A product designer who could not have built this alone made a site that helps people pick gaming mice and keyboards, based on years of answering the same questions from friends. He built it in an AI app and keeps improving it from reader feedback. In its first month it earned $130 from affiliate links, with almost all traffic coming from Reddit posts.

$130a month

I used AI in Word to sue my healthcare provider

Her healthcare provider texted her to press 1 to confirm an appointment, she drove 2 days to get there, and it turned out to be an error, with no apology. She used three AI tools, mostly the AI in Word, to sue the provider.

Give the AI all my businesses' inboxes at once

Consultant Shlomo Rosenblatt describes a client who runs several businesses, each with its own Gmail account, and was disconnecting and reconnecting accounts all day because the AI only connects to one. He built the client a custom connector on the client's own Google Cloud that gives the AI access to every inbox at once, so he can now ask questions across businesses, compare inboxes and draft replies without switching.

WorkWent wrong

The AI only checked 25 emails when I asked it to scan my whole inbox

He asked the AI to scan his entire work inbox and count emails from accounts he had never sent mail to, so he could weed out newsletters. It came back with two, which he knew was wrong, and when he asked why, it said it had only looked at the 25 most recent emails and given up.

This one went wrong. See what happened 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.