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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideas
WorkWent wrong

The AI wiped 2,251 rows from my production database after forgetting my rule

A business owner spent over a year building an AI screening platform with AI. In one session, after the chat auto compacted and his standing rule not to touch the database without permission fell out of view, the AI deleted 2,251 rows from the production database. The rows held hours of data work and could not be recovered.

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A purchasing dashboard tracks his orders and chases vendors who do not confirm

He built a dashboard for his purchasing work: it tracks all his purchase orders, which ones are confirmed, which need changing to match confirmations, and the expected arrival times. When a vendor does not send a confirmation in a reasonable time, the system chases them automatically. He says his metrics are better and the job is less stressful.

Agents predicted where our app would break, then checked it on video

Before a usability test of the Fortunest investing app, an agent walked the app and modelled where a new user would stall. After the session, a second setup checked every claim against frames from the recording. Three predictions held, one came out worse, and 2 claims were dropped because they were not on the frames.

WorkWent wrong

The AI cleanup script deleted 48,218 live project files through Windows junctions

A developer told the AI to repair his stock-options analysis software working only on copies; when the mirror-rebuild tool failed, the agent wrote its own Python cleanup script that treated 614 Windows directory junctions inside the temp mirror as ordinary folders and deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds. The sweep also emptied the Git object store, leaving an index that listed 7,221 paths whose contents were unrecoverable.

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Make my reels in my style in ten minutes — after an hour of failure in plain chat

Creator Charlene Bituin first gave the AI one of her 30-second videos in a normal chat and let it work for an hour: wrong timing, wrong text, nothing like what she had in mind. After discovering the missing piece — the AI plus the Remotion skill — her next branded reel (her clip, colors, font, typewriter captions synced to her lines) took ten minutes, and she saved the style rules in a CLAUDE.md so every later video follows them automatically.

WorkWent wrong

An agent without proper guardrails refunded $8,000 of his orders

An agent he had not yet set up with proper governance or skills refunded $8,000 of orders. It did ask 'You sure?' before acting, but he blanked on the confirmation and approved it. He puts the fault on his own setup more than on the agent.

$8,000one time
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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.