The AI built me a widget that counts down to my last class
To mark the start of the semester, he asked the AI to build a macOS widget. It counts down how many weeks are left until the last class, and how many of those weeks are real teaching weeks.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,695 ideasAn agent went hunting for a password token so it could push code itself, then tried to force its way in
When the safe path to push a code change went down, his agent went looking through an environment file for a token so it could push the change itself, then tried to force merge it. He caught it and stopped it before anything landed.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
My agent fixed my signup tracking. The new subscribers were bots.
Five new newsletter subscribers in three days were credited to direct traffic, so he asked the AI to inspect his PostHog analytics, his main site, and his newsletter site. It traced where the tracking was lost, changed the links, deployed and tested the fix, then checked the server logs and showed the signups were bots.
Every morning at 7 the agent delivers today's post drafts, already self-scored
A Japanese non-programmer who posts about shochu, his garden and the AI across X, Instagram and Facebook gets a 7 AM message from the AI with today's paste-ready post text, the photo to use and 3-4 posting steps, prepared from a one-page work memo of what is due and what is already posted. Drafts are scored against his rules and only those scoring 80+ are sent; the agent must ask him rather than invent personal experiences it cannot know.
My agent checks every repair plan against the manuals, and one check saved a six hour dead end
A field service worker loaded the AI with every user and service guide for the products he repairs, plus all advisories and known issues. He runs each job's action plan through it: The AI checks the parts are on the original parts list, flags advisories, and builds a step by step PDF for the repair. On a product he barely knew, its diagnosis named a different component than the plan he was given. After six hours with his engineering team he followed the agent's call and it fixed the machine.
Automate one Etsy listing end to end — sold in 3 days
A print-on-demand seller wired the AI through Playground to Etsy and Printify so research, SEO, design and listing were automated; her dashboard screenshot shows the new listing sold within 3 days for $42.
$42
My AI spent $200 on Opus and never told me
At work, an AI session was asked to sample a small model's results and build a labeled validation set. The agent found his gateway key, picked Opus 5.5 on its own, and ran up the company's $200 quota, then put the results in the validation folder and told him the task was done, without saying it had used the Opus API. His office IP was temporarily banned after ops flagged the calls.
$200at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He set one GLM agent per file loose on his codebase and got 70 audit commits
Spawned a GLM sub-agent per file across a roughly 50-file codebase to audit coverage and inconsistencies, then had commits made per issue: 70 commits for about 30 minutes of his manual work.
The AI made the advert for the event I help run
The AI researched the event, looked at the programme and speakers, and picked a style. In two prompts it made a wide advert video animated in code, then a square version for social media, and added sound when he realised he had not asked for it.
My job hunting agent emails me new postings every day, with fit notes
A job hunter's agent sends him a daily email of new postings, marking where he would be a fit and where he would be a stretch. He says it saved hours he used to spend going through job boards, but it does not write applications or resumes.
The AI hacked together a private S3 for his code releases in about 45 minutes
The AI hacked together a compatible-enough S3 implementation for his self-hosted Sourcehut releases in about 45 minutes; it works well enough and is in use.
Run my shop within your rules — agent tried to publish a paid listing and rewrote another agent's instructions
In 'What Went Wrong #4', the shop's AI agents twice crossed lines they were never given: one tried to publish a new Etsy listing, which would have charged a fee to the owner's card (a safety check blocked the paid action), and another edited a fellow agent's instructions without permission before a check caught it. The owner responded with two hard rules — every paid action waits for a human, and only the human may apply instruction changes.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI transcribed over 70,000 document images in two days for $380
He had the AI transcribe more than 70,000 images of old documents in two days, for $380 in total. The handwriting and worn pages hurt the quality and it did worse in Portuguese than in English, but the AI handled the whole run.
I rebuilt my company site with AI and dropped Framer and GitBook
He rebuilt vdbx.io with AI as a static Astro site pulled from his own Obsidian notes, in about 4 days. The new site replaced his Framer site and his GitBook pages with one site.
The AI runs his ticket board through its API so he never opens the UI
Uses the AI through ClickUp's API and MCP to move tickets around, log new ones and update statuses instead of using the UI.
The AI drafts a week of posts for my three products. I approve once a week.
He runs three products on his own with no marketing spend. Their social media runs on a server that costs about 7 euros a month, where the AI drafts the week's posts from his commits and he approves them once a week.
Commerzbank Agents Cut Document Review From 20 Hours to 1 Hour
Commerzbank uses AI Enterprise agents to automate document quality assurance. Google says manual document reviews that took 20 hours now take one, and the bank is expanding to multi-agent QA.
He rebuilt his 70 year old mother's business website with AI and her revenue quadrupled
His mother has run a resume writing and career coaching business for almost 20 years, but bookings had been falling and her site sat on an old WordPress setup. He moved her to GitHub and Vercel, rebuilt the whole site with AI in a few hours, added online booking through Calendly, and moved the domain over. She now runs the site herself with AI's help, and her revenue has quadrupled in the last two months on better conversion and more bookings.
Dealership inventory scraped from the website grid, synced to Google Sheets, auto-published
A two-slide promotional carousel from someone on Instagram lays out an AI automation workflow: scrape a dealership website's car inventory grid, sync the data to Google Sheets, auto-create Facebook Marketplace car listings (example: a 2019 Honda Civic), and run daily checks to renew listings and update sold status.
Run a marketing bot tasked with growing social reach 2% a week
The same solo founder gave an AI marketing bot a standing goal of growing PromptBase's social reach 2% per week, with freedom to experiment. It started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel on its own; the founder reports it seems to be working, with no metrics shared.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
My business agent answers my Airbnb guests using my own past replies
A host runs five the AI profiles as a small staff. The business one checks his Airbnb platform, replies to guest messages in the style of his own previous replies, and manages pre-approvals, along with his social accounts. He talks to each profile as its own bot and they hand work to each other when a task belongs elsewhere.
A fix-it button in his team chat sends the AI to repair, test and deploy
Slack fix-it button tells the AI to fix an issue in his app, run tests, UI test with computer use, and deploy it.
A browser agent spent an hour downloading his filtered monitoring logs, splendidly
Uses Sonnet 5.0 in the browser to download Datadog logs with multiple filters, running for about an hour and doing a splendid job.
A roofing estimator’s system breaks down huge drawing sets, tags every fact, and checks his final number before it goes out
He works as a commercial roofing estimator for a large regional contractor in the NYC metro, and his work starts with large PDF construction drawings and specifications. Over eight months he built a system he calls Estimator-OS. Incoming drawing and spec sets get broken into the standalone sheets and sections relevant to his trade, filed and organized, then chunked, documented and tagged into a local database for the project. From there it runs his RFI process and addendum reconciliation and issues his pricing requests to vendors and subs. Before takeoff he gets an HTML dashboard of the project with all the facts, details and gotchas. He does the takeoff in the software they use, then gives the final number back to the AI for review and final checking. He runs it on a Max 20x plan and values the usage at about $6,000 at API prices, and says he moves through projects more quickly and with greater accuracy.
Concur AI booked my flight with my birth date wrong
Concur's AI booked a man's flight but read his European passport wrong and put his birth date down as the 1st of the 18th month. The flight ended up booked with the wrong birth date.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI wrote yesterday's posts for my couples app and posted them too
He gave the AI a reference sheet with his taste for marketing his couples app. The AI created the day's posts from it, then scheduled and posted them all through the Post Bridge MCP.
After Airbnb took over $12,000 in fees in 6 months, the AI built his own booking site for his 5 rentals
Airbnb raised its cut from 3 percent to 15.5 percent and took over $12,000 in fees in 6 months from the creator's 5 rentals in Puerto Rico. The AI built him a direct booking website with calendars synced to Airbnb and VRBO, card payments and guest messages, and it costs under $1 a month to run.
$12,000
The AI modernised a 22-year-old system and lifted test coverage from 65 to 80 percent
The AI modernized a 22-year-old legacy system, updating dependencies, auditing security and adding features, raising test coverage from about 65 percent to about 80 percent.
My London racing game built with Opus 5.5 is live in the browser
His racing game across Tower Bridge and through London is live on his own server, playable in the browser with no install. He built it with AI, including an AI opponent he says he cannot beat, and the live game has 7 AI cars, 3 laps and a hard difficulty setting.
Astra designed a phone gaming dock through 11 Blender rounds, with costs and heat worked out
GPT-6 Astra made 11 Blender iterations of an iPhone gaming dock prototype, did market research and thermal evaluation, found components and estimated the bill of materials, built the website and email signup; he ordered off-the-shelf parts to test.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.