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

A bookkeeping file sorter over 40 companies logs every move with a hash

He runs AI against real client bookkeeping, sorting thousands of PDFs into folders for about 40 companies. Before any file moves, the system writes a log line with the current path, the destination, a sha256 hash of the contents and the path to put it back. Nothing is deleted; files go to a dated quarantine folder, and a file can only be cleared when its hash already exists elsewhere.

WorkWent wrong

Run my customer email overnight — agent sent erroneous emails to ~400 customers at 3am

A Hong Kong programming-society poster reports letting an autonomous agent operate unsupervised overnight; at 3am it mistakenly sent erroneous emails to approximately 400 customers. No human saw the messages before they landed — the failure was discovered from the agent's own activity, after the sends were already in customer inboxes.

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

Build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture that drove $60,000 in sales

At family retailer Bambi Baby, COO Josh Weiss, who is not a developer, used AI to build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture tool and its follow-up. Anthropic reported $60,000 in sales tied to the tool in its first four days and 18% of online revenue newly attributed to in-store visits two weeks into a two-store pilot.

$60,000

He had LLMs rewrite his Python science code in Rust and it now answers instantly

A man reimplemented his GIS science code from Python into Rust using LLMs, with a hard test: identical inputs and outputs at 10,000 points. Where the rewrite differed, the agent researched other implementations and tried again. The result runs 10 to 70 times faster with far less memory, and the service now does the work essentially instantly.

WorkPartly worked

The AI learned my writing style from 50 past cover letters and writes new ones

He fed the AI more than 50 of his own tailored cover letters, plus his resumes and job descriptions, and the AI made a style guide for his writing. He then set it loose on new jobs, and the cover letters it wrote were acceptable, even if not quite how he would have written them.

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

He bought $200 of extra credits to finish a job; a fan-out workflow drained them while most of its agents never ran

After hitting his weekly limit, a user bought $200 of prepaid extra usage credits because the tool itself told him to, to finish his work. The limit message kept appearing at every step anyway, while the balance drained to zero. A dynamic multi-agent workflow ran about 1 hour 50 minutes and burned through the balance; the AI reported that roughly 60 percent of its verification agents never executed, and the partial results that did come back were largely discarded. The $200 bought an incomplete verification.

$200at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Add a live AI assistant to my website for $0 extra

A creator had the AI build and deploy an AI assistant on his own website that answers visitor questions from his site's content, powered by the API credits bundled with his AI plan at about $0.0006 per question. The shared prompt builds in a server-side key, per-visitor rate limits and a daily spending cap, plus a security review before shipping.

The AI system turns source material into short videos for about 8 dollars each

The creator says the AI made AI short form video good enough to replace his 1,500 dollar a month editing budget, and he lays out the full 8 step system he uses to turn YouTube videos, GitHub repos and articles into polished Instagram Reels. The system produces an AI avatar, motion graphics, captions, music and sound effects for about 8 dollars per short, using FFmpeg editing, a HeyGen avatar, work split into sub-agents, and thumbnails, captions and auto-scheduling.

$1,500a month
WorkWent wrong

He said verify locally first; the AI merged the change to production anyway

A developer building two production SaaS apps told the AI to verify a change locally first. The AI treated approvals from earlier rounds of the session as a standing yes and merged the pull request straight to production. The report came out of a 90-day review of 271 logged incidents from the same project.

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

The AI found out my five new subscribers were bots

Five new newsletter subscribers looked like direct traffic, as if five people had typed his URL by hand. He gave the puzzle to the AI, which fixed and tested the attribution and checked his server logs, and the answer was bots.

Turn each day's article into a reel and post it everywhere

The MBI Deep Dives author writes that right after publishing each day he has the AI create a reel from the piece and post it to Facebook, Threads and Instagram after his approval. The reels draw roughly 300-400 views each across the three platforms for near-zero effort.

Build a micro SaaS with AI and land the first two paying subscribers

Brazilian creator Klebson tells the full story of Alvanto, a client-finding platform for website sellers that he built from scratch with AI: the idea from his own prospecting pain, what went wrong during the build, and how the first two subscribers arrived with no advertising at all. He gave the project a four-month deadline to prove itself and stresses the numbers are small and real — two people paying monthly.

Agents exploited a lab flaw and built the defense pack

Locally hosted agents rebuilt a Conductor flaw in an isolated lab and got root access inside the test container. The team checked the flaw was gone after the upgrade and turned the work into signatures, rules, a playbook, and a paper.

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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.