An LLM wrote data library bindings for his language, perfectly sufficient first try
Asked an LLM to write Apache Arrow bindings for Lean; it knocked out perfectly sufficient bindings.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideasThe AI resurfaced lapsed founder relationships from a year of Gmail
The author asked the AI to scan his Gmail for founders he had spoken with a year earlier but not recently; the AI surfaced several not contacted since last fall, and he is now reviewing their companies for follow-up.
A headless agent works his ticket queue: compares code to tickets, replies on its own
Set up headless the AI on a VM with an Azure DevOps MCP queue; it compares code to tickets and replies to comments automatically.
Log into Paychex and submit my payroll
A farm owner’s the AI logs into Paychex Flex, submits payroll, and then tells him what he owes after taxes. Payroll day is a bot run and a summary, not an afternoon in a portal.
I used AI to fix a data entry gap at work
A man with no coding experience used AI to generate a VBA script in Excel. The script fixed a manual data entry gap at his work and took the risk of typos and misreads out of the job.
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
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI matches the bank payments to the right invoices and marks them paid
A services co-op connected the AI to its Salesforce. The finance director drops in a bank statement and the AI matches each payment to the invoice it pays, to the cent, sorted into certain, split across invoices, or to check. Once she approves the list, it records the payments and marks the invoices as paid.
My agent rebuilt my business website and runs its search work weekly
The same side business owner had the AI redo his website and take over its search work. The AI logs into his Google insights and handles the weekly optimisation for the words he wants to rank for. After two weeks the site sat at the bottom of the first page for those words, on an old Weebly site he expected to hold it back.
Non-engineers at his robotics company ship real internal apps through an AI skill
Internal app platform with an AI skill for writing and deploying apps; non-engineers used it for inventory, scheduling and other forms and databases at a robotics company.
My agent rebuilt the business software I was paying $150 a month for and saves me $1,750 a year
Answering a how are you making money thread, he says a piece of business software he used does one thing and does it badly. With the AI’s help he built a piece of software that does the same thing better, with the features he always wanted. It took a lot of bug testing and had many errors at first, but it was done in two weeks. His version costs him $50 a year in server costs instead of $150 a month, saving about $1,750 a year.
$1,750a year
His research digest agent invented a paper that does not exist
His research digest agent sent him summaries that included a paper that does not exist. He skimmed the digests for two weeks without clicking a single link before he checked, then fired the agent and kept a script plus a human check instead.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Sold two the AI-built websites to local businesses after ~50 cold pitches; the
Someone cold-pitched ~50 local businesses with websites the AI built; 2 bought. The website-flipping idea came from the AI itself; he just made the calls.
The AI runs my wife's shop back office and replaced a $600 a month ads manager
For his wife's business, the AI reads hundreds of emails a day and prints her a short brief of what matters, files the rest, updates her website, runs her Square and her Google Ads, and prints a weekly report every Saturday night. It caught a licence expiry buried in the email, stays inside budget, and replaced a person who charged $600 a month to run the ads, with better results.
$600a month
The AI made its own email address and signed up for a site
In a Korean test of four AI assistants for office workers, the AI created its own email address and used it to sign up for another site. The video is a re-edit of an October 12 live stream where the creator tested the assistants on his own accounts.
The AI generated the board files for two circuit boards, and both boards work
Made 2 PCBs co-working with AI: The AI generated KiCad sources from shared netlist, read specs, set constraints; both boards made via PCBWay and both work.
The AI read his scanned cheques and invoices and wrote the rename commands, in short bursts
The AI processed scans of checks and invoices and wrote rename commands from their contents, removing manual batch reading, but often returned only 15 or fewer lines and access was later removed.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Run my local newsletter for 6,000 neighbours: research, write, sell the ads
A local publisher’s the AI research, write and sell the ads for a Thursday paper read by 6,000 neighbours. The bots cover the whole production loop of a real local news product, not just the writing.
The AI triages his user bug reports and tells both sides what happens next
The AI told to find a user's bug, decide user error vs bug, notify the user and tell the developer what to fix; the developer replied in 15 minutes asking if the fix was wanted today or Tuesday.
A solo seller's daily production plan pulls orders from four shops at once
He makes and sells his own products. The AI built him a multi channel order aggregator that gathers the day's sales from eBay, Etsy, Amazon and his own website, then sends him a daily production plan and a printable PDF of the day's invoices. He reckons it saves 20 to 30 minutes a day.
An LLM filled in four copies of an admin form from my notes
He spent about an hour getting an LLM to work out the fillable admin PDF he had been sent, then auto fill four copies from his Markdown notes. It took longer than filling them in by hand, but he would rather do it this way.
The AI could not reformat my Excel file. I lost two hours.
At work, they were too lazy to anonymize data to run it on the AI, so they tried AI instead. The AI was supposed to redo one Excel file using the format of another, with near identical data in different tables and a different currency. Two hours were lost.
2 hourssaved
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Agents reconcile thousands of messy records and chase the people who can clear the odd ones
Agentic workflow ingests files from a complicated program, parses and loads them to a database, spawns agents that reconcile hundreds to thousands of items in flight and reach out to people for clarification, catching mistakes in real time, replacing a 500 dollar per hour service.
The AI built my data tool and saved a $1000 a year Matlab licence
He runs a one person business that makes electronics for hobbyists and his customers run several of his devices at once. The AI built a stand alone program that plots their measurements together, the job he had been doing in Matlab, and worked out on its own how data from different products fits together and how to line it up in time.
$1,000a year
Built offline .NET knowledge base from 820 MB corpus
A builder used AI in Google AI Studio and DeepSeek to build a 19 project .NET system over about 4 and a half hours. It turned an 820 MB corpus into a 153 MB SQLite catalog with 0 foreign key errors.
A tradesman's agent priced his job in five minutes and found compliance gaps
A tradesman let his agent handle a job end to end: it worked out the requirements, priced the job, and flagged compliance issues, in about five minutes against the hours the same work used to take him.
Grow my affiliate site across platforms — Pinterest killed the domain, Ko-fi unpublished us, Podbean froze the account
Peace Call's two-week log of running a HighLevel affiliate site with an AI (Oct 4-18) records a wall of platform rejections: Pinterest suspended the domain and denied the appeal on Oct 18, Ko-fi unpublished the page as SEO spam, Podbean froze the account, both Lemmy servers declined registration (Oct 16-17), Japanese Nostr relays refused the agent's US-based posts, and Reddit returns 403 to the agent's machine. The site's income after two weeks of multi-platform agent publishing: $0.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
My work agent did 119 audit matches in 15 minutes that take me a full day
A man spent a few weeks building a work AI agent for compliance checks. Today it worked through a 200 question information security audit bank and completed the 119 items that match answers to the correct standard procedures in 15 minutes. That section normally takes him a whole day.
I built a foreign language voiceover for a work video with AI
He needed a foreign language voiceover on a video presentation at work. He spent several hours with AI building a process he could trust, then rendered each paragraph as speech and built it into a new audio track for the video.
Analyse my Instagram analytics and build my growth plan
Creator Amie Tollefsrud gave the AI access to her Instagram analytics and asked for growth advice; after three clarifying questions about audience and positioning, the AI delivered an 'Instagram Growth Plan' PDF. Screen recordings show an executive diagnosis (1.85M accounts reached), audience positioning, four content pillars, keyword clusters, carousel and story blueprints, and a 7-day action checklist.
I know nothing about Eclipse plugins. The AI built me one that works.
He did not know how to make Eclipse plugins, so he had the AI make one that highlights and type checks jOOQ’s own tag syntax. It took a single prompt, and the plugin already works.
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.