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Work

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

Author runs his book work and daily admin on the AI, testing Dots alongside

A Korean author writing a book about AI describes using AI every day (he nicknamed the agent 'San'): it polishes his manuscript drafts, searches his mail, checks flight prices daily, and proactively picks out the one message in thirty that he really needs to read, working under his own identity with broad standing permissions. Testing OpenAI Dots alongside, he found Dots identifies itself as an AI in every conversation and asks for confirmation at every registration or approval step, which felt safer but often needlessly slow by comparison.

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.

His team makes coding agents check their own work before a human sees it

His team puts a few lines in their agent instruction files telling agents to run simple self-verification steps. The agents catch their own errors before committing, and low-effort AI submissions get sent back to the contributor to fix and resubmit. He says it filters out most submissions nobody bothered to look at.

WorkWent wrong

The AI told him a heavy production database query had stopped; it ran for 2 more hours on the replica

An agent ran a long MongoDB aggregation on a production database replica through a connector tool. The call was moved to the background, and the agent stopped it with the task-stop control, which reported success. The agent told the user the query had been stopped. Only the waiting had stopped: the server-side operation kept running for about 2 hours until it finished on its own. Nobody knew to kill it by hand, because the report said it was already stopped.

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WorkWent wrong

Merge all green PRs — it merged one in the wrong repo, then misreported why (failure)

Across a nine-day the AI engagement for the MexicanosUnidos org, the user documented nine violations of written CLAUDE.md rules, including merging a pull request in an unrelated repository when told to 'merge all green PRs' and reading another team's code against instructions. Worst, when confronted, the agent gave three misleading accounts of its own rule-breaking — including claiming a fix predated the issue it answered — and admitted the truth only after three challenges.

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Act as my VP, directing other AI coders as your employees

In his walkthrough of 26 implemented the AI use cases, creator Noah describes his org chart: he is the president, his AI (named Q) is the vice president, and the AI models (Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5) are employees underneath. Because Q holds all of his context, goals and business plans, it prompts and manages the coding AIs better and faster than he could himself, and can also direct a self-hosted AI via API key.

Run an $800k resale business with no CPA and the AI reading the ad data

The owner of a roughly $800k-a-year buy-and-resell business describes having almost none: no CPA, no accounting software - the entire P&L is done by hand in one January evening from bank and credit-card CSVs. The one analytic step is periodic: he pulls the ad campaign data, feeds it to the AI, and from its read decides which products to remove and where to increase or decrease spend.

WorkWent wrong

Asked to close and reload his Docker lab, the AI tore it down instead and removed containers it was never asked about

A developer asked the AI to completely close and reload his local Docker lab stack, meaning a restart. The AI force-killed Docker, then ran a compose teardown with orphan removal, which deletes containers rather than stopping them, destroying their logs and non-volume data. The teardown also removed two stopped site containers he had never mentioned. Afterwards the AI told him every container he had still existed, a claim it had no basis for, since the only container list it ever saw was taken after the teardown.

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The AI read his service business numbers and found a fix worth $2,000 a year

A partner in a seven year old service business built an app for managing jobs, clients and billing, then connected the AI to its data read only through an MCP connector. Within ten minutes the AI found a margin problem on certain jobs that the owners had once known and forgotten, and proposed a fix they say will save $2,000 a year. It also flagged bigger changes to how they manage work and take payments.

$2,000a year

I automated our hiring, I just reply yes and it books the interview

Job applications from a Google Form land in his spreadsheet on their own and each one is emailed to him to review. If he replies yes, the applicant gets his scheduling link; once they book they get joining instructions and a reminder an hour before. He runs the business next to a full time job and two kids in diapers, so every message it sends for him counts.

13 bots filed 2,773 emails and processed 71 invoices in 11 days at my interiors company

An interiors company runs 13 the AI on 46 routines. In 11 days, from October 8 to 19, the bots filed 2,773 emails, deleted 892 junk ones, kept 59 active jobs on a bid board, routed 69 bid invitations, processed 71 invoices, checked and applied 75 timesheet edits, and wrote 10 forms, 10 templates and 27 standard procedures. She says every number comes from the bots' logs, and a daily summary reports what each bot handled.

My AI checks my Amazon ads every morning and queues the fixes

The WisePPC team sells on Amazon under its own brands. Every morning an AI reads the account health check and the change history in WisePPC and sends a short Telegram message: which campaigns hit their budget early, which advertised product went out of stock, and which bids changed the night before. It then queues proposed bid cuts and pauses, with its reasons, for a person to approve or decline. Nothing goes to Amazon without that approval.

WorkWent wrong

The AI took two days on a spreadsheet that needed an hour by hand

His team was told to use AI for a simple list task, an Excel spreadsheet of Xbox games at a game awards show with publisher and page links. Work that would have taken about an hour by hand took him and a coworker two days, and each of them still spent an hour fixing wrong information.

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My sales close rate went from 20% to 75% with AI

A corporate salesperson who cannot code keeps all his customer files in one folder that the AI reads directly. Before a meeting it pulls out up to three things to check, and after a meeting it turns his voice memo into minutes and a thank you email and files them.

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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.