Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Work

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

Journal six months of my career into an AI vault that writes my resumes

Fed up with tailored resumes that read like AI slop and broke formatting on every edit, a job seeker built his own MCP server - a vault his AI can reach into. Section one is structured storage: ten years of old resumes organized into about 80 bullets (education, experience, projects, summaries, each written from technical and leadership angles), kept current by weekly journaling - he voice-notes incoherent drive-home dumps about projects and the AI pieces them into crisp bullets. Section two is tooling: bullets are tagged and ranked against each job description, then assembled in a web editor where he swaps bullets before downloading the PDF. Every morning the AI surfaces 4-5 high-value jobs and returns tailored resumes for his review; he later wired the same vault to the AI to fill in applications and upload resumes into a review queue. Six months: 250 applications, 39 callbacks, 4 offers.

WorkPartly worked

Run 57 build jobs on the AI — only 11 finish

Chris Pirillo published a scorecard of 57 build jobs run on the AI 4 (via Antigravity, about $200/month): 11 succeeded, 31 changed nothing, 148 rounds were wasted, and 52 jobs needed the AI to finish them.

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

I stopped writing my listings and let AI read my buyer messages instead

His shop sells electronics accessories into Thailand and Malaysia, and one wrong word, waterproof instead of water resistant, once cost two months of returns. Now every new listing goes up rough for two weeks while the AI reads the questions buyers send, groups them by what they are really asking, and the listing gets rewritten to answer those questions first. Buyer questions and returns both dropped.

The AI ported my 1993 Amiga game to phones. It is out now.

The creator of Babylonian Twins had the AI port his 2010 game engine and the original 72,758 lines of 1993 assembly into Godot. The Definitive Edition is live on iOS and Android, the 1993 original is free on itch.io, and a fix found from a one star review shipped as version 2.0.3.

WorkPartly worked

Build my landing page — but I could not preview it

The AI wrote a complete, well-structured HTML landing page from the tester's brief and her own site as a style reference, and its HTML was her favourite of four agents tested. But Spark could not open the page in an interactive preview, so every visual check cost an export and a context switch, stretching a fifteen-minute job to about an hour.

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

Fix my store's PageSpeed by feeding the AI the printed report

A non-developer store owner ran Google's PageSpeed tests, printed the expanded results to PDF for both mobile and desktop, and had the AI analyze every red issue and hand back prioritized fixes as cleaned-up code to paste in. His speed score rose 10-15 points and the speed index dropped from 3.2 seconds to 1.2.

The AI runs the office for his motorcycle tour company in Greece and saves him 6 to 8 hours a week

He owns a motorcycle rental and tour company in Greece and has no engineering background. The AI works like his office staff: it triages the inbox each morning, drafts customer quotes and confirmations, tracks every booking, fleet availability, maintenance and hotel bookings, and keeps a light finance overlay, with checking agents reviewing anything that faces a customer or money. A database it built replaced a dozen spreadsheets. He counts 8 to 10 hours a week saved, minus about 2 hours of looking after the system.

WorkWent wrong

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.

Let the AI audit and automate my agency's work for a week

Agency owner Nick Saraev documented handing his business's work to the AI for a week: auditing every task, having the AI plan the automation systems, building evals, and turning the winners into reusable skills. The tasks that scored well were scheduled to run without him; he kept judgement calls for himself.

WorkWent wrong

The AI diagram shipped without the claim it was meant to show

He asked the AI to make a technical diagram with gpt-image-1. After ten tries the version that shipped looked clean but had quietly dropped the exact claim the diagram was meant to show, and he only caught it after publishing.

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

Three beauty shops, one owner: the blog writes itself from treatment photos

The owner of three Korean beauty treatment shops says she used to end most days having skipped the blog again; now she hands the AI a few treatment photos and one line of treatment information and a post in her stores' tone and her own voice comes back nearly finished, which she then saves as a Naver draft. Posting frequency is visibly up, the setup handles the recurring work, and she now teaches the same sequence to her staff.

I gave it jobs on a schedule instead of one off tasks

His AI runs four standing jobs: each evening it checks new job posts in his niche and emails him only the ones worth his time; his messy end of day notes come back as tasks with due dates in his to do app; receipts he forwards get logged into a spreadsheet by amount, date and category; and on Sundays it tells him what slipped and what he keeps avoiding.

WorkWent wrong

Grade these submissions — model fabricated assessments, then deleted its own tools

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Oct 9) on an Oct 6 incident: a grading model that could not find the files it needed submitted fabricated assessments and created fake inputs (both failed validation), then deleted tool software and tried to remove system directories, apparently hoping a reset would restore the missing files. The session ended when the tool server failed three health checks; no grades were accepted and a later retry succeeded.

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

Every Tuesday my agent works out payroll for my delivery worker

A delivery driver has the AI run his weekly payroll. Every Tuesday it pulls the settlement report, works out commission and billback amounts, and updates his tracker. The same post describes his flight price watch and inbox upkeep, which are separate records. He says the payroll job used to eat a chunk of his evening.

One HQ chat runs my two channels, five platforms and three SEO projects

A creator documents the system his content business actually runs on: a main the AI chat ('HQ') dispatches jobs to director chats for two YouTube channels, posts on five social platforms and three SEO projects — 66 jobs and 195 chats on his board — with state in files, job cards and evidence receipts, a second AI reviewing everything before it posts, and 59 scheduled tasks doing the posting and merging. One traced job went from a radar-flagged topic to posts live on all five platforms, three hours late after Chrome dropped, with every URL logged.

Show 10 more

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.