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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas

Ship one secret feature at 4am while I sleep

As an experiment, the founder told his project-manager bot to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it while he slept - the only rule was that it had to benefit the site. Reading the support inbox, the bot chose to alert users before their accounts time out from too many declined submissions, built it, and deployed it; he woke to a working feature he hadn't specified.

Close my store's books in four minutes a month with a self-auditing AI setup

A store owner's month-end runs itself: QuickBooks ingests bank transactions while the AI works the store's API transactions, reconciles the two, scrapes vendor invoices out of Google Drive to update COGS batches, and files a PDF audit trail with each month-end journal entry. Four minutes a month after about an hour of setup, in a thread where the original poster had just found $3,500 of mishandled HST doing the same job by hand.

$20a month

Check my menu prices against competitors before I raise them

Ted and Tami Taylor, who run three New Mexico restaurants, had the AI compare what customers could get from competitors before they updated menu prices, accounting for delivery markups and measuring value by sandwich weight and drink volume. The analysis helped them avoid increases that would have made some products uncompetitive; Ted says they would otherwise have skipped the research.

A job hunting agent found him 20 interviews in four weeks

His agent runs once a week: it finds companies on Google Maps, finds a real person's contact details on the web, and drafts a personal email for each one, which he approves before it sends. Across 200 companies it produced 20 interviews in four weeks, and he spends about an hour a day on the replies.

Build a native job-tracker app with AI writing all the code

Andy Bennett built Helm, a Mac, iPhone and iPad job tracker with CV tailoring, with AI writing all of the code and most of the design across 641 commits and 21 plans. The first working Mac version landed in about eight hours of commits on September 11; both apps are now in TestFlight beta.

WorkWent wrong

I let Astra run a software factory for 35 hours. It built nothing of value.

Armin Ronacher let GPT-6 Astra run a weekend software factory with subagents to try building a Python with virtual threads and lexical scoping. After 35 hours and about 4 billion tokens it had delivered nothing of value, and the code it wrote was so compressed it was hard to read.

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

One owner, three organizations, and the AI doing the office work in Spanish

A Spanish-speaking owner in Hazleton, Pennsylvania put the AI to work across his three organizations for several weeks, giving instructions in Spanish, often by voice dictation: it re-optimized the SEO of hundreds of his news site's articles in batches from Search Console data and fixed site-speed problems, built his tax office's complete online store (ten digital products with card and PayPal payments) plus an Etsy shop, redesigned his nonprofit's website, and handles client accounting, PDF receipts and construction estimates day to day. Long government processes, his trademark registration and an IRS certified-agent application, were completed step by step together; the hard limits were his to cross: he types passwords himself, and Etsy's selfie identity check is one step no agent can do.

The AI builds my seller and buyer ad campaigns

In the same interview, he describes building a seller campaign and a matching buyer campaign with AI, live, sitting next to a title rep. The campaigns feed the intake stack that his AI follow-up then works.

WorkWent wrong

The AI re-ran its document script and wiped out 40 minutes of his Word edits

A session generated a Word document with a script. The user then edited the document in Word for about 40 minutes and saved. When he asked for one more change, the session re-ran its script, which rebuilt the whole file from its older in-memory content and replaced the file on disk. His 40 minutes of edits were unrecoverable, because the write went through the shell, where the tool’s read-before-write protection does not apply.

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

Opencode mostly wrote a fix script for journald logs going missing

On machines that regenerate their machine ID at every boot, journalctl reported no journal files even though logs existed, because journald and journalctl end up looking in different directories. The answer links a fix script that Opencode mostly wrote, published on GitHub with a full write up of why the race happens.

Publish my blog in four languages every day from one instruction

Context Studios' AI agent Timmy runs a daily content pipeline from a single instruction: it researches a topic, writes the article in English, translates it into German, French and Italian, creates all four posts in the CMS and publishes them. It then verifies the URLs return 200, submits them to Google Search Console and posts platform-tailored copy to X, LinkedIn and Facebook.

The AI reinstalled our whole 16 node cluster. It is live now.

He spent 4 weeks designing and testing an upgrade of their 16 node HPC cluster with AI, and the AI then did the full reinstall itself. The reinstall covered remote install, network booted images, Slurm setup, a shared filesystem, and web services that give their users a small cloud platform.

WorkWent wrong

Asked to copy folders, the AI emptied the destination instead, 2 days of research gone

A user asked the AI to copy documents into a folder. As a cleanup step it invented on its own, the AI permanently deleted the destination folder first, about 200 files holding 2 full days of research. Earlier in the same session it had deleted duplicate files safely through the Recycle Bin, so the safe pattern was available and simply was not used.

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

Build the business tools I kept putting off, with AI planning and the AI building

A marketing-business owner who is not a developer used AI for strategy, planning and technical thinking and the AI to build, with himself making decisions and testing in the middle. The outputs were a real business website built and launched (his SearchyFound business), a schema generator and other tools, and a lead engine for finding and evaluating potential customers; the video also shows failures, including Google Analytics not actually tracking.

Tracked business-trip receipts in real time and categorized $2,404 in expenses, flagging

Jenny Stojkovic (95K followers, AI/wealth/investing) documented building a tax-deduction tracker in an AI app after discovering she overpaid taxes by $46,324. During a 'business trip to Vegas,' she logged receipts by chat: an airport snack (Veggie Straws, 50% deductible), a $61.88 airport-to-hotel Uber, baggage fees, and a porter tip — all flagged work-related; a Vegas show ticket with a client and a rented conference dress marked non-deductible ('ordinary clothing is generally personal'); hotel laun

$2,404
WorkPartly worked

His agent keeps assigning him new work faster than he can automate the old work

A Japanese note writer uses AI as a topic scout that proactively sends him new article ideas on a schedule. When the AI suggested also automating the X post for each article, he built a note RSS to Zapier to Buffer pipeline with AI guiding the setup (its instructions looped: 'leave the prompt blank', then 'the blank is the problem'), got the generation test to pass and the Zap live, but still has not seen one real automatic post, while the AI delivered three more article ideas in the meantime.

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

Port 430,000 lines of TypeScript to Rust with coding agents

GitHub engineer Stephen Toub's September 16, 2026 account describes porting the AI runtime from TypeScript to Rust mostly with AI coding agents: 832,378 lines of production Rust plus 468,689 lines of tests across 128 merged pull requests in about fourteen and a half weeks. The attributed token spend was about $120,000 against roughly three weeks of his own time, shipping 135 releases as the port landed.

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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.