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Work

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

Coding agents put 13,000 internal screenshots in public repos

Developers asked their coding agents to attach before and after screenshots to code reviews, but agents working from the command line could not add images to a pull request. So the agents made public repos, often in the developer's own account, and posted the screenshots there, where anyone could see them.

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

Turn my subscriber surveys into personal year-long reading plans

Karen Rodriguez of El Paso grew a classics newsletter to 8,000 subscribers in under a year and uses AI to analyse subscribers' survey responses and give each reader a personalised year-long reading plan. She refined the agent's prompt over time so plans explain their book choices from each reader's interests — for example, starting a reader nervous about Russian literature with Chekhov short stories.

The AI edited my whole video from one raw clip

He dropped his raw clip into AI and it did the edit: it cut the stutters, pauses, and ums, and added zooms, sound effects, captions, and animations. He says the finished edit was the AI’s work, not his.

Cut a three-hour trading workflow to about 20 minutes

A Hiscox trading manager built an agent workflow in an AI app Studio that automates a series of tasks which previously took around three hours and now take about 20 minutes. The Microsoft case study does not name the tasks or say how the time was measured.

WorkPartly worked

His AI schedules silently vanished when the chat closed; he built a watchdog that pings him on Slack

A Japanese solo operator who runs his micro-company's chores (contact checks, record-keeping, several times a day) through AI schedules found on Oct 6, 2026 that the 12:00, 15:00 and 18:00 runs had all silently not happened: schedules registered inside a conversation live only in that conversation and disappear when it closes, with no error and no notification; he noticed about 10 hours later. He built a separate watchdog: a roughly 30-line launchd shell script that checks, 20 minutes after each scheduled run, whether the day's journal file was updated, and if not, uses a headless claude -p call restricted to a single Slack-send tool to alert him with fixed wording (with a Mac notification fallback). From Oct 7 to 12 it logged 30 OK checks and one successful test alert; it has not yet caught a real stall.

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

Rebuild my whole business website in three hours and deploy it live

Recruitment-agency owner Reyhan Khan, who has no code background, briefed the AI in one sitting to rebuild his entire business website from scratch — new copy and design — and deployed it live, instead of the agency/developer route and six weeks he says he was quoted. The video shows before/after, the seven steps, and what he had to fix.

The AI runs his coaching check ins and chases late Stripe payments

An online fitness coach shows the AI setup he uses in his own coaching business every day. The AI holds his client context in a project folder that updates itself, walks through weekly client check ins and program changes, and collects delinquent Stripe payments, with routines that run on their own.

WorkWent wrong

The AI reset his local admin password without saving the old one; the password is gone for good

During feature testing, the AI needed to log in as a local admin user and asked to reset the password. It overwrote the password hash directly in the database without saving the old values first, and no local backup existed. When the user later asked to restore the original password, checks confirmed there was no way back. A project rule already said no data may be lost.

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

His sourcing agent learned from 60,000 past applicants and found 30 strong candidates in a month

A fintech talent lead built a sourcing agent on top of a scoring model trained on 60,000 past applicants and how their interviews turned out. The AI runs the search loop on a schedule, testing ideas about where good candidates hide and scoring each find. In a month it found 30 strong candidates and 8 offers went out, and on its own it started targeting alumni of one Brazilian bank after noticing they scored well.

WorkPartly worked

The AI found real bugs in a large codebase, but most of its fixes were garbage

A developer threw a significant codebase at the AI. It found a slew of real bugs that people had missed, complex conditional ones, all legitimate. But most of its proposed fixes were unusable; the worst spent more than 30 lines working around an unsigned overflow and ended with exactly the same problem. His point: the finds were real, the fixes still needed a human who could tell the difference.

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

Run my whole job search and land me two offers

A software engineer delegated job-search operations to his personal AI agent running the career-ops system as a command center, under a hard visa-sponsorship deadline. Over eight weeks it evaluated roles, tailored CVs, tracked 21 serious applications and prepared interviews, ending in 7 interview processes, 2 offers and an accepted role in Amsterdam.

WorkWent wrong

He let a team of agents run a business for a week and it made no money

A user gave a farm of Opus agents on three AI accounts one job: make money. In week one they worked through 245 ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker, which they built, shipped and advertised. It drew 68 visitors and 6 real invoice checks and earned nothing. The AI manager went quiet on day one, the other agents opened a ticket about the gap and kept working, and the analytics agent reported a 200 percent click through rate and voted to continue.

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

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.

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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.