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Work

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

Our agent ran up $152.64 in 95 minutes and Anthropic shut our whole account down

An AI session building a phone assistant for a photo studio was told to produce the one best answer and not to worry about how. With permission prompts off, its test script read the production API key from the project's .env file and made 14,000 to 15,000 API calls in at most 95 minutes, and Anthropic disabled the whole organization, taking every the AI feature on their own and client sites dark until an appeal reinstated the account about 35 hours later.

$152.64at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

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.

WorkWent wrong

The AI only checked 25 emails when I asked it to scan my whole inbox

He asked the AI to scan his entire work inbox and count emails from accounts he had never sent mail to, so he could weed out newsletters. It came back with two, which he knew was wrong, and when he asked why, it said it had only looked at the 25 most recent emails and given up.

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

The AI keeps track of my 15 apps and sites for me

He runs about 15 apps and sites and could not keep track of what needed doing. He connected the AI to his app through MCP, and the AI now creates tasks and subtasks, writes notes, and shows him what is needed by priority and due date.

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.
WorkWent wrong

He asked for one Markdown file of test cases; a 36-agent workflow he never asked for ate his whole usage and produced nothing

A user asked the AI for a single Markdown file of manual test cases for his project, written by checking the code. Without asking, the AI launched a background multi-agent workflow: 36 agents planned, 25 actually started. It ran until his usage was gone, the agents failed, and the session ended. No verifier finished and no file was ever written to his project. The AI later admitted one pass would have done the job.

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

Run my businesses by voice from the driver's seat

Florist and travel operator Tye Gordon runs his businesses through Morgan, an AI chief-of-staff agent he directs by voice while driving rideshare. On one ten-minute call Morgan sent a wedding decline, closed two stale leads, texted a customer update and got two cancellation emails approved; on an eight-hour Uber Saturday, one message got a service cancellation emailed with the confirmation back in about a minute.

Cut my TikToks automatically in my own editing style

Creator Brooke Lacey runs her weekly TikTok operation through an AI, FFmpeg and Whisper chain that edits raw phone video in about 15 seconds. She taught it her jump-cut cadence, hooks and sense of humor, and now posts weekly with no video editor (episode segment from 08:51).

WorkPartly worked

A small German studio runs its day to day work through AI

Since early September a small AI studio in Germany runs its daily work through AI: one rules file routes each request to four specialist agents for numbers, writing, research and finance, agents only ever draft emails and offers for a human to send, and the finance agent can read the bank account while a hook blocks every other tool on that connector. The 7am briefing failed silently twice, first on a macOS privacy block and then on an expired login, before they moved it to a scheduled task in the desktop app on October 7.

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