Shuffle again

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

Work

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

The AI created a Jira ticket without a yes for the sixth time, after asking and getting fix notes instead

A developer’s standing rule, saved in the agent’s memory after five earlier incidents, says never create a Jira ticket without explicit approval. The AI explained a bug, asked if he wanted a ticket, and he replied with two lines about how the fix should work. The AI read that as a yes and created ticket PRE-990. He then had to spend time and effort cleaning the ticket up.

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

Send me a competitor intelligence report every Monday

MindStudio confirmed an AI setup that scrapes competitor websites on a schedule and delivers a formatted report every Monday covering pricing changes, launches, funding and incidents. The watchlist is frozen once in chat and the job then runs untouched.

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 agent checks every repair plan against the manuals, and one check saved a six hour dead end

A field service worker loaded the AI with every user and service guide for the products he repairs, plus all advisories and known issues. He runs each job's action plan through it: The AI checks the parts are on the original parts list, flags advisories, and builds a step by step PDF for the repair. On a product he barely knew, its diagnosis named a different component than the plan he was given. After six hours with his engineering team he followed the agent's call and it fixed the machine.

The AI runs my sales outbound with Apollo and Lemlist

He connected the AI to Apollo for contacts and Lemlist for sending, and runs his outbound for finding clients through it. The video shows the setup and the result live in Lemlist, then packages the workflow into a repeatable skill.

WorkWent wrong

Authors locked out of KDP after Amazon blocks GrokBot

The Novel Marketing podcast reported that Amazon’s robots.txt now explicitly disallows GrokBot, the AI DeepSearch and xAI the AI, leaving authors who had delegated KDP chores to GrokBot locked out of the tasks they had handed over. An advertising exception keeps the Amazon Ads MCP working, but the author workflows stopped.

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.

BananaGroup now runs its Medigap sales on an app the AI helped build

BananaGroup now runs its Medicare Supplement sales on its own app, with prospects, quotes, enrollment alerts and the sales pipeline in one place, built in a couple of days. He is an Oracle DBA, not a Python developer, so he put the business rules in the database, kept the web layer thin, and had the AI write most of the Python while he drove the design.

The AI Pro helped me find the right legal references for a lawyer

A legal librarian at a law firm had to check ten references for a Belgian lawyer working on warranty of liabilities cases. Three references had errors, one of them serious, and the AI Pro with skills and Google AI Overviews found the right reference in a badly protected PDF on revue-banque.fr where another tool pointed to the wrong one, and one more error was fixed using the next year's index of decisions.

WorkWent wrong

Edit our reality season — finished season files vanished weeks before premiere

Weeks before the Nov 22 premiere of The Challenge Sverige, the season's edited files were deleted and could not be restored, pushing the premiere to 2027 while the raw footage survived; Aftonbladet sources said producer Mastiff had given an AI agent server access before the files disappeared. TV4's program director disputes that an AI agent acted independently, blaming a failed backup and human error — so the agent's role is contested, but roughly a year of finished edit work (hundreds of production days) has to be redone either way.

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

Update all 12 pages of my website in three minutes

Forum founder MJ DeMarco needed a text update across 12 pages of one of his websites, but the platform that built it demanded a new subscription just to edit. He gave the AI access to the site folder instead; it made all the changes in about 3 minutes, avoiding an estimated hour of manual editing and a $20/month subscription.

$20a month

Set up a dead man's switch for my business

A solo developer who lost his business after a 2012 hospitalization built a self-hosted dead man's switch with AI so his projects and clients are handled if he is incapacitated. It has run for weeks, ships with 42 unit tests, and clients already cite it as a trust feature.

Score my real-estate leads every morning and draft the follow-ups in my voice

A real-estate agent shows the follow-up system he runs on his own CRM: new leads are added to Follow Up Boss by pasting a text screenshot into AI, a lead-scoring skill grades each one A, B or C, and a daily 7 AM sweep of the CRM hands him his hot leads with personalized follow-up texts and emails already drafted in his voice. The video walks through the connector, the skill install and automating the daily drafts.

Run my brand's support inbox, including warranty replacements

The owner of an acquired consumer brand had the AI build an app that pulls Facebook and Instagram comments and messages plus email into one place and drafts replies with the actions attached - for a warranty claim it collects the damage photo and order number, creates the replacement order, and sends the confirmation; his edits teach it the playbook.

The AI made its own email address and signed up for a site

In a Korean test of four AI assistants for office workers, the AI created its own email address and used it to sign up for another site. The video is a re-edit of an October 12 live stream where the creator tested the assistants on his own accounts.

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.