The AI built the CRM for my consulting work in three hours
In three hours of work with AI, he had a CRM built entirely around his consulting activity. He did not write a line of code, he just described what he wanted.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasThe AI built his data indexing tool and one-off analysis went from slow to quick
Built with AI Python tooling that indexes a slow data corpus and converts it to Parquet queryable with DuckDB, dramatically improving turnaround on one-off analysis tasks.
Run an $800k resale business with no CPA and the AI reading the ad data
The owner of a roughly $800k-a-year buy-and-resell business describes having almost none: no CPA, no accounting software - the entire P&L is done by hand in one January evening from bank and credit-card CSVs. The one analytic step is periodic: he pulls the ad campaign data, feeds it to the AI, and from its read decides which products to remove and where to increase or decrease spend.
Screen 900 applications into a 50-person shortlist
A case-study video describes a recruiter who gave the AI the real hiring requirements for a QA tester role and had it review roughly 900 emailed applications — without sending, deleting or moving any mail — and return a structured shortlist table of about 50 candidates.
My AI team scouts content, writes scripts and makes my thumbnails
He set up the AI with five helpers for his YouTube work. One scouts what is new every Monday, one helps write scripts, one makes all his thumbnails, one updates his personal brand GitHub repo, and one helps him engage on X.
Ship a secret PromptBase feature at 4am while I sleep
A solo founder told his AI project-manager bot to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it while he slept, with only the rule that it had to benefit the site. Drawing on support emails, it built and deployed an alert that warns users before their account times out from too many declined submissions, and it worked.
Zendesk's the AI-Powered Custom Agents Hit 1 Million Executions in Seven Weeks
A five-person Zendesk team built the Custom Agent Builder with AI and the AI Agent SDK, going from proof of concept to early access in four months. Customers ran one million Custom Agent executions in the first seven weeks, reporting up to 10 percent higher automated resolution and up to 80 percent lower human handle times.
His team moved their ops work into agent skills; a usage cap and buggy scripts shut it down
His team pushed devops workflow into agent skills and shut down when they hit a usage cap; the scripts turned out buggy and poorly documented, and the harnesses had been burning tokens muddling through instead of raising alerts.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The vendor tracker he built is what his real-estate mother recommends clients from
Built a vendor tracker app his mother, a real estate agent, uses to recommend vendors to clients.
Made $600 selling two short client research reports that the AI compiled, compared
John Merphy made $600 selling two short client research reports: The AI compiled the research, compared sources and formatted the docs; he reviewed and delivered. Part of $1,150 total that month.
$600
My calendar fills my work blocks and switches my Mac to Focus on its own
An AI Skill reads his main Google Calendar, works out the free time in his day, and after he confirms, fills a separate calendar with 50 minute focus blocks and 25 minute chore blocks based on the Pomodoro technique. A script that runs every minute then turns his Mac's work Focus mode on and off to match those blocks, and he says it is running well so far.
Used the AI for Monday business admin and bookkeeping, building an automated accounting
Creator Trey Hollis (someone) shares that the AI made Monday administrative tasks and bookkeeping much easier, specifically noting he built an accounting spreadsheet that automates processes he previously could not construct himself.
The AI researched Etsy's best-selling Wix templates to plan a resellable product line
In 'Using the AI for Business' Ep. 1, the AI researched Etsy's best-selling Wix website templates using real sales numbers, identified the winning niche and delivery method, and planned a resellable template product line for Jackie (the build itself is Part 2).
The AI pulled my old Athens trip from Gmail and emailed for a new offer
He asked the AI to get an offer for last year's Athens trip so he could compare prices and book again this year. Without being asked, the AI fetched the old trip details from his Gmail, wrote the email and sent it, asking for a good offer with all the details in it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His team's data agent answers SQL questions, triages alerts and fixes bad data on schedule
Team Data Platform Agent, evolved over 2 years, is widely used for SQL questions, on-call alert triage, lag monitoring, and scheduled workflows fixing bad data.
The AI ran his whole group marketing push and brought in 500 users in 2 weeks
A founder had AI agent run the entire group marketing campaign for his new app. It read each group’s rules, worked out the best way to post in each one, saved notes and data per group in a spreadsheet, made Instagram videos and reels and posted them to Instagram and TikTok, and is building a Kiva crowdfunding campaign.
Agents do the manual half of his video editing, and his project time fell by about half
He edits video for a living. His agents handle the non creative manual work around each project: quality checks for missed text, black frames and logos, subtitles, reformatting for social aspect ratios, spreading files to the right products and pulling source material for descriptions. He logs his hours on every project and says agent assisted projects take about half the time with better quality; the weeks spent building the setup paid for themselves in two weeks.
Rust code faster than the state of the art, by asking agents to make it faster
Writing Rust code faster than state of the art by asking agents to make the code faster.
Earn money on your own — week 3: still $0
A disclosed AI agent that runs the Vellum Labs account reports its own week 3 (Oct 6–12, 2026) of trying to earn money from zero capital: it ran 31 headless measurement runs and posted 7 technical replies on other projects' GitHub issues, 3 of which were adopted into those projects' code or specs. Revenue stayed $0, with no stars, visits or sales traced back to the replies.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI turned his messy survey draft into a Qualtrics survey
He used a GitHub repo that lets the AI act as an agent for Qualtrics surveys. The AI took his disorganized Word doc survey draft and turned it into a Qualtrics survey, formatted better than any survey he has written himself.
Non-engineer lets the AI run his note publishing operation overnight
On Oct 2, 2026 a Japanese non-engineer asked the AI to run his note account for monetization; the agent picked the niche itself, then researched, drafted and self-reviewed 12 manuscripts during his 5-hour nap, reaching 42 drafts by the end of the day. It now plans topics, writes drafts, creates header images, registers the posting schedule in Google Calendar and prepares X and Threads announcements, batched a week ahead for his approval. The AI’s own safety feature stopped it from pressing the X post button; he keeps five jobs human: purpose, identity details, the final post button, personal experience and publish approval.
He runs 13 scheduled the AI routines for his blog and social accounts, chosen with a three-question filter
A Korean blogger documents the 13 scheduled the AI routines (desktop-app Routines) that run his content operation as of Oct 13, 2026: 6 daily blog-post jobs, 3 daily or every-other-day refresh/summary/index checks, 2 social jobs (Threads twice a day, Instagram), and 2 weekly checks and calculator builds. Jobs were picked with a filter he also turns into a reusable prompt: the task must repeat 3+ times a week in the same order, be checkable in one minute, and be reversible (never money-sending, deleting or messaging others). Guardrails: routines halt and log where they stopped if a password field appears, and Blogspot posts stay drafts for him to publish. A one-off scheduled job to end a book discount at 00:05 on Oct 13 ran on time. The post sells his 18-page PDF of the instruction and memory-file templates, so it is marked promotional.
An LLM wrote a near-compliant C compiler in 2 weekends that out-optimizes the commercial ones
An LLM wrote an almost fully compliant re-targetable C23 compiler in 2 weekends, beating XC8 and Keil on optimization for several architectures.
Cowork checks his email hourly through the night and sums up his ad campaigns
He uses AI to check his email hourly, mostly overnight, handling customer mail and marketer pitches while it does not act during the day. It also watches his ad campaigns and gives him a summary of how everything is running, and checks his school email into a weekly digest.
His small businesses run on separate AI agents for inbox, outreach and quotes, and nothing goes out without his phone approval
He runs his own small businesses with AI agents. Each job has its own agent with its own instructions file: one triages the inbox, one handles outreach, one prepares quotes. The agents only draft; he approves every email and quote from his phone before it goes out. A brief arrives at a fixed time every morning with the overnight replies, what is waiting on him, and the follow-ups for the day, and it replaced his own daily check-in. When he corrects something, the correction goes into a shared notes file that every agent reads, so he only has to say it once.
The AI built my own time tracker in 10 minutes
Her old time tracking software will stop working after the next system update. With the AI she built her own time tracker in 10 minutes, running locally on her Mac, with only the features she needs.
My agent built its own Linear connector in under a minute
When the tool he wanted was not on the AI’s connector list, he had the AI build the link itself. The AI took his Linear API key into secure storage, built a connector that can list teams, search and create issues and update their status, then checked it worked with an identity check. He says the same route works for any service with an API.
Settlement program cuts a bookkeeper's 12-hour Thursday to under one hour
Alongside his homemade TMS, Wes Oberman built a settlement payroll program that calculates every driver's pay automatically. His wife Laura's Thursday settlement run, previously a 12-hour day of manual calculation, now takes under an hour, and the automatic math removes the risk of underpaying drivers.
11 hourssaved
He runs AI agents in parallel, and loose runs cost him a night
A working guide from his own runs: with fixed specifications and clear completion conditions, parallel AI agents finish tasks in 20 to 50 minutes. When he left the conditions loose, one run repeated the full test suite 141 times overnight, another stalled for 8 hours after misreading a rule, and report logs grew large enough to overload his Git server.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
An AI session watched a security thread every 15 minutes through an incident day
During a security incident day, a man had an AI session checking the Hacker News thread every 15 minutes, following the links to look for public exploits and mitigations or anything he might have missed. He says it helped them feel safer and take all the necessary steps through the day.
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.