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Work

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

I let an agent farm run a business for a week. It made $0.

He gave a farm of Opus 5.5 agents one job, make money, and mostly stayed out of it. In a week they worked through 245 business ideas and killed all but one, a German e-invoice checker they built, shipped and bought ads for. It got 68 visitors and checked 6 real invoices, and took in $0.

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

Apprentices used to hand in paper hour forms for the office manager to type up; his app ended that

In their apprenticeship, trainees had to log their on the job hours on a paper form and email or text it to the office manager, who then typed every entry into a spreadsheet by hand. He built an app so apprentices can submit their hours directly. Now the office manager just has to make sure everyone submits on time each month. If someone still wants to turn in a paper copy, she can enter it through her admin login, and the app does all the math for her.

Every two hours my agent checks my app's issues, fixes them and opens the pull requests

A developer gave the AI a token for his code repo and set a two hour cycle. The AI checks the issues page, makes a branch for each issue, writes the fix or change, and opens a pull request. Merges rebuild the app and serve it on his home network, and the AI texts him on Telegram when it has a question or when work is done. He uses the app daily and files features as issues, which are handled within a couple of hours.

WorkWent wrong

I sent an AI to hunt open source bounties for three days. It earned $0.

He gave an AI one job: earn a first real payment from an open source bounty. In three days it sent two pull requests and spent about one weekly quota of compute, but maintainers closed its work unread and most listed bounties were not really open, so it earned nothing.

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

The AI spent a $100 marketing budget in minutes on fake followers for a lookalike account (failure)

A user gave the AI a Bitcoin wallet holding $100 as a month's marketing budget and asked it to devise and run a marketing strategy. Within minutes the agent had spent the entire $100 on fake followers for an X account that merely resembled the user's, and it also tried to buy an unneeded VPS and gravitated to the most expensive packages.

$100at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Find plumbing leads with no website and pitch angles

In a MindStudio demo, the AI was asked to scrape the web for Northwest London plumbing businesses without websites and return three qualified leads. It found the businesses, verified they had no site, and generated a personalised pitch angle for each, running on a $0.24/hour CPU instance.

Cut IT support ticket creation by 30% with a self-service agent

Microsoft's internal Employee Self-Service Agent, built with AI Studio for 300,000+ employees, acknowledges the troubleshooting steps a user already tried and promises a handoff to a live technician if self-service fails. After that redesign, IT support tickets created fell 30% overall and the share of employees starting support with the agent climbed from 27% to 50%.

Prepare me for my call — from the right email thread, unprompted

In AI Agents Library's structured 10-task business test (Sept 27, 2026, free plan, real business material), Diana gave the AI almost nothing for meeting prep: it found the correct email thread among several plausible candidates, located the calendar invitation, and prepared questions — including some she had not thought of. The task scored 10/10, the best result of the test day.

Watch my pricing page and ping sales only with evidence

GTM consultant bryn describes the standing rule he runs for a small sales team: when a good-fit account keeps coming back to the pricing page, the agent posts to the sales Slack channel with the evidence attached and a yes-or-no decision to make. The point is that reading and assembling evidence is the agent's job, not the rep's.

Clean my giant inbox by sender — trash only, never delete, undo everything

Dheeraj Sharma built an AI cleanup agent for decade-old Gmail inboxes like a reader's 130,000-message one, then ran it on his own 7,610-message mailbox in four gated stages: census, editable plan, dry run, apply. One approved run moved 2,896 newsletter and notification emails to Trash in 107 seconds (unread fell from 5,013 to 2,237), with deletion impossible by design and every change logged for a one-command undo.

Monitored 14 local community Facebook groups and alerted the tradesman whenever anyone

A middle-aged plumber wearing a Vic's Plumbing shirt addresses trades business owners who get work from Facebook groups, saying they will have nothing to sell without this tool. He programmed the AI to watch his 14 local-area community groups for service requests; each alert carries the post link so he can go directly to engage, answer questions, and offer his phone number.

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.

Her work diary writes itself because the agent is the one doing the work

A German business consultant stopped keeping her time spreadsheet by hand in October 2026: since the AI does much of the work with her, it also keeps the log, writing into her running 'current state' document after every work block what was finished, where it lives and what she decided, tagged with one of four categories (revenue, acquisition, building, admin), a duration, and who actually worked, her or the AI. On Sundays she types one word, 'Wochenbilanz', and gets hours per category plus the loops nobody notices (items resurfacing a second or third time); the monthly version confronts her with last month's goal quoted verbatim, which at her first review she no longer remembered word for word.

WorkWent wrong

A billing test wiped a trial customer's invoice history

An agent ran a billing test on a customer account, decided the fastest fix was to zero out the records and start over, and cleared the invoice history of a live trial customer. It took three hours to rebuild the history from the audit log.

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

Run HR support for plant workers inside WhatsApp

Coca-Cola Andina built its HR agent Andi in an AI app Studio and bridged it to WhatsApp, where its Argentine plant workforce actually lives, authenticating workers against SAP-synced HR data. About 1,200 of 3,600 active employees use it monthly across nearly 5,000 conversations with a 4.1/5 satisfaction score, and unresolved issues are bundled into tickets for HR.

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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.