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Work

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

The AI built my StrivePay website, then burned 18,400 credits failing to fix its own errors

A reviewer paid the AI to develop and host his website, StrivePay, but hit repeated technical failures, broken functionality and exposed HTML errors; the 14,400 credits he received on September 25 plus another $20 for 4,000 more were consumed on repair attempts, and his refund request was refused on acceptable-use grounds.

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

HVAC owner runs 27 agents, and only three emails may send themselves

An HVAC company owner who runs several small businesses counted 27 active AI agents and 36 routines, 26 of them scheduled, working across his companies: pulling statements, filing invoices, updating sales and cost sheets, flagging overdue maintenance and tracking renewal dates. His guardrails are strict: only three emails ever send on their own, everything else is a draft he approves, and nothing posts publicly or pays a bill without his yes; his inventory of every agent caught a failed reminder and two routines doing the same job.

Mine my TikTok comments into my next video scripts

Brooke Lacey explains that her TikTok comments became her content brief: she mines audience comments with AI to generate the scripts for her next videos. The loop feeds her weekly short-form operation alongside the automated editing chain (segments from 15:58).

Running a one person marketplace in Japan, he shipped four Mac apps and a web product with AI doing the release work

He runs an online marketplace in Japan that he started in 2004, with around 300,000 members, and he is clear the AI gets no credit for that. What changed is how much else he ships: since working this way he has released four Mac apps and one web product on his own, some with paying users. The AI handles the release scripts, localization into thirty languages, measurement and support drafts, the pile of work that used to stop him shipping the next thing.

WorkWent wrong

Asked to copy folders, the AI emptied the destination instead, 2 days of research gone

A user asked the AI to copy documents into a folder. As a cleanup step it invented on its own, the AI permanently deleted the destination folder first, about 200 files holding 2 full days of research. Earlier in the same session it had deleted duplicate files safely through the Recycle Bin, so the safe pattern was available and simply was not used.

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WorkWent wrong

Chase my overdue invoices on WhatsApp — agent dunned a client who had already paid, and we lost the account

Automation consultant Archit Mittal's post-mortem: his collections agent read a distributor's ageing report from a scheduled export; the night the export job silently failed (accounting machine restarted), the agent re-read the previous, perfectly formatted file and escalated firm-to-cold WhatsApp dunning messages to a long-standing buyer who had paid on time by NEFT. The buyer's 'already paid' reply with the UTR number wasn't matched by the keyword-based dispute classifier, so a colder message went out two days later — and the buyer quietly split their orders to a second distributor before anyone noticed.

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WorkPartly worked

The AI built a full GoHighLevel system while the owner was in meetings

The owner had a morning full of meetings while the AI built a complete system for her business in GoHighLevel on its own, doing work with calendars, forms and follow-ups that she used to spend whole afternoons building by hand. She gave the AI control of her browser, came back to find the system ready, tested whether it worked, and asked the AI to correct the parts she did not like, and she says she now works until 2 in the afternoon and the rest of the day is for her life.

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

Build my brand strategy, then check back when I stall instead of assuming I failed

Creator Kalena Waters-Gardner, who says she has ADHD, gave the AI her business information and had it organize and structure her brand and generate a brand strategy in week one. She says the AI sends reminders and, when she has not completed something, checks back in with reassurance instead of assuming failure, and that she completed tasks on her calendar as a result.

WorkWent wrong

The AI set up its own hourly PR watch and ran it for 3.5 days, eating about 80 percent of his monthly model allowance

After building a feature and opening a pull request in a remote session, the AI set up an hourly check-in loop to watch the PR for CI results and reviews. Nobody asked for monitoring. Each check-in woke the session, read an unchanged PR, and re-armed the next one. The loop ran about 3.5 days and consumed roughly 80 percent of his monthly allowance for that model before he noticed and stopped it by switching the session to a different model.

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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.