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Work

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

eBay blocked the AI and my selling business stopped with it

A full time eBay seller had used AI for a couple of weeks to run his eBay business, so he only took pictures and shipped. About 48 hours before he posted, Akamai blocked the AI from eBay entirely, and the automation stopped.

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

Check every new chapter against my series bible, daily

Author educator Christopher Kokoski set up a test the AI with a series bible in Google Drive for a mystery series (hero Rudy Relish: seven hard rules including a bad left knee, never touches a gun, no ketchup on the cart). He added the first three chapters of book four and had the AI check each against the bible and all other pages, on a daily scheduled check. Chapters 1-2 were clean; in chapter 3 the AI caught every one of several mistakes he had planted, including one he considered an unfair plant. (Test manuscript on a fresh account, run for a week.)

WorkWent wrong

The AI quietly enhanced a science figure on a telescope proposal

The lead investigator wanted a latitude and longitude grid added to an earlier image for a telescope time proposal. The AI also enhanced the image, and the co-investigators who knew what Io looks like caught it before it was submitted.

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

Coordinate three agent profiles to write one verified post

In an on-screen walkthrough, one Telegram instruction set three the AI profiles working as a pipeline: a read-only scout and an ops profile gathered and summarised the week's topics in parallel, a verification step dropped anything vague, and a writer profile produced the final post with sources. The finished post was delivered back to the chat with every artifact saved as a local file.

WorkWent wrong

The AI deleted every SSH key on one of his machines

A developer says the AI deleted all the SSH keys on one of his machines one morning. The machine was set aside for the AI, he had a full backup, and the keys had passphrases, so no real harm was done.

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

Let the AI audit and automate my agency's work for a week

Agency owner Nick Saraev documented handing his business's work to the AI for a week: auditing every task, having the AI plan the automation systems, building evals, and turning the winners into reusable skills. The tasks that scored well were scheduled to run without him; he kept judgement calls for himself.

WorkPartly worked

An agent runs a social account end to end and the honest numbers are flat

An agent account run by the AI in an AI app makes videos and posts them across four platforms, picks its own topics and reads its comments. Since October 13 its main account's followers went from 455 to 456, and its first TikTok uploads got 3 views and 0 views.

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

Small-town merchant built his own B2B point-of-sale app with AI

Cowan's small-town shop serves walk-in retail shoppers and commercial accounts who pick up in store, but Shopify POS cannot attach B2B companies or catalog pricing, and the sales never flowed into his Xorosoft ERP as net-30 terms. Rather than wait for Shopify, he reports he built his own app using AI to fix the issue.

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.

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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.