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

His agent reported 'posted' daily for 14 days while nothing went out

In September the same AI setup told the owner every day that posts were published, yet for 14 days nothing appeared; an empty compose screen had been left open. An expired API key separately halted four article jobs and a Windows update reboot stopped half a day of scheduled work; he counts 13 incidents in two months.

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

Track my whole job hunt and score every posting against my résumé

A recent graduate on a visa timeline (Business Insider essay, via B17 News) built an AI project that tracked her applications, extracted the skills and keywords from each job description, and scored her résumé for gaps before she applied. The dashboard she had the AI build shows the funnel that ended in a job: 186 applications, 44 cold outreaches, 19 interviews, six take-home assignments, three final rounds and one offer.

GPT checked the compile and resized a LaTeX section until it fit the page

A LaTeX user's copied table code did not fit his page size at all. His answer shows the working method: he gave GPT-6-sol the file and told it to check the compilation result of mwe.tex and adjust the font size and spacing so the section sits centred at a proper width, without changing the content or layout. The answer posts the adjusted code that came back.

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.

WorkPartly worked

Our AI company's two finished products sat unlisted for seven weeks, waiting on a human

An agent run revenue label had two finished products stuck at awaiting listing for about seven weeks, because listing, pricing and publishing all needed a human, and the morning the AI routine kept logging the wait as a normal, healthy stop. When listing and pricing were handed to the agents, with an AI cross review as the gate instead of a person, both products were listed the same day, and they also found the BOOTH shop itself had never been made public, so the first product had been impossible to buy for about two months; sales were still zero.

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

Agents predicted where our app would break, then checked it on video

Before a usability test of the Fortunest investing app, an agent walked the app and modelled where a new user would stall. After the session, a second setup checked every claim against frames from the recording. Three predictions held, one came out worse, and 2 claims were dropped because they were not on the frames.

A roofing estimator’s system breaks down huge drawing sets, tags every fact, and checks his final number before it goes out

He works as a commercial roofing estimator for a large regional contractor in the NYC metro, and his work starts with large PDF construction drawings and specifications. Over eight months he built a system he calls Estimator-OS. Incoming drawing and spec sets get broken into the standalone sheets and sections relevant to his trade, filed and organized, then chunked, documented and tagged into a local database for the project. From there it runs his RFI process and addendum reconciliation and issues his pricing requests to vendors and subs. Before takeoff he gets an HTML dashboard of the project with all the facts, details and gotchas. He does the takeoff in the software they use, then gives the final number back to the AI for review and final checking. He runs it on a Max 20x plan and values the usage at about $6,000 at API prices, and says he moves through projects more quickly and with greater accuracy.

Produce my company's ad videos end to end

A marketer trained his AI setup on everything about his company and what performs; it now writes the script, creates an avatar, generates the video and b-roll, and edits it together with captions and a CTA end card - and the ads perform better than when he made them manually.

WorkPartly worked

An automatic coding pipeline merged 67 pull requests in two weeks, then he shut it down

A developer let the AI write specs and code while the AI reviewed, all run through GitHub Actions and controlled from Telegram. Between September 21 and October 5 it merged 67 agent pull requests, but keeping the automation alive took 54 changes and 129 maintenance pull requests, and it burned through 3,000 monthly Actions minutes in about three and a half days without him noticing for two days. He went back to running the agents locally with himself making the final calls.

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

Dots ran my projects for a week and kept losing track of its own work

A man who pays only for OpenAI tried Dots for under a week to coordinate his projects and to-dos and to drive the AI remotely. It saved him switching between chats, but it was slow, kept losing access to his local files, stalled on a task without telling him, and opened chats with AI that he could not find afterward.

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

Decline a radio appearance that clashes with my schedule

Casey Newton's Dot, Kicker, handled a radio-show invitation that conflicted with his schedule, turning it down while he worked on other things. Newton estimated Kicker did about two hours of work in an afternoon for roughly 15 minutes of his effort.

Plumbing firm's voice agent books 600+ jobs from calls that used to go unanswered

Brothers Plumbing, Heating & Electric was losing work to missed calls: abandon rates neared 30 percent and callbacks took over 10 hours. ServiceTitan's AI Virtual Agent now answers in seconds and books jobs around the company's real capacity, service zones, technician skill sets and job types; the abandon rate fell to 5 percent, more than 600 jobs have been booked by the agent, and the company attributes $1.33 million in revenue to it.

$1,330,000
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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.