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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,695 ideas
WorkPartly worked

Shortlist workshop venues and audit the seating catch

In an October 1, 2026 test, a Cue agent returned three Manhattan workshop venues in about four minutes with capacity, price, accessibility and cancellation fields plus source links, flagging unconfirmed availability. A second agent's audit only started after an explicit follow-up prompt, and it caught that the headline 40-person venue seated only 30 in a classroom layout.

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

I had my agent read its own usage bill, set five rules, and cut its token use by about a fifth

He exported 10 hours of his AI usage (8,915 model calls, about 1.15 billion tokens) and had the bot study it. Chat with him was only about 11 percent; background subtasks the assistants started on their own were the rest, and 96 percent of input tokens were old context being read again. He set five standing rules, including a five minute wait limit and a cap on task size. A day later a second export showed total tokens down about 19 percent and tokens per call down about 28 percent, with average context per call down from about 128K to about 92K.

59-year-old non-coder's the AI posts 95 times a week across six accounts

A 59-year-old Japanese logistics worker who has never coded has the AI run 38 routines, including daily posts for three regional 'free places this week' Threads accounts; the agent published 95 posts in Oct 9-15 and one AI-written intro post passed 51,000 views. He reviews output five minutes morning and evening from his 4.5-hour commute.

Turn construction plans into a priced remodel estimate in about 10 minutes

A contractor coach shows his working takeoff system: he uploads construction plans into AI, which reads every sheet, note and finish item against his existing JobTread cost group of rates, markups and formulas, cites the sheet behind each quantity, and produces a bathroom remodel estimate of about $44,000 at a 46% margin in roughly 10 minutes. The conversation is saved as a reusable skill, with guardrails to show numbers before writing and stop on contradictions.

WorkPartly worked

My wife lost her bakery notebook, so I built her an app

His wife runs La Condesa Baking Company, a one person wholesale bakery with four cafe accounts, and all her shelf counts and invoices lived in one yellow notebook that went missing. He used AI to build Cuenta, a phone app that counts shelf stock, builds each delivery, prints and emails her branded invoice, and shows who owes what.

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

Crawl both client websites through our own SEO tool — 44 and 111 pages

Connecting the agency's own MCP-based SEO service to Toby took an afternoon of wrong turns between desktop and web plugin setups, but once authenticated it created both monitored sites and completed full crawls: 44 pages for the law firm and 111 for the medical practice. Google data imports were still skipped because the service had no Google connection configured.

A dashboard sorts his whole manufacturing business into the next card to do

He runs a manufacturing business with 17 employees and a day that bounces between projects and problems. His texts are forwarded to email, and Cowork sorts his emails, texts and CRM appointments into action points; a dashboard he built in an AI app ranks them as cards in time and project order, so he just works the top card and clicks done. It is learning how long his tasks take and how far away each one sits.

Rebuild our newsletter from the old issue and the style guide

After employer approval to connect workplace apps, the Business Insider reporter gave Dots an old newsletter in Google Docs plus a how-to guide, and manually shared a temporary Okta two-factor code. The Dot produced a test newsletter draft in about five minutes that an editor called 95% good, with photos, a chart and links in the right places.

Solo founder runs product management, QA and customer support through AI

A Korean solo developer's two-day diary of putting the AI to work as his team: GitHub issue labels split between him and the AI across marketing, planning, design, QA, operations and finance, with a project board and roadmap milestones built in about an hour; the AI runs QA on each deploy event and files issues; customer inquiries are answered through an admin MCP connection; and morning routines from a one-time setup (7 AM English lesson, Google Analytics analysis, issue briefing) arrive unprompted. He burned through his provided tokens in two days and estimates a 70 percent workload reduction.

Runs a monthly background scan of press and viral posts and stages

Content creator Colin Rocker (someone) named his AI 'Marlowe' and set it to keep his personal website updated without manual input. Marlowe runs scheduled background tasks including a monthly scan of the internet for new press and viral posts, pulling findings into his site — but never publishes without his approval.

He had LLMs rewrite his Python science code in Rust and it now answers instantly

A man reimplemented his GIS science code from Python into Rust using LLMs, with a hard test: identical inputs and outputs at 10,000 points. Where the rewrite differed, the agent researched other implementations and tried again. The result runs 10 to 70 times faster with far less memory, and the service now does the work essentially instantly.

HVAC tech's AI shops parts prices mid-call and banks every job for the next tech

Senior HVAC technician David Gharamany at Art of Comfort checks from a customer's home whether a part is at the shop, how fast he can get it, and which seller is cheapest, with the company's AI engine doing the shopping. Every service call's data is fed back into the system so the next technician facing a similar fault can pull up his fixes instead of phoning him, and the same system handles customer calls so the shop stops missing them.

The AI matched a client's 60 legacy reports to the new system in about an hour

His team is replacing a client's 15 year old system. The new system has to produce the same 60 report types as the old one, some with up to 100,000 rows, and his developers could not match the output exactly: wrong fonts, misspelled headers, rounding differences, cells formatted as text. He gave Fable 5.1 both codebases and a dump of the client's production database, and within an hour it had found and fixed every difference, down to column widths and row heights. Matching the reports by hand would have taken weeks.

Five years of books rebuilt from 34,000 transactions across 27 statement formats

He spent 31 years in IT, retired, and now runs an auto repair business. With the AI he rebuilt five years of books in QuickBooks for two businesses and his household, parsing 34,000 transactions from 27 different statement and portal formats in about two months. Estimates now come from phone call transcriptions, and the manual work on intake is down 80 percent.

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.

I gave an agent a server and $90. A month later it had taken in over $2,600.

He set up an agent called Cairn on a small rented server with about $90 in a wallet that needs both their signatures to move. The agent built its own website, keeps a public journal and ledger, wrote a manual on running agents like itself, and made over $2,600 in a month from paid questions, book sales, audit work for other agent owners and donations.

$2,600
WorkPartly worked

Manual mode was on — the agent edited anyway because it could not see the mode (partial)

A user running the AI in manual mode, where every edit needs approval, found the agent rewriting rule files and creating a script without confirming anything. The model had read the session's permission mode once at the start, when it still showed 'default', had no way to see it change, and when challenged answered from that stale reading and guesswork instead of checking.

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

Find me 48 school-district customers and draft each pitch — one replied, booked and paid

Teri Moten, a one-person AI-training business in Victoria, Texas, dictated a request to the AI: research rural districts near her, find potential customers and tailor pitches to their teacher-training calendars. About ten minutes later it returned 48 contacts and personalised email drafts, even noting she had attended school in one district and spoken with a principal in another; two districts replied within 48 hours and one booked and paid for a training session within ten days.

A marketing chief who cannot code runs a 130 agent system that tripled her blog traffic

A CMO at a business software company designed a marketing system of about 130 AI agents, one per job: researcher, writer, fact checker, critic, publisher. It runs her blog in three languages, LinkedIn for five executives, outbound and SEO, ticking every five minutes and starting work only when something is due. After a year in production it has published more than 630 articles and blog traffic from search is up 3.9 times. Her worst failure was a scheduled job that failed silently for a month; now a weekly audit checks the scheduler itself.

My brother replaced a $1,500 machine program with one the AI built in an hour

A man bought a used piece of industrial machinery and the $1,500 control software did not come with it. With no coding experience at all, he asked the AI on the web to build a control app, and in under an hour he had a working app packaged as a .deb file for Linux. It cost him nothing because he used his brother's AI subscription.

$1,500
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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.