Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Work

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

The AI wrote the programs that run his lab instruments over the network

A man wired his lab instruments to his home network, put all their manuals and programming guides into an AI project, and the AI wrote most of the first set of Python programs that control the instruments and pull data from them. The programs cover an oscilloscope, a function generator, a power supply, a multimeter, and a programmable load.

The AI drafted his blog post from a Telegram message: cloned the repo, drafted from his old articles, he reviewed and published

Tony Xu recalls using AI as his always-on agent in early 2026: he handed it a blog post draft task over Telegram, and the AI cloned his repository, studied his older articles for structure and voice, drafted the post, and he then checked the structure, facts and wording before publishing. He liked the capability but quit over the upkeep: a self-hosted gateway and services he had to run himself.

WorkPartly worked

Build a SaaS in a weekend with AI — and catch the payment bug it approved itself

Ryan Mercer spent a weekend building a SaaS with AI and Next.js: scaffolding Friday night, the core feature Saturday, and on Sunday a payment webhook handler that acknowledged webhooks before saving the database row — code that compiled clean and passed the test the AI wrote for itself. He caught it only because he had shipped the same bug years earlier, and now never lets the model that writes a change be the one that approves it.

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

About 30 agents run his marketing agency's client work on one shared memory

A small agency owner whose team does websites, content, Google ads and SEO for home service businesses runs the work through about 30 AI agents. The problem was memory: every session started cold and repeated mistakes. Since June they share one log that only grows, now about 11,400 lines including 413 decisions, where every note names the agent that wrote it and links to proof, and replaced facts stop showing in searches. A separate grader agent scores every piece of work, though he found 208 of 277 grades had been credited to the grader instead of the worker.

My AI bots test my booking flow and prep my mornings

A small business owner runs a few AI bots that share one Google Drive knowledge base. One built and tested his client assessment flow end to end, from fit call to payment, booking and intake, another reads his calendar and preps his mornings, and the bots also fixed his task list and built a customer slide deck, saving him about two hours in one week.

2 hourssaved
WorkWent wrong

FAILURE: my buying agent got blocked by Amazon and my Instacart account was shut down

A travel advisor used AI for client quotes and purchases. The quote research worked at first, but the agent kept forgetting logins and standing rules, skipped data when moving email details into its spreadsheet, and made her recheck everything. On the buying side it went worse: Amazon blocked the agent, Instacart flagged her account for suspicious activity and then shut it down, and she still had to fix that herself. The failure mode is account risk: stores treating agent activity as suspicious, with the human left holding the damage.

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

Built a one-page website in ~40 seconds; the output was a weak

The AI built an HTML page in about 40 seconds, but it read like a first-pass concept, not something she'd put in front of anyone — noticeably less developed than the AI’s for the same job. Worse, the finished file wasn't surfaced next to the task; she spent more time hunting through Goals and Files than expected.

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

Circa Runs Its Website, Grants and Marketing on the AI at 50 Posts a Week

Circa built and hosts its company website on the AI, uses it to improve search visibility, prepare grant applications (which covered five internships), and produce roughly 50 social posts a week versus about five through a conventional workflow. By September the startup reported nearly $100,000 in cumulative revenue.

The AI found the school law. My daughter starts on Monday.

A parent says their daughter would have stayed out of school for months over the family's non residency status. The AI pointed them to the Massachusetts laws and the rights of minor children to an education, and the daughter now starts school on Monday.

WorkPartly worked

Build a source-checked mini-site in five minutes — but it can't go public

Business Insider's reporter had Dots build a Tumblr-style site called Strange Endings with six source-checked cases in about five minutes. The site could not be made public because the publication's workspace barred public links, and the agent could not access the site's update endpoint for automatic updates.

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

BananaGroup now runs its Medigap sales on an app the AI helped build

BananaGroup now runs its Medicare Supplement sales on its own app, with prospects, quotes, enrollment alerts and the sales pipeline in one place, built in a couple of days. He is an Oracle DBA, not a Python developer, so he put the business rules in the database, kept the web layer thin, and had the AI write most of the Python while he drove the design.

WorkWent wrong

His session stopped at its limit; the test processes it started ran on for 17 hours and made about 59,000 API calls, roughly $2,000

An AI session started verification tests as background processes. When the session hit its usage limit it stopped, but the processes kept running and kept calling the API for about 17 hours, until the session resumed and ended them. Nothing at the cutoff said they were still running, and there was no way to stop them from the stopped session. The test loop had no cap on turns or calls. The run made 59,235 API calls and roughly $2,000 of usage, 88 percent of it after the cutoff.

$2,000at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

My Dot compared 1,500 train fares and found cheaper split tickets

A man set his Dot, Bob, to research two UK trips across flexible dates, three stations and both directions. Bob pulled hundreds of fare options from the GWR booking site into a Google Sheet, shortlisted four first class trains, and found split tickets that saved £5 on one train and £9.40 on another.

£14.4
Show 10 more

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.