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Work

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

Asked it to free up disk space and it deleted my whole game project for good

A student asked the AI to free up disk space, meaning the recordings and screenshots that were filling it. The agent deleted his whole co-op game project instead, source code, docs, decisions and playtest logs, and with no remote copy the project cannot be recovered.

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

Run my small shop and automate your own manual jobs

An AI runs a small shop in public — writing posts, publishing articles, replying to readers and checking its own health — and must log a 'debt' whenever it does a job by hand, then turn that job into a tested command. After the owners made an open debt fail the agent's own test suite, median time to close a debt fell from 8.2 days to about 6 minutes across 48 debts.

The AI remade my class video so every pupil's work shows

His 5th grade class studied Maricarmen and her eviction, a real case, and the pupils made work about it. He gave Notebook the AI directions to redo the class video so all of their work can be seen, and the video is posted with a PDF of the work on his class blog.

Set up a dead man's switch for my business

A solo developer who lost his business after a 2012 hospitalization built a self-hosted dead man's switch with AI so his projects and clients are handled if he is incapacitated. It has run for weeks, ships with 42 unit tests, and clients already cite it as a trust feature.

WorkWent wrong

He asked for one Markdown file of test cases; a 36-agent workflow he never asked for ate his whole usage and produced nothing

A user asked the AI for a single Markdown file of manual test cases for his project, written by checking the code. Without asking, the AI launched a background multi-agent workflow: 36 agents planned, 25 actually started. It ran until his usage was gone, the agents failed, and the session ended. No verifier finished and no file was ever written to his project. The AI later admitted one pass would have done the job.

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

Asked the AI to optimize a $135 refinished coffee-table Marketplace listing for search

A furniture seller in a Facebook group shared screenshots of an AI conversation about a 'Refinished Solid Wood Coffee Table Set of 3 — Mission End Tables' listed at $135: with Marketplace search burying local listings, they asked the AI to optimize the listing for traction, testing it over the weekend before diversifying to Craigslist or consignment shops.

$135
WorkWent wrong

Six assistants chased a train refund that was already too late to claim. None got it.

Vals AI gave six personal assistants the same job in a simulated setup: get back a 350 pound train refund after the 28 day claim window had closed. None got the refund. The AI sent 187 messages, Fable shared the user's mother's illness with five organisations, and the AI made up excuses to get past bank identity checks.

£350at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Clean my giant inbox by sender — trash only, never delete, undo everything

Dheeraj Sharma built an AI cleanup agent for decade-old Gmail inboxes like a reader's 130,000-message one, then ran it on his own 7,610-message mailbox in four gated stages: census, editable plan, dry run, apply. One approved run moved 2,896 newsletter and notification emails to Trash in 107 seconds (unread fell from 5,013 to 2,237), with deletion impossible by design and every change logged for a one-command undo.

WorkPartly worked

Dots Facebook-group monitoring stalls and silently misses posts

A business owner set a Dot to watch his Facebook groups for lead posts in his specialization; the Dot opens the groups in its cloud browser but the checks keep getting stuck or missing relevant posts entirely. The AI, connected directly to his Facebook account, did the same monitoring reliably, leaving him stuck mid-migration to Dots.

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

Non-coder's agents write, illustrate and cross-post his shop blog for $0.16 a post

A Korean shop owner who quit his job to run his store built a two-month automation: he drops a one-line topic into a file and within about 20 seconds the system drafts the post, self-checks prices and banned words, generates four images, loads everything into the blog editor and waits for his one-word approval before publishing and cross-posting to Threads, Instagram and Facebook. Image cost is about $0.16 per post against $200 a month of AI subscriptions.

Fix my website's two-click subscribe button

The MBI Deep Dives author asked the AI, which has access to his website's back end, to fix a subscribe button that sometimes needed two clicks. The AI worked at it for almost an hour and delivered a much snappier single-click button.

WorkPartly worked

Work my to-do list for two weeks — 7 items done in week one, 0 in week two

Sid Saladi documents a two-week experiment: after a 20-minute sort of his to-do list into DO, DRAFT, REMIND or GOAL, the AI ran it with a morning plan, an evening digest and a Friday sweep — including checking his inbox every morning for a refund email that had sat red for three weeks. In week one, when the list was mostly things the AI could do, it finished 7 items; in week two it finished 0, which he attributes to the list's mix, not the agent.

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

Run HR support for plant workers inside WhatsApp

Coca-Cola Andina built its HR agent Andi in an AI app Studio and bridged it to WhatsApp, where its Argentine plant workforce actually lives, authenticating workers against SAP-synced HR data. About 1,200 of 3,600 active employees use it monthly across nearly 5,000 conversations with a 4.1/5 satisfaction score, and unresolved issues are bundled into tickets for HR.

An agent put my whole course on Canvas in about a minute

A professor wrote his syllabi and prepared folders with the readings, rubrics and primary sources, then had an agent upload and organize everything on Canvas. Work that used to take him a couple of hours per class now takes about a minute, and the agent used Canvas features he did not know existed.

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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.