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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas
WorkPartly worked

It ran my job applications end to end, but it also submitted one I had not approved

He set the AI loose on entry level machine learning and data roles with hard rules: roles posted in the last 48 hours, pull the job description and required skills, rank matches against his projects, fill out applications, and log every job and status in a spreadsheet. It handled search to form filling and remembered his rules on visas and salary. But search results were full of expired postings and dead links, it made form mistakes, logins and captchas still fell to him, and once it submitted an application he had not approved. He warns against letting it rewrite a resume freely, since it adds things he cannot back up.

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

Agents do the manual half of his video editing, and his project time fell by about half

He edits video for a living. His agents handle the non creative manual work around each project: quality checks for missed text, black frames and logos, subtitles, reformatting for social aspect ratios, spreading files to the right products and pulling source material for descriptions. He logs his hours on every project and says agent assisted projects take about half the time with better quality; the weeks spent building the setup paid for themselves in two weeks.

Build an AI workspace that searches 300+ job sources and fit-scores every lead

Buried in a thread about application exhaustion, a job seeker describes the workspace he built in an AI app: it searches 300+ job sources, pulls leads and fit-scores each against his experience, preferences, salary requirements and commute; for any lead worth pursuing it breaks down the posting and the organization, compares it with his background, suggests resume adjustments, creates a customized cover letter and drafts the application email - he reviews, attaches documents and submits.

WorkWent wrong

The AI diagram shipped without the claim it was meant to show

He asked the AI to make a technical diagram with gpt-image-1. After ten tries the version that shipped looked clean but had quietly dropped the exact claim the diagram was meant to show, and he only caught it after publishing.

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

Agent searched jobs against his CV and built his application pack

He gave the AI his CV and a job search brief, and the agent searched Naukri, LinkedIn, and Wellfound for roles posted in the last 24 hours, scored each one against his experience, and tracked the strongest in a Google Sheet. For the top 3 it made a tailored summary and cover note in a Google Doc and drafted an intro email for each, leaving sending and applying to him.

His AI checks WordPress plugins daily and found malware

He set up an AI for his WP Beacon project to check WordPress plugins every day. After two weeks of daily checks it pinged him about malware in the InstaWP Connect plugin, and wordpress.org closed the listing that afternoon and restored it the next morning.

Running a one person marketplace in Japan, he shipped four Mac apps and a web product with AI doing the release work

He runs an online marketplace in Japan that he started in 2004, with around 300,000 members, and he is clear the AI gets no credit for that. What changed is how much else he ships: since working this way he has released four Mac apps and one web product on his own, some with paying users. The AI handles the release scripts, localization into thirty languages, measurement and support drafts, the pile of work that used to stop him shipping the next thing.

The AI filmed and exported a how-to video for my dad

He typed one line into AI asking for a screen recording that shows how to add up numbers in Google Sheets, for his dad who struggles with computers. The AI recorded the demo, did the typing and clicking itself, and exported it ready to send.

Build a working spreadsheet into my Drive from one source

The AI planned, then wrote a finished Google Sheet into the tester's Drive from one named source file, with the requested columns, sort order, summary row, formulas and a chart. She iterated in chat while watching the writes land in the open Sheet, and still checked every formula by hand.

The AI helped him get Photoshop and four other Adobe apps running on Linux

A Creative Cloud user wanted to move his work laptop to Linux, but Adobe makes no Linux versions. With a lot of help from the AI he built a patched version of Wine, the tool that runs Windows programs on Linux, and shared it free. On his laptop, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Audition and Media Encoder now install and run through his normal paid account.

Family-office staff each built a working AI agent for their own recurring job

A Spanish AI consultant's case study (client anonymized): in autumn 2026 he trained the 8-12 person team of an industrial family office with several companies. Working in department pairs, each pair left with a working the AI Skill or agent prototype on a real case of theirs: a Skill for the monthly storage-unit bank reconciliation, another for comparing offers, a Cowork contract registry over the maintenance folder, and scheduled tasks such as a daily inbox review and a weekly maintenance summary, all on Microsoft 365 connectors, with a governance playbook and 30 days of support.

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.

The AI rebuilt our network proxy tool in 6 weeks. Doing it by hand had taken 16 months.

The maintainer of GitProxy, a network security tool used in finance, refactored it from Node.js to Java with AI working as a pair. Six weeks of this workflow matched about 16 months of earlier manual effort. His first try with one-shot the AI generation produced about 1,800 lines a session of messy code that did not survive, and the talk explains why the interactive way worked.

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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.