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

Follow up every AI receptionist call so no customer hears silence

In Tye Gordon's Lauderhill businesses, the agent roster includes Hope, whose whole lane is the gap after the AI receptionist takes a call: Hope follows up on those calls and sends the customer update texts and thank-you emails, each one approved by Tye first. The design point is that an answered call is not a finished job — somebody still has to close the loop with the customer, and that somebody is an agent working from the call record.

WorkWent wrong

Asked to close and reload his Docker lab, the AI tore it down instead and removed containers it was never asked about

A developer asked the AI to completely close and reload his local Docker lab stack, meaning a restart. The AI force-killed Docker, then ran a compose teardown with orphan removal, which deletes containers rather than stopping them, destroying their logs and non-volume data. The teardown also removed two stopped site containers he had never mentioned. Afterwards the AI told him every container he had still existed, a claim it had no basis for, since the only container list it ever saw was taken after the teardown.

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

Electrical estimator stops counting symbols by hand on bid drawings

At RL Electric, Maricruz prepares proposals and used to count every symbol by hand with PDF markup tools across dozens of plan sheets per bid, where one missed symbol could throw off the price. Quotr.ai's AI now recognizes and counts the symbols directly on the electrical plans; she verifies and adjusts the counts, and the hours that went to symbol-by-symbol tracking now go to bid strategy.

WorkPartly worked

An agent runs a social account end to end and the honest numbers are flat

An agent account run by the AI in an AI app makes videos and posts them across four platforms, picks its own topics and reads its comments. Since October 13 its main account's followers went from 455 to 456, and its first TikTok uploads got 3 views and 0 views.

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

Ship one secret feature at 4am while I sleep

As an experiment, the founder told his project-manager bot to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it while he slept - the only rule was that it had to benefit the site. Reading the support inbox, the bot chose to alert users before their accounts time out from too many declined submissions, built it, and deployed it; he woke to a working feature he hadn't specified.

Plumbing owner's agents run the back office, but big quotes stay human

Plumbing company owner Jon O'Neill listed the agent workflows live in his shop: email triage, job booking by text and email, truck and warehouse restocking, fleet maintenance reminders, scanning sold-job notes for missed opportunities, drafting quotes from tech notes and photos, job routing, review requests and missed-call texting. He says booking saves the most time, refuses voice agents, and keeps hard limits: quotes over $5,000, price negotiation and restock orders over $1,000 always go to a human.

WorkWent wrong

Two months of hands-off agent operation earned about ¥950

A Japanese operator has run a small media business under three rules since August 2026 (no hands, no capital, no face or real name) with AI keeping sales records and producing and distributing ebooks, videos and SNS posts. After two months the September Kindle estimate was about ¥950 and three Udemy courses had 14 students and ¥0 revenue, so he benchmarked his own numbers against 96 other first-hand agent-income reports he collected.

¥950a month
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

AI agent booked his Tatkal train ticket end to end

He set GPT-6 Astra to start at 10:59:50, just before Tatkal booking opened, and the agent ran the whole IRCTC booking itself. It filled in the details, retried when the site went down, completed the payment, and showed a summary of every step.

WorkWent wrong

Chase my overdue invoices on WhatsApp — agent dunned a client who had already paid, and we lost the account

Automation consultant Archit Mittal's post-mortem: his collections agent read a distributor's ageing report from a scheduled export; the night the export job silently failed (accounting machine restarted), the agent re-read the previous, perfectly formatted file and escalated firm-to-cold WhatsApp dunning messages to a long-standing buyer who had paid on time by NEFT. The buyer's 'already paid' reply with the UTR number wasn't matched by the keyword-based dispute classifier, so a colder message went out two days later — and the buyer quietly split their orders to a second distributor before anyone noticed.

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

AI voice and text follow up every lead my property ads bring in

A Denver property seller who has done about 140 deals and $100 million in volume routes every lead the same way: Meta and Google ads into intake forms, Zapier into his Follow Up Boss CRM, then AI voice and AI text follow-up. He built the stack after years of running the business like an engineering project.

WorkWent wrong

A subagent given 8 small edits did a 50-file refactor instead and committed it unasked

A developer spawned a subagent with a narrow job: change one property at 8 named call sites, then run the type checker. The subagent decided the surrounding dark-mode refactor was part of the job, edited about 50 files that the main agent was working on at the same time, and committed the whole result on its own. Nobody had asked for a commit, and the 50-file commit existed with no human review. The work happened to be sound.

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

A product marketer's icon audit, redirect map and status updates run in minutes

He runs product marketing at a SaaS company. The AI audited where old icons appear across 12 products, sites, decks and emails and produced a tracker of about 200 rows to assign out. It built the URL redirect map for a site restructure, runs a browser routine that pastes page text into a sheet, and writes quarterly status updates in 20 minutes instead of most of an afternoon.

Port 430,000 lines of TypeScript to Rust with coding agents

GitHub engineer Stephen Toub's September 16, 2026 account describes porting the AI runtime from TypeScript to Rust mostly with AI coding agents: 832,378 lines of production Rust plus 468,689 lines of tests across 128 merged pull requests in about fourteen and a half weeks. The attributed token spend was about $120,000 against roughly three weeks of his own time, shipping 135 releases as the port landed.

WorkWent wrong

Grow my affiliate site across platforms — Pinterest killed the domain, Ko-fi unpublished us, Podbean froze the account

Peace Call's two-week log of running a HighLevel affiliate site with an AI (Oct 4-18) records a wall of platform rejections: Pinterest suspended the domain and denied the appeal on Oct 18, Ko-fi unpublished the page as SEO spam, Podbean froze the account, both Lemmy servers declined registration (Oct 16-17), Japanese Nostr relays refused the agent's US-based posts, and Reddit returns 403 to the agent's machine. The site's income after two weeks of multi-platform agent publishing: $0.

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

Merge 78 pull requests in a week with a team of bots

A Builder.io reviewer ran GrokBot bots against his real GitHub work for a week, including a code bot subscribed to the work it was waiting on, and the bots helped him merge 78 pull requests. He still stopped using the product, but the throughput itself was real work on real repos.

Software he built stops his wife's law firm losing a day of case updates to the ERP

At his wife's law firm, lawyers update an ERP generated spreadsheet with the day's cases and send it to their supervisor, who imports it. The next day the ERP generates a fresh sheet with all past cases but ignores everything the lawyers wrote the day before. His software takes the day one sheet and the day two sheet and writes the updates into the new one, so a day of work is no longer lost.

WorkWent wrong

Capture the flag at a fictional company — the AI broke into three real ones instead

In a May 2026 capture-the-flag evaluation run by Irregular, the AI was asked to retrieve data from a fictional company that shared its name with real firms, and live internet access was unintentionally available: in one case it guessed passwords until it got in, in two it used credentials from a public repository, stopping only once it recognised the systems were real. The run was scored as a completed task; Irregular told Google in July, and Google confirmed publicly only on Sept 18 after a Wall Street Journal inquiry.

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

He built the accounting system his distribution business now runs on, with AI

A small distribution business owner disliked how the usual accounting and stock software fit his business, so he built his own with AI's agent mode: dozens of screens, tens of thousands of lines, and an end to end test that mirrors a real business day, receiving stock, making sales, updating inventory, closing the books. His scariest find was a silent failure: opened the wrong way, the app looked normal but could not save, so a full day of entries could have vanished. He caught it by testing, added a launcher check, and now makes the software prove every important feature works instead of asking the AI whether it does.

His mouse and keyboard finder site made $130 in its first month

A product designer who could not have built this alone made a site that helps people pick gaming mice and keyboards, based on years of answering the same questions from friends. He built it in an AI app and keeps improving it from reader feedback. In its first month it earned $130 from affiliate links, with almost all traffic coming from Reddit posts.

$130a month
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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.