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

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.

An AI skill that hunts freelance gigs across seven portals

Tomasz Woliński of Polish IT training firm StormIT built an AI skill, /szukaj-zlecen, that with one command searches seven freelancer portals, collects job listings, rates their difficulty, estimates budgets and suggests how to approach each one. Filters can restrict results to Polish sources or a chosen automation type, and a scoring system matches gigs to the user's experience level.

WorkPartly worked

Fill out my insurance broker's building document from my own files

Kicker completed most of an arcane insurance-broker document about Newton's new office by finding the lease, researching city websites and checking budget documents. It answered all but two of the broker's questions and asked follow-ups where it was unsure.

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

The AI built the interactive probability guide I had always wanted

He had always wanted a compact guide to probability distributions, what they are used for and how they relate to each other. The AI built the site he designed, with 15 core distributions and an extended map of 32, where clicking a distribution gives an interactive graph and clicking a link explains the relationship.

Decline a radio appearance that clashes with my schedule

Casey Newton's Dot, Kicker, handled a radio-show invitation that conflicted with his schedule, turning it down while he worked on other things. Newton estimated Kicker did about two hours of work in an afternoon for roughly 15 minutes of his effort.

Plumbing firm's voice agent books 600+ jobs from calls that used to go unanswered

Brothers Plumbing, Heating & Electric was losing work to missed calls: abandon rates neared 30 percent and callbacks took over 10 hours. ServiceTitan's AI Virtual Agent now answers in seconds and books jobs around the company's real capacity, service zones, technician skill sets and job types; the abandon rate fell to 5 percent, more than 600 jobs have been booked by the agent, and the company attributes $1.33 million in revenue to it.

$1,330,000

The AI wrote the Chinese messages that got his lost phone back

On a trip to Chaozhou, China, he lost his Android phone and does not speak Chinese. The AI told him to mark the phone lost at once and not wipe it, and wrote the Chinese messages to the man who found it, and the phone was brought to his hotel in under three hours.

WorkWent wrong

The AI made my PDF searchable and gave back blank pages

He asked the AI to make a PDF text searchable because his employer pays for full the AI but not the paid Adobe with OCR. After 10 minutes of processing it gave him a new PDF with the same number of pages, all completely blank and with no hidden text.

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

Audit my Instagram performance and draft replies to my DMs

Founder Divya Gugnani shows screen recordings of the AI connected to her Instagram: it audited her account (reporting 38% of Reels working and 22% of Carousels not) and drafted replies to 47 new DMs. The same demo shows Gmail reply drafts held for her approval and a school permission slip auto-completed from email.

WorkWent wrong

An agent without proper guardrails refunded $8,000 of his orders

An agent he had not yet set up with proper governance or skills refunded $8,000 of orders. It did ask 'You sure?' before acting, but he blanked on the confirmation and approved it. He puts the fault on his own setup more than on the agent.

$8,000one time
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Launch a landing-page SaaS that made $16K in three days

A self-described desperate vibe coder commented in an Reddit showcase thread that the SaaS he built with AI, which auto-generates landing pages and tracks who will pay, made $16k in 3 days with 876 paying users. It spread via Reddit and Twitter and got noticed in a hackathon Discord.

$16,000
WorkWent wrong

The AI spent a $100 marketing budget in minutes on fake followers for a lookalike account (failure)

A user gave the AI a Bitcoin wallet holding $100 as a month's marketing budget and asked it to devise and run a marketing strategy. Within minutes the agent had spent the entire $100 on fake followers for an X account that merely resembled the user's, and it also tried to buy an unneeded VPS and gravitated to the most expensive packages.

$100at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Three beauty shops, one owner: the blog writes itself from treatment photos

The owner of three Korean beauty treatment shops says she used to end most days having skipped the blog again; now she hands the AI a few treatment photos and one line of treatment information and a post in her stores' tone and her own voice comes back nearly finished, which she then saves as a Naver draft. Posting frequency is visibly up, the setup handles the recurring work, and she now teaches the same sequence to her staff.

WorkWent wrong

AI booked my hotel 468 miles away, plus one in West Palm Beach

An AI booking tool put a man in North Dakota into a hotel 468 miles away at 9:30 pm and booked him a second room in West Palm Beach for the same night. The same AI had also failed to cancel his Siurex XM.

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.

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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.