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

I built an online game on a Raspberry Pi between farm jobs. It made $3,000.

A New Zealand sheep farmer who had only made small scripts before installed the AI on a Raspberry Pi server and, over more than 1,000 prompts, built a working online game with a persistent world and real players. In its first three months it took about $3,000 from paying customers, and he still runs it from the farm.

$3,000

Resolve 600,000 employee queries across 87,000 staff

LTM's RAIma super-agent, built in an AI app Studio and embedded in Teams and Microsoft 365 the AI, handles attendance corrections, leave applications, seat booking and hardware requests across more than 87,000 employees. It has resolved over 600,000 queries at roughly 100,000 prompts a month, verifies medical documents for sick-leave approvals, and cut automated campus-onboarding email effort by more than 90%.

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.

The AI made my article pictures, a video reel and a storybook PDF for about $12

Working with AI connected to the Higgsfield MCP, he produced two illustrated articles, a reel with generated B-roll, editing and a cover, and an illustrated children's story as a 9 page PDF with a cover. The test used 236 credits, about $12, and three video shots took about three quarters of that. He also shows the connection mistake he made at the start.

WorkWent wrong

The AI cleanup script deleted 48,218 live project files through Windows junctions

A developer told the AI to repair his stock-options analysis software working only on copies; when the mirror-rebuild tool failed, the agent wrote its own Python cleanup script that treated 614 Windows directory junctions inside the temp mirror as ordinary folders and deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds. The sweep also emptied the Git object store, leaving an index that listed 7,221 paths whose contents were unrecoverable.

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

My Dot built me 1,400 sales leads in five hours

He asked his Dot to build a list of sales leads for his industry, limited to the business types he actually sells to. In five hours it had 1,400 leads and was still going, on its way to about 3,500 across the 20 biggest metro areas. He had paid $223 for about 350 leads before, and the Dot's list was cleaner.

A small tech firm gave the AI 41 scoped tools and it now handles first line support tickets

The owner of a small technology company called ALAPKO runs AI as the reasoning layer for an internal support worker they call Mabel, with 41 purpose built tools tied into their systems. In a shown run she read a ticket with its customer and asset history, worked out the likely cause, claimed the ticket, replied to the customer with troubleshooting steps, wrote an internal engineering note, and set the ticket status, in about 34 seconds. Business actions go through permission scoped tools and every action lands in an audit log; her normal shell access is read only.

Run my whole solo business on a daily ritual — I just approve and send

Joshua Tiernan handed his to-do list to the AI entirely: scheduled tasks across HubSpot, Gmail and Notion research prospects on weekends, draft follow-up and reply emails when his custom 'Next Touch Date' arrives, track sponsor deliverables and payments, log ideas and build his next day's task list each morning. Nothing sends without his review, and he estimates the system, run on a £90/month Max plan, does the work of 10 to 20 full-time humans across his sponsorship business.

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.

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Run a party-game app business on a few hours a week with AI

A sales professional who had never built anything launched Antics, a party game app in 11 languages, with AI, and says revenue is growing week over week in multiple countries. The AI also runs the back office: a daily 05:30 brief email with actions to take, an analytics pipeline, a script that adjusts Apple Search Ads bids daily, drafted App Store review replies, and a payments ledger for his promo team.

Add a live AI assistant to my website for $0 extra

A creator had the AI build and deploy an AI assistant on his own website that answers visitor questions from his site's content, powered by the API credits bundled with his AI plan at about $0.0006 per question. The shared prompt builds in a server-side key, per-visitor rate limits and a daily spending cap, plus a security review before shipping.

WorkWent wrong

His publishing agent posted the same articles twice with changed web addresses

The publishing agent for his magazine posted duplicate articles to WordPress, with the copies sitting at addresses ending in -2 where readers could find both. A do not publish note he meant as temporary also sat in an agent's instructions for a week and quietly stopped all output.

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

Salon owner's own front-desk agent lifts completed intake forms from 25% to 81%

At the Operably founder's own Aveda Lifestyle Salon in Carmel, Indiana, the live setup books guests by text against real availability with a card on file, sends intake forms automatically before a first visit, and gives staff a Teams/Slack assistant that answers policy questions from the salon's own 1,000-plus documents with cited sources. Within weeks of the reminder texts starting, new guests arriving with the intake form already done jumped from about 25 percent in a typical week to 81 percent in one week; the voice receptionist is built but not yet live for guests.

File everything I text myself into the right category

Shreya Agarwal connected the AI to WhatsApp so every thought, task and reminder she messages herself is classified and stored automatically, with deadlines extracted — a 'cancel the free trial in two months' note becomes a task dated today plus 60 days. Setup took under 15 minutes and new categories are created by the agent as new kinds of items appear.

A review engine asked his past customers for reviews and got three five star ones on day one

His system asks customers for a Google review after their first service, through its own tracked links, with up to 17 text and email touches over 12 months that stop the moment someone clicks. He backfilled about 70 past customers and got three new five star reviews on the first day, and the system replies to every new review in about 15 minutes, holding negative ones for his approval.

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.

Cut a three-hour trading workflow to about 20 minutes

A Hiscox trading manager built an agent workflow in an AI app Studio that automates a series of tasks which previously took around three hours and now take about 20 minutes. The Microsoft case study does not name the tasks or say how the time was measured.

My agent cuts my gameplay into compilation videos and shorts and posts them for me

A gamer running a channel where he plays thousands of games built a web app with AI. He just plays, drops in a hook and a few words of review, and the system takes over: when six gameplay videos are ready it cuts a compilation with a full description and posts it to YouTube on schedule. Every day it also makes two Guess The Game shorts in two languages and posts them to YouTube Shorts, Instagram and TikTok, twelve posts a day at set times.

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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.