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

The AI turned my 30 year old icon library into a paid Mac app in 11 days

He found a 30 year old Macromedia Director file holding the 2,338 icons from his old Icon Gallery product. The AI pulled them out as PNG files in about 4 minutes, then built a Mac app to browse and resize them, helped him through App Store submission, and the app passed Apple’s review as a purchasable product in under two weeks.

Update all 12 pages of my website in three minutes

Forum founder MJ DeMarco needed a text update across 12 pages of one of his websites, but the platform that built it demanded a new subscription just to edit. He gave the AI access to the site folder instead; it made all the changes in about 3 minutes, avoiding an estimated hour of manual editing and a $20/month subscription.

$20a month

He runs 13 scheduled the AI routines for his blog and social accounts, chosen with a three-question filter

A Korean blogger documents the 13 scheduled the AI routines (desktop-app Routines) that run his content operation as of Oct 13, 2026: 6 daily blog-post jobs, 3 daily or every-other-day refresh/summary/index checks, 2 social jobs (Threads twice a day, Instagram), and 2 weekly checks and calculator builds. Jobs were picked with a filter he also turns into a reusable prompt: the task must repeat 3+ times a week in the same order, be checkable in one minute, and be reversible (never money-sending, deleting or messaging others). Guardrails: routines halt and log where they stopped if a password field appears, and Blogspot posts stay drafts for him to publish. A one-off scheduled job to end a book discount at 00:05 on Oct 13 ran on time. The post sells his 18-page PDF of the instruction and memory-file templates, so it is marked promotional.

WorkWent wrong

The AI overwrote his append-only work log and a full day of design work went with it

A senior engineer keeps a daily devlog file that is only ever added to. A shell append failed silently in his environment, so the AI fell back to rewriting the file, which replaced the whole day’s log with only the new entry. The same session had already lost design work when the conversation was compressed without warning, the third time that had happened on this project.

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

Review my Salesforce pipeline and flag the deals going stale

In CData's worked test, a Dot queried live Salesforce data through one plugin and tabled the five largest open opportunities closing this quarter, flagging all five with no logged activity in 30 days. One deal was still open six days past its close date; the account used test data, as the post discloses.

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.

Audit 187 email flows in three minutes and tell me delete, fix or ignore

Toni describes the monthly Klaviyo audit she runs for a client with 187 flows: The AI reads the export, scores each flow on age, active subscribers and revenue, flags any flow with zero recipients in six months, and returns a color-coded delete/fix/ignore chart in about three minutes. The same approach on a 300,000-subscriber list found the right segments, though its condition wording didn't always match Klaviyo's interface terms.

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.

Fill out my LLC paperwork from documents in my email

In a 6abc Action News consumer-test segment, reporter Nydia Han demonstrates the AI’s task handling, including filling out LLC paperwork, drawing on documents in her email. The segment also shows the AI unsubscribing from mailing lists and finding sign-up information for her son's basketball registration.

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.

The AI wrote the programs that run his lab instruments over the network

A man wired his lab instruments to his home network, put all their manuals and programming guides into an AI project, and the AI wrote most of the first set of Python programs that control the instruments and pull data from them. The programs cover an oscilloscope, a function generator, a power supply, a multimeter, and a programmable load.

Answer my clinic's phones with AI, and grade the calls it gets wrong

The same clinic director built his own phone switchboard where an AI voice answers patient calls first, transcribes them in real time and writes summaries and to-do lists. When two AI models disagree on how a call should be classified, the call lands on a grading screen where he taps number keys to mark the right answer.

Publish my blog in four languages every day from one instruction

Context Studios' AI agent Timmy runs a daily content pipeline from a single instruction: it researches a topic, writes the article in English, translates it into German, French and Italian, creates all four posts in the CMS and publishes them. It then verifies the URLs return 200, submits them to Google Search Console and posts platform-tailored copy to X, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Small-town merchant built his own B2B point-of-sale app with AI

Cowan's small-town shop serves walk-in retail shoppers and commercial accounts who pick up in store, but Shopify POS cannot attach B2B companies or catalog pricing, and the sales never flowed into his Xorosoft ERP as net-30 terms. Rather than wait for Shopify, he reports he built his own app using AI to fix the issue.

WorkWent wrong

Research my book's comps on Amazon

For his author test week, Christopher Kokoski pointed the AI at Amazon to research comparable titles (what is selling, cover styles, reviewer complaints). Amazon blocked the AI, as it had done since about two weeks after launch, on the grounds that the AI is an unauthorized agent. Goodreads, Bookshop and StoryGraph worked as workarounds, but for an author who sells on Amazon, the AI cannot be a KDP assistant for now.

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

My dot built and published my review lab page from one prompt

Diana gave her dot Sparky one brief for a standalone review lab page, with a ten test grid, the scoring rules, a checklist and a clear note that it must not invent test results. Sparky built the page in an AI app Sites, published it, told her on its own that the page was set to private, and gave her a link she could share.

WorkPartly worked

Shortlist workshop venues and audit the seating catch

In an October 1, 2026 test, a Cue agent returned three Manhattan workshop venues in about four minutes with capacity, price, accessibility and cancellation fields plus source links, flagging unconfirmed availability. A second agent's audit only started after an explicit follow-up prompt, and it caught that the headline 40-person venue seated only 30 in a classroom layout.

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

A folder tidy up script for my freelance work grew for five months and took over

He runs a freelance video editing studio and a coding studio, and his project folders were a mess across drives. He started a small folder making script with AI and kept adding to it daily for five months. It is now a 100,000 line Rust program with 1,390 tests that holds every project he has, gives each a permanent ID, and jumps him to any project on any drive or machine with one command.

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.

WorkPartly worked

A realtor with memory loss runs his deals on voice notes and the AI

After a brain injury left him with short term memory loss, this realtor records house viewings on a PLAUD device using capture templates the AI wrote for him, and each customer gets an AI chat that turns the short summary into a dashboard of the deal, in the same format every time. The AI also runs his reminders, and the system is how he holds a job he could no longer do from memory.

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

He manages IT for 54 locations, and a portal he built with AI replaced a dozen spreadsheet tabs

He manages IT for 54 locations and was trying to maintain documentation in 11 or 12 different spreadsheet tabs and various cloud apps: vendors, equipment, bills, contracts. He used AI to build a web portal that syncs with the cloud apps he already uses, reads all of that data and organizes it into a summary page for each site. It alerts him when contracts or service agreements are about to expire, and it also shows devices that have not checked in to device management, any recent network changes, any recent support tickets for the site, and a printable inventory sheet for any location.

His gym agent books tours, and some chats became long term training clients

Abraham Gerving runs two small gyms on a key card model, staffed only part of the day. About a year ago he put an AI agent on member messages and calls: it schedules tours, books consultations, and points new members toward personal training, and some people who started out chatting with it became long term training clients.

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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.