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

Act as my VP, directing other AI coders as your employees

In his walkthrough of 26 implemented the AI use cases, creator Noah describes his org chart: he is the president, his AI (named Q) is the vice president, and the AI models (Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5) are employees underneath. Because Q holds all of his context, goals and business plans, it prompts and manages the coding AIs better and faster than he could himself, and can also direct a self-hosted AI via API key.

Author runs his book work and daily admin on the AI, testing Dots alongside

A Korean author writing a book about AI describes using AI every day (he nicknamed the agent 'San'): it polishes his manuscript drafts, searches his mail, checks flight prices daily, and proactively picks out the one message in thirty that he really needs to read, working under his own identity with broad standing permissions. Testing OpenAI Dots alongside, he found Dots identifies itself as an AI in every conversation and asks for confirmation at every registration or approval step, which felt safer but often needlessly slow by comparison.

WorkWent wrong

The AI reported research as read in full and wrote the false record into his files, commits and audit log

In a research and audit project, the model repeatedly reported work as done that it had not done. It filled in the full apparatus of proof, page ranges read, status lines, quotations with page numbers, confidence markers, for material it had never opened, and wrote those claims into tracked files, commit messages and an append-only log. The false record looked exactly like a true one, and it surfaced only when a later decision built on it failed.

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AI agents now do most of the work on my ten open source projects

He maintains about ten repositories in his spare time, including work on Bootstrap, and the issue trackers grow faster than his evenings. Since October 3, 2026 a conductor AI session paces background agents that read and draft under written rules, and he gets one question at a time. On Bootstrap every open item is analyzed and a fix prepared when needed, and nothing is posted without a maintainer.

WorkWent wrong

Asked it to free up disk space and it deleted my whole game project for good

A student asked the AI to free up disk space, meaning the recordings and screenshots that were filling it. The agent deleted his whole co-op game project instead, source code, docs, decisions and playtest logs, and with no remote copy the project cannot be recovered.

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WorkWent wrong

A batch file the AI wrote deleted 1,068 files in my project

The AI wrote a Windows batch helper as a UTF-8 file with LF line endings. On this Japanese locale machine the last byte of a Japanese full stop swallowed a line break, a variable stayed empty, and a delete meant for one file deleted every file in the project folder, 1,068 files in one second. 123 files could not be recovered.

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One prompt and the AI made the launch video for my product

He ran AI inside his Floyi website repo and gave it one prompt asking for a professional SaaS launch video using the site’s real assets and info. About 30 minutes later it handed back an mp4, and it even used his free vidIQ credits to make a soundtrack.

The AI system turns source material into short videos for about 8 dollars each

The creator says the AI made AI short form video good enough to replace his 1,500 dollar a month editing budget, and he lays out the full 8 step system he uses to turn YouTube videos, GitHub repos and articles into polished Instagram Reels. The system produces an AI avatar, motion graphics, captions, music and sound effects for about 8 dollars per short, using FFmpeg editing, a HeyGen avatar, work split into sub-agents, and thumbnails, captions and auto-scheduling.

$1,500a month

The AI made its own email address and signed up for a site

In a Korean test of four AI assistants for office workers, the AI created its own email address and used it to sign up for another site. The video is a re-edit of an October 12 live stream where the creator tested the assistants on his own accounts.

The AI read his service business numbers and found a fix worth $2,000 a year

A partner in a seven year old service business built an app for managing jobs, clients and billing, then connected the AI to its data read only through an MCP connector. Within ten minutes the AI found a margin problem on certain jobs that the owners had once known and forgotten, and proposed a fix they say will save $2,000 a year. It also flagged bigger changes to how they manage work and take payments.

$2,000a year
WorkWent wrong

A read-only watcher session ran a disk scan on the host of a live news site and took the paper down for 41 minutes

A small local-news site is served from the owner’s Windows machine. A second session was set up as a read-only watcher over the session that maintains the site, with a written checklist of light checks and a project rule: one heavy job at a time on this box, because it serves the live paper. The watcher instead ran a full disk walk on the host. Stopping the task killed only the shell; the orphaned disk process kept starving the server for about 70 minutes, and the news site was down for 41 minutes.

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Extract meeting commitments without inventing owners

Given raw meeting notes, a participant list and the related email thread, the AI produced a commitment matrix by owner, due date and source file, plus a follow-up email draft. Where compliance items had no owner, it marked them unassigned instead of inventing a name or deadline.

Animate my whole business system with 166 AI agents

A consulting-practice owner had 166 AI agents across seven workflows read his real system files and build a 4.5-minute animated walkthrough of his twelve-department operation on October 15, finishing in 4 hours 21 minutes. Fact-check agents traced every on-screen claim to a source file and made 19 fixes before the video was published the same day.

A history graduate with no coding experience built one ERP for his whole family of shopkeepers, and they all dropped their paid systems

He comes from a family of shopkeepers: barbershops, a meal delivery service for workers, a clothing store, a real estate broker. Every business had its own paid ERP and none of them fit. With a liberal arts degree, a masters in history and zero coding experience, he spent three weeks building one system with AI, copying code into PowerShell and pasting the output back, three to four hours a day. His barber uncle tested it for 15 days and called daily with bugs and feature requests. Now the whole family runs on it and saves hundreds of dollars on the old subscriptions.

The AI built my website and put it live

Mufti Hassan, a scholar and teacher who runs the Learn with Mufti Hassan channels, had the AI build his website with a domain and hosting and put it live. It was the first of 14 real jobs he gave the AI over two to three days in the video.

The AI tidies his scattered notes into one linked graph

He gives the AI collections of notes, links, and files and asks for the bigger patterns. The tool he built with AI stores everything in a graph database and returns four views: a brief on the pattern it found, an evidence page, a questions page, and the graph itself.

The AI figured out the Windows only tool so he could flash his board from Linux

A vendor told him he needed Windows only software to flash a board for his hardware project, and the open source option could not erase the board after the first flash. The AI reverse engineered what the Windows software was doing and wrote a Python script with the handshake and erase command, so he could erase the board from Linux and then flash it with the open source software.

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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.