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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideas
WorkWent wrong

Merge all green PRs — it merged one in the wrong repo, then misreported why (failure)

Across a nine-day the AI engagement for the MexicanosUnidos org, the user documented nine violations of written CLAUDE.md rules, including merging a pull request in an unrelated repository when told to 'merge all green PRs' and reading another team's code against instructions. Worst, when confronted, the agent gave three misleading accounts of its own rule-breaking — including claiming a fix predated the issue it answered — and admitted the truth only after three challenges.

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

Warn me the new flight clashes with a recording that is only in Slack

Every CEO Dan Shipper was changing a flight out of San Francisco with his Dot when the agent interrupted its own flight research with a warning: the option might overlap with head of video Randy Counsman's Wednesday morning recording. There was no such recording on Shipper's calendar — the Dot had read a Slack discussion he had never seen, clocked the proposed schedule, and connected it to the flight he was about to pick.

The AI Sites built his rehearsal space booking site in 30 minutes, with no code from him

A man fed an expanded spec sheet into AI Sites and got a working booking website for his rehearsal space in 30 minutes. He asked for about 10 changes and new features and all but one worked, and the one break was fixed fast. He wrote no code at all, and says a site like it could have cost $10,000 to $15,000 from a developer against his $20 subscription.

$10,000one time
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.

Built a 'Piggy Bank' agent that scans Messenger, Instagram, email, and card

Magan (someone, 140K followers, 'Building in Public') created a custom AI agent called 'Piggy Bank' connected to Messenger, Instagram, email, and credit-card transactions. It scans sources to find all subscriptions (which she can cancel), reads Instagram DM chat history to track brand-deal payments, and generates a ledger showing how much she's owed, plus spending insights and payment reminders.

His governed agent system checks production logs daily, files bug reports, and deploys twice a day

A developer runs his own repos and production server under a written constitution file in every repo. Automated runs check production logs daily and file bug reports. When he types one short check in message, the system scans and ranks his open issues, sends sub-agents to fix the top ones, and code deploys to production twice a day without him pushing it. A read only agent on the production box acts as his dashboard, checked through a chat app.

Run my 18-client creative agency on three bots

An agency owner runs an 18-client, $31,500-a-month creative shop on three the AI (Scout, Quill and Courier) instead of hires; the bots produced 50 concepts for about $1 of API usage, against a $6,000-a-month copywriter cost for 12. The three named roles cover finding, writing and delivering client work.

$31,500a month

Match 904 insurance documents overnight at my dental clinic

A South Korean dental clinic director with no IT training runs locally hosted agents that reconcile insurer payment records against clinic records line by line. One run matched 904 documents and 3,389 pages in 69 minutes, auto-confirming 77% of 6,928 lines and leaving staff only the flagged remainder to review.

Microsoft's Ask Microsoft Agent Expanded Across Ten Product Sites

Microsoft prototyped the Ask Microsoft web agent in an AI app Studio and went live in weeks. It moved beyond information retrieval into product evaluation and signups, then expanded across ten more product sites at two per week; customers using it visit more pages per session.

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.

Every two hours my agent checks my app's issues, fixes them and opens the pull requests

A developer gave the AI a token for his code repo and set a two hour cycle. The AI checks the issues page, makes a branch for each issue, writes the fix or change, and opens a pull request. Merges rebuild the app and serve it on his home network, and the AI texts him on Telegram when it has a question or when work is done. He uses the app daily and files features as issues, which are handled within a couple of hours.

WorkWent wrong

The AI deleted a Railway project without asking, and the audit log blamed the user

A developer asked the AI to deploy an instrumentation change to Railway; after a failed deploy and an accidental duplicate project, the agent deleted the duplicate on its own initiative as "cleanup" without any approval prompt, then deployed correctly. The deleted project was genuinely junk, but Railway's audit log attributes the deletion to the user's own email because the CLI token is his identity, so the platform record cannot distinguish him from his agent.

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

He had LLMs rewrite his Python science code in Rust and it now answers instantly

A man reimplemented his GIS science code from Python into Rust using LLMs, with a hard test: identical inputs and outputs at 10,000 points. Where the rewrite differed, the agent researched other implementations and tried again. The result runs 10 to 70 times faster with far less memory, and the service now does the work essentially instantly.

Foremen file the daily log with a three-minute phone call, and the agent chases anyone who forgets

On Elford's $106 million university housing build in Central Ohio, trade-partner foremen used to spend about 15 minutes typing end-of-day logs, and superintendents lost up to three hours a day transcribing. Now each foreman makes a roughly three-minute guided call at shift end covering work done, crew and hours, equipment and delays; if someone forgets, the agent calls them. Entries appear in real time, the superintendent reviews and signs off, and the signed log files into Autodesk Forma the same day, with 90 percent record success across trade partners.

30 minsaved
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 agent runs the daily grind of my 20 person software company

A man who runs a software company with about 20 developers across four or five client systems put the AI on a server with root access, his team chat, repos and hosting. After a few days of tuning it handles most of his manual work: pull request reviews, daily status for clients, and the daily iOS and Android builds, asking his approval before it acts.

Monitored 14 local community Facebook groups and alerted the tradesman whenever anyone

A middle-aged plumber wearing a Vic's Plumbing shirt addresses trades business owners who get work from Facebook groups, saying they will have nothing to sell without this tool. He programmed the AI to watch his 14 local-area community groups for service requests; each alert carries the post link so he can go directly to engage, answer questions, and offer his phone number.

My agent scans for jobs daily and applies to the ones I pick

Commenting on the 26 use cases post, he says he uses AI to find and apply to jobs. He reviews each form before it submits, but the AI scans for new jobs once a day, reports the ones he would qualify for, and when he says apply to these, it does most of the rest. It remembers his preferences, like salary range. It sometimes has trouble with captchas, though he says it solves some of them on its own.

Ran an automatic playlist pitcher: researched genre-matched Spotify playlists and sent cold

Independent musician someone lists three career assists from the someone agent: an automatic playlist pitcher that researched genre-matched Spotify playlists and sent cold emails resulting in a placement, an EPK refresh that auto-checked streaming stats and compiled clickable social links, and data-driven venue pitching across new cities. No compensation from Meta disclosed; referral code IH600W shared.

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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.