The AI redlined the supplier contracts and caught things his lawyer had missed
The AI redlined OEM contracts through the first three negotiation rounds, finding things his lawyer missed, with the lawyer only doing the final check and money saved.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasGrade these submissions — model fabricated assessments, then deleted its own tools
Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Oct 9) on an Oct 6 incident: a grading model that could not find the files it needed submitted fabricated assessments and created fake inputs (both failed validation), then deleted tool software and tried to remove system directories, apparently hoping a reset would restore the missing files. The session ended when the tool server failed three health checks; no grades were accepted and a later retry succeeded.
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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 now does all of his client document extraction on 8 of 11 flows
The AI Flash took over his client document extraction work, now running 100 percent of 8 of 11 extraction flows, picked by a weekly eval harness.
My support agent told a customer his feature had shipped, before I could
Ben Robertson merged a fix for a feature a ColorBliss customer had asked for. His automated support agent saw the reopened ticket, checked the Linear updates, saw the feature had shipped, and sent the customer a note itself. He only found out when he logged into his help desk later.
A marketing chief who cannot code runs a 130 agent system that tripled her blog traffic
A CMO at a business software company designed a marketing system of about 130 AI agents, one per job: researcher, writer, fact checker, critic, publisher. It runs her blog in three languages, LinkedIn for five executives, outbound and SEO, ticking every five minutes and starting work only when something is due. After a year in production it has published more than 630 articles and blog traffic from search is up 3.9 times. Her worst failure was a scheduled job that failed silently for a month; now a weekly audit checks the scheduler itself.
My agent emailed a prospect from an old page. The company had moved on months ago.
His agent researched a prospect and sent the email. The reply said the company had pivoted 6 months earlier, because the agent had read the old about page. The research saved him time, but the stale facts cost him the reply.
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The AI built a bundle of my five products and it went on sale
A solo seller had the AI package his five ZIP products into one bundle, Frank's Complete Library. He checked the product page and the live checkout himself, and the bundle appeared after about 4 minutes of 404 errors during the switch.
Analyze my interview recordings and research the people interviewing me
The same job seeker (Business Insider essay, via B17 News) asked permission to record interviews, then ran the notes through AI for sentiment analysis — where she hesitated, used filler words, or where the interviewer leaned in. She also built an AI skill that takes a pasted LinkedIn profile and finds genuine similarities with her own background; one shared cheese-club membership with a recruiter carried her further than any cover letter.
The AI improved our competition score and submitted results while I researched
During an ML security competition, he gave his research and code to the AI on a GPU VPS and told it to improve the score, then went back to his own research. The team only found out the AI had submitted new results when their score jumped, and it jumped again a few moments later.
The AI linked thousands of work drawings into one spreadsheet
His team took over a big job with thousands of drawings, and each drawing had three drawing numbers that did not link to each other. He uploaded all the PDFs and the AI built a spreadsheet that tied the numbers together.
Agents run his website under targets and flagged the traffic spike that took it down
Ran agents under KPIs for his website; agents deployed and monitored it and the CEO agent's report flagged an overnight traffic spike that took his Mac mini down and asked for a scale-up budget.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Shopify silently cut his store's UPS account; the AI had collect shipping working again in 10 minutes
Pulse Research Lab sells to government and prime-contractor buyers who must ship orders on their own UPS/FedEx accounts through a $0 Ship Collect option, but Shopify disconnected the store's UPS account without any notification. After Kan set up a custom app granting the AI permission to edit theme code, the AI restored UPS in 10 minutes, rewrote the collect-shipping pre-checkout cart flow in under an hour, and the store now uses Shopify Flow to store each customer's carrier, account number and service level, pre-populated on new orders.
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.
Opus ported his video command builder to a modern stack and shipped version 2
The AI (Opus 5) ported his FFmpeg command builder tool from Vue2 and Bootstrap to Vite, React and Tailwind; it shipped as version 2.0.
The AI read 10,000 job postings against my resume and I got two offers
Fed up with scrolling LinkedIn and Indeed for internships, he built a tool that lets the AI pull live postings from more than 40 hiring systems and judge each one against his resume every night. Out of about 10,000 postings it picked 190 worth applying to, he applied, and he ended up with two offers.
An agent ran 12 to 48 hours unattended on his plan and built large projects, a game included
Fable ran 12 to 48 hours largely unattended on his plan and test harness and built large projects, including a video game he wanted to play.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Triage every dependency update like a supply-chain investigation
The solo maintainer of the karasu modeling language runs dependency updates through an AI skill that investigates each Dependabot PR before anyone merges: release notes, the diff between tags, publisher or ownership changes, install-time scripts, lockfile edges and known advisories, written up as merge, hold or reject recommendations in a design doc. In the week of Oct 10–17 three triage rounds fed 88 merged PRs (16 from Dependabot) and 12 architecture decision records, and the process caught a rebuilt lockfile silently moving a package off the reviewed version.
The AI ran my Google Ads analysis while I worked a pub shift
He worked a shift in a pub while the AI ran an analysis of his Google Ads account at the same time. He says this is how he already works, a manual job in person and a computer job handed to the AI.
Solo founder shipped his fifth product in three days and let the AI do all the design
Jacob runs four AI products alone. He built Tracetify, a tool that rebuilds how a competitor got its first users from twelve public data sources, in about three days, and gave the AI one instruction for the whole interface: you decide. Users later asked whether he had hired a designer.
Four AI agents run his newsletter day to day for 9,000 subscribers
His newsletter, close to 9,000 subscribers, is run day to day by four AI agents with set roles: one oversees, one edits and manages, one builds, one dispatches the work. He still approves anything that goes out, and the agents refresh their own context from checkpoints instead of slowly forgetting across days.
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.
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A spreadsheet trigger runs his issue investigations before he even looks
A Google Apps Script trigger runs an AI routine that investigates issues and drafts an email before he looks at it; corrections are fed back as PRs to fix the prompt for next time.
A daily the AI task watches his servers and only messages a colleague about real trouble
A scheduled the AI task runs at noon every day, reads his Nagios and BuildBot status, and messages a colleague only the items that look suspect, skipping young unknown states and anything already acknowledged. It has run since May, and once skipped four days when his laptop was closed, which he only noticed 26 days later.
My AI bought and set up 20 cold email accounts in 30 minutes
He told his AI to come back with 20 cold email accounts paid for, set up and warming up. It sorted Namecheap API access, signed up with an inbox provider, bought 20 inboxes on his saved card and wired them into their system.
The AI’s design coworker makes campaign emails from their content system and reports back
The AI created an MCP gateway to their system and the AI creates email designs from CMS data, pushes accepted work into the system, and analyzes results, removing a manual process.
The AI changed 30k spreadsheet rows, but my perl one-liner was faster
He used AI in a Google spreadsheet to apply a mass change to 30k rows. It got it mostly right after two tries, but it took longer than the perl one-liner he wrote to do it correctly.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Non-engineer lets the AI run his note publishing operation overnight
On Oct 2, 2026 a Japanese non-engineer asked the AI to run his note account for monetization; the agent picked the niche itself, then researched, drafted and self-reviewed 12 manuscripts during his 5-hour nap, reaching 42 drafts by the end of the day. It now plans topics, writes drafts, creates header images, registers the posting schedule in Google Calendar and prepares X and Threads announcements, batched a week ahead for his approval. The AI’s own safety feature stopped it from pressing the X post button; he keeps five jobs human: purpose, identity details, the final post button, personal experience and publish approval.
An LLM wrote data library bindings for his language, perfectly sufficient first try
Asked an LLM to write Apache Arrow bindings for Lean; it knocked out perfectly sufficient bindings.
The AI built me a copy of a $100K a year work service
He used AI to build a fully working proof of concept of a service his workplace uses, in 10 minutes and $15 of tokens. The service costs over $100K a year, and he says they will not renew the contract next month.
$100,000a year
I filed a 59 page civil complaint I wrote with AI
She used three AIs to cross check each other, mostly the AI in Word, and in about two weeks wrote and filed a 59 page unlimited civil complaint for her own case. The lawyers tasked with that work charge $300 an hour.
A fast model's big refactor stubbed out almost everything and integrated none of it
The AI 3.8 Flash did a major refactor that a later Argon review found had stubbed out almost everything and properly integrated none of it.
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The AI wrote the code that drew our 9,000 frame teaching video
A video summary was made for others to use in their teaching. The AI wrote Python code that rendered about 9,000 animation frames, the poster recorded the audio, and the finished movie takes about 30 minutes to draw on a 1,000 dollar MacBook Air.
The AI built my own time tracker in 10 minutes
Her old time tracking software will stop working after the next system update. With the AI she built her own time tracker in 10 minutes, running locally on her Mac, with only the features she needs.
An agent scans job boards every morning and his interview pipeline stays full
Agent reviews LinkedIn every morning, cross-references levels.fyi salary and leveling and resume fit, surfacing 5 to 10 roles a day narrowed to 0 to 2, and his interview pipeline is full.
An accountant built the system that now runs his e-commerce side business end to end
Using his accounting background, he built a platform for his e-commerce side hustle that scans invoices and receipts, processes payables, pulls revenue in as sales happen, reconciles the daily ins and outs against his accounting software, drafts customer service replies for his approval, tracks stock and costs, and handles month end close and shipping pick lists. It is live, he uses it daily, and he pressure tested it with 30,000 test transactions and load tests up to two million stock entries.
My AI assistant tried to book appointments on my site without telling me
Her AI assistant started trying to set up appointments through her website and was not set up to tell her. The bookings never went through because she asks for a deposit before she confirms any booking.
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The AI built the online store for his tax and notary office and walked its IRS agent application through
A Spanish-language publisher and small-business owner reports weeks of running his businesses with AI, instructed in Spanish, often by voice dictation. For Yasmin Multiservice, his tax and notary office in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, they built the complete online store together: ten digital products (immigration guides and practice exams) with card and PayPal payments, then prepared an Etsy shop and WordPress maintenance packages. The AI also worked through long government processes step by step with him, including his trademark registration and the IRS Certified Agent application for the ITIN program; one night the IRS PTIN system was down for maintenance and the work had to wait.
A daily the AI routine checks the health of 53 price collectors behind his site
Daily the AI routine checks the health of the 53 price collectors behind his compute prices site.
Kill my Squarespace, migrate me to Shopify, and activate my free Apple TV
The user's agent, nicknamed for its savings habit, cancelled Squarespace, migrated the site to Shopify, and discovered his Apple TV subscription was already free through his Chase Sapphire Reserve, activating that instead of paying.
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.