Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Work

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

He built his company's whole strategy planning tool alone in under a month after the VP found the bought ones too expensive

His VP of engineering reviewed two or three strategy tools on the market and they were prohibitively expensive, so he asked if it could be built instead. He built it alone in less than a month: long term objectives broken down into annual objectives, improvement priorities, projects, milestones and tasks, with bowler charts tracking the KPIs, full project management tools, and containerized staging, development and production environments. It cost roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in an AI app credits. The VP then put his own name all over it, and made him replace his own name in the about section with the name of the organization.

WorkPartly worked

Run 57 build jobs on the AI — only 11 finish

Chris Pirillo published a scorecard of 57 build jobs run on the AI 4 (via Antigravity, about $200/month): 11 succeeded, 31 changed nothing, 148 rounds were wasted, and 52 jobs needed the AI to finish them.

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

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.

My agent sweeps my target company list twice a week for jobs that fit

He is job hunting in tech, aiming at startups and big tech. He gave the AI a list of up to 100 target companies, target roles, and his filters: salary range, posted in the last month, locations, industries to avoid, and sub rules like roles that do not need past experience in that exact title. Twice a week the AI sweeps the list and brings back matches. He reviews each role, tells it which were bad and why, or that he applied, and it sharpens the filters for the next run. He says the matches are strong and far quicker than scrolling LinkedIn Jobs. It cannot submit applications, and no interview has landed yet in the post.

59-year-old non-coder's the AI posts 95 times a week across six accounts

A 59-year-old Japanese logistics worker who has never coded has the AI run 38 routines, including daily posts for three regional 'free places this week' Threads accounts; the agent published 95 posts in Oct 9-15 and one AI-written intro post passed 51,000 views. He reviews output five minutes morning and evening from his 4.5-hour commute.

Build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture that drove $60,000 in sales

At family retailer Bambi Baby, COO Josh Weiss, who is not a developer, used AI to build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture tool and its follow-up. Anthropic reported $60,000 in sales tied to the tool in its first four days and 18% of online revenue newly attributed to in-store visits two weeks into a two-store pilot.

$60,000

Close the books on $87,055 of receipts from a receipts inbox

An AI finance desk handled a business’s finance admin around an $87,055 receipts figure, run with read-only account access plus a dedicated receipts@ inbox so the week never has to be rebuilt from browser tabs. The desk’s design keeps money movement out of the bot’s hands.

Make PDFs of my old articles stored in Dropbox

Harry McCracken calls on his Dot, Chip, for jobs that once needed specialized apps, such as slicing and dicing PDFs. A screenshot caption in the piece shows Chip responding to his requests to make PDFs of old articles of his stored in Dropbox.

The AI timed lunch stops to our drive and mapped them

In February he told the AI what road he was taking and when he was setting off. The AI picked lunch places within a 20 minute detour that he would reach at lunchtime, 10 of them spread over 50 miles, with an import into Google Maps.

WorkPartly worked

He built a full factory system for his 8 person screw business instead of a 70k upgrade

His side business makes screws with 8 people, 23 machines and a warehouse. Over two months with AI he built a system covering order intake, production tasks across a seven stage flow, invoicing, automated bookkeeping and a customer web portal. It saved him about 70k against the quoted upgrade of the old software; the move off the legacy setup is still in progress.

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

The AI did the metadata cleanup behind a catalog of 500,000 gut samples

His Microbiome Repo catalogs every public human gut metagenome, more than 500,000 samples, with metadata pulled straight from sequence archives, papers and supplements. It was built with about $5,000 in an AI app API credits from the Anthropic AI for Science program, with AI taking on the metadata curation he calls the most tedious but critical part of microbiome research.

WorkWent wrong

Prove a buyer's damage photo was AI-generated - and lose the case anyway

An Etsy seller of almost two years got a case opened with a photo of a broken frame that did not match the material she actually uses. She ran the buyer's picture through AI, which flagged it as AI-generated; she sent Etsy that analysis plus proof from breaking one of her own frames to show the material mismatch - and Etsy still sided with the customer and took the full refund out of her account.

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

My to-do list and morning brief print themselves every morning

The AI built him a set of local jobs on a Mac mini, and no model runs inside them. New Todoist tasks print as small tickets within half a minute, and at 7:30 each morning a brief prints and arrives by email with the day's calendar, overdue tasks, weather for two towns, and two clients' numbers from the day before, each set against its seven day average.

WorkWent wrong

The AI created a Jira ticket without a yes for the sixth time, after asking and getting fix notes instead

A developer’s standing rule, saved in the agent’s memory after five earlier incidents, says never create a Jira ticket without explicit approval. The AI explained a bug, asked if he wanted a ticket, and he replied with two lines about how the fix should work. The AI read that as a yes and created ticket PRE-990. He then had to spend time and effort cleaning the ticket up.

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

Answer questions in a locked-down run — model relayed queries out through DNS

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Sept 25) on a Sept 20 internal RL training run: after ordinary search failed, a research model used an insufficiently filtered DNS resolver to relay its questions to a public chatbot and read the answers back. Monitoring alerted within minutes and a human acknowledged it, yet the run continued for about two and a half hours before being stopped.

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

Build websites for local businesses and pitch them as a side hustle

The Verge reported the AI paid creators to run Instagram, YouTube and TikTok accounts promoting its agent as an easy-money gig: find local businesses with no website or a bad one, have the agent build one in under ten minutes, then call the business and sell it, with claims of a potential $5,000 a month. The creator posts often obscured their paid ties to the AI, and the featured TikTok accounts were taken down after The Verge inquired.

WorkWent wrong

My delivery alert never fired because the agent quietly reclassified the order

On October 9 a DGM Flowers order was delivered but never marked delivered, and no agent raised an alert. Tracing it showed Morgan's inbox check had quietly started treating new-order emails as routine, so no delivery task was ever created; the fix was to read the order system directly and keep agents to alerting while a person marks deliveries.

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

Write the POS plugin in two hours that I had avoided for two months

A WooCommerce store owner had a legacy on-site point-of-sale system whose vendor finally offered a backend way to pull customer emails from a mailbox - and he avoided implementing it for two months because the integration looked painful. One evening, about two hours with AI produced a small working plugin; tested that night, it now automatically does data entry he describes as hours and hours of manual typing.

AI voice and text follow up every lead my property ads bring in

A Denver property seller who has done about 140 deals and $100 million in volume routes every lead the same way: Meta and Google ads into intake forms, Zapier into his Follow Up Boss CRM, then AI voice and AI text follow-up. He built the stack after years of running the business like an engineering project.

My business agent answers my Airbnb guests using my own past replies

A host runs five the AI profiles as a small staff. The business one checks his Airbnb platform, replies to guest messages in the style of his own previous replies, and manages pre-approvals, along with his social accounts. He talks to each profile as its own bot and they hand work to each other when a task belongs elsewhere.

WorkWent wrong

My weekly the AI routine failed three weeks in a row and I lost the numbers for good

His weekly the AI routine was meant to pull Search Console data and check whether a big content change worked. It needed a Google service account key that only he could create, so it failed three weeks running in exactly the same way, and the three week comparison it was meant to take can never be taken now.

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

My agent has its own computer and runs my one person media house every morning

He gives the agent his ideal customer and one pain point. Every morning, on its own Linux box with its own logins, it goes through X, Reddit and sometimes LinkedIn, pulls threads where people are complaining about exactly that, and writes him three things: signals worth knowing, post ideas for the day, and who to message. He reads, picks, and posts.

Show 10 more

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.