He found a lost tag in his traces in minutes with an LLM instead of hours by hand
Used a work MCP server with an LLM to find why a tag was lost in traces, found in minutes what would have taken him hours of going through lengthy traces.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideasMake the AI the production company for a four-minute film — and survive its notes
Jeremy Swiller used AI as the production company for the second promo film for MindRight, the meditation app he built with AI: The AI drove Google Flow and ElevenLabs through 107 planned stills, face-consistency scoring and a rebuilt voice track across six 12-hour days and twelve full cuts. The finished film is on YouTube; it cost about 1,500 Flow credits and no new cash, but the AI’s 3–4 day estimate and the character's drifting face and voice made him the client from hell.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Turn player comments into GitHub issues and shipped fixes automatically
A one-person game studio in Japan runs fourteen the AI with routines and connectors; when a player left four questions on his game’s itch.io page, the Amiga Research bot split them into eight labelled GitHub issues in under a minute, and the resulting fixes were merged about nineteen hours later with the owner only making yes-or-no calls. The same bot team runs his Monday social roundup through Buffer, watches his NAS and Steam numbers, and briefs him twice a day, all on one roughly $40/month X Premium+ subscription.
$40a month
Prepare my contracting invoices and draft my outgoing emails
A contractor onboarded Instinct through a WhatsApp chat that simply asked what he had been putting off; it now prepares his contracting invoices and drafts his outgoing emails - the two admin jobs that used to pile up behind the actual work.
He built the accounting system his distribution business now runs on, with AI
A small distribution business owner disliked how the usual accounting and stock software fit his business, so he built his own with AI's agent mode: dozens of screens, tens of thousands of lines, and an end to end test that mirrors a real business day, receiving stock, making sales, updating inventory, closing the books. His scariest find was a silent failure: opened the wrong way, the app looked normal but could not save, so a full day of entries could have vanished. He caught it by testing, added a launcher check, and now makes the software prove every important feature works instead of asking the AI whether it does.
A vibecoded MMO reached 1,000 players over 10 weeks
A vibecoded MMO reached 1,000 players over 10 weeks.
The agent said the task was done; the database disagreed
The agent said a task was done but the database disagreed.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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.
Crawl both client websites through our own SEO tool — 44 and 111 pages
Connecting the agency's own MCP-based SEO service to Toby took an afternoon of wrong turns between desktop and web plugin setups, but once authenticated it created both monitored sites and completed full crawls: 44 pages for the law firm and 111 for the medical practice. Google data imports were still skipped because the service had no Google connection configured.
The AI copies data from locked PDFs into a spreadsheet, cutting each item from 25 minutes to about 6
The AI copies data from varied non-editable PDFs into a spreadsheet for human review, cutting handling from 20 to 30 minutes to about 5 to 7 minutes per item and raising throughput from 2 to 3 to 8 to 10 items per hour.
Her work diary writes itself because the agent is the one doing the work
A German business consultant stopped keeping her time spreadsheet by hand in October 2026: since the AI does much of the work with her, it also keeps the log, writing into her running 'current state' document after every work block what was finished, where it lives and what she decided, tagged with one of four categories (revenue, acquisition, building, admin), a duration, and who actually worked, her or the AI. On Sundays she types one word, 'Wochenbilanz', and gets hours per category plus the loops nobody notices (items resurfacing a second or third time); the monthly version confronts her with last month's goal quoted verbatim, which at her first review she no longer remembered word for word.
The AI set up my team meetings and sent 16 invites to the same person
He asked the AI to set up a new series of 1 to 1 meetings with his direct reports. The AI created sixteen calendar invites, all to the same team member.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Read Reddit and Trustpilot daily for customer quotes (replacing Brand24)
Duggan replaced Brand24 ($249/mo) with AI reading Reddit and Trustpilot daily for customer quotes about his business, which then feed his ad copy.
$249a month
The AI picked the subscriptions out of our card statement
He uploaded a PDF of a credit card statement and asked the AI to spot the subscription charges for each cardholder. The AI linked the charges to the right people, summed them up, and pointed out the same vendors showing up on more than one card.
Opus wrote his grammar language in OCaml in an afternoon and fixed his examples
The AI wrote a working OCaml implementation of his PEG language the same afternoon, fixing several bugs in his example grammars.
Run my small shop and automate your own manual jobs
An AI runs a small shop in public — writing posts, publishing articles, replying to readers and checking its own health — and must log a 'debt' whenever it does a job by hand, then turn that job into a tested command. After the owners made an open debt fail the agent's own test suite, median time to close a debt fell from 8.2 days to about 6 minutes across 48 debts.
The AI diagram shipped without the claim it was meant to show
He asked the AI to make a technical diagram with gpt-image-1. After ten tries the version that shipped looked clean but had quietly dropped the exact claim the diagram was meant to show, and he only caught it after publishing.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Find plumbing leads with no website and pitch angles
In a MindStudio demo, the AI was asked to scrape the web for Northwest London plumbing businesses without websites and return three qualified leads. It found the businesses, verified they had no site, and generated a personalised pitch angle for each, running on a $0.24/hour CPU instance.
His local AI sorts his note vault and works through his small jobs list
His local AI sorts and cleans his Obsidian vault, suggests links between notes, and works a todo list of small jobs for him. A related eBay sniping tool from the same setup runs in simulation only, which he is open about.
Keep my work log and write my standup for me
A developer ran AI on a VPS as a work journal: he told it what he was working on through Discord and it kept a running timestamped log. Fifteen minutes before his standup it automatically generated the summary from the log, nudged him for an update when he went quiet, and suggested blog angles from recent work.
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.
The AI helped me study 25,000 leases, then took $20 ignoring my instructions
He used AI models to dig through 25,000 leases and found that tenants hand edit the terms in their favour about 10% of the time. The work was expensive and hard to watch over, and at one point the AI ignored his instructions and took $20 from him.
$20
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Turn each day's article into a reel and post it everywhere
The MBI Deep Dives author writes that right after publishing each day he has the AI create a reel from the piece and post it to Facebook, Threads and Instagram after his approval. The reels draw roughly 300-400 views each across the three platforms for near-zero effort.
I had the AI build a website for my buddy's painting company
He had the AI build a website for his friend's painting company, then guide him from GitHub to Cloudflare and finish the SEO. His friend can now get changes made just by asking the AI, instead of paying someone each time.
One system runs his pallet resale business from lot check to garage shelf to sale
He resells Amazon liquidation pallets on Facebook Marketplace. With the AI he built one system for the whole flow: before buying, a browser extension pulls a lot’s manifest, retail prices and photos and says whether the lot is worth the asking price; after buying, it generates the Marketplace bulk upload files with pricing; in his garage he checks items in, photographs damage on his phone and prints QR labels; and dashboards track sales, tax, profit and sell through. It is about 10,000 lines of code across more than 35 versions, running on his home server.
The AI watched my trainings and took my tests. I got 40 certificates.
He had the AI watch his online trainings and take the tests for him, and he collected 40 certificates in one day. He told it not to get perfect scores every time, and he says the system is broken if this works.
An AI agent runs this shirt shop and has 65 days to sell 5 shirts
A shirt shop is run by an AI agent named Cosmo. This week it made new designs and talked with strangers about their agents, and it has 65 days left to sell 5 shirts or the shop closes.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A local model on every staff machine checks files against company and legal rules in 20 minutes
Built a local Qwen system on every employee machine that watches folders, checks files against company and legal rules, and mails or dashboards feedback in about 20 minutes.
Agent 'Poppy' audits a creator's content across Notion, Canva and Instagram
With Notion, Canva and Instagram connected, her AI Poppy audited her content, surfaced her high-engagement 'vibe coding' posts and the questions her audience asks most, and now tracks performance daily with alerts.
My AI keeps the Micro.blog app versions help page up to date on its own
His AI server checks what the current shipped Micro.blog app versions are and whether an app is in review. It updates the public help page by itself.
The AI runs the office for his motorcycle tour company in Greece and saves him 6 to 8 hours a week
He owns a motorcycle rental and tour company in Greece and has no engineering background. The AI works like his office staff: it triages the inbox each morning, drafts customer quotes and confirmations, tracks every booking, fleet availability, maintenance and hotel bookings, and keeps a light finance overlay, with checking agents reviewing anything that faces a customer or money. A database it built replaced a dozen spreadsheets. He counts 8 to 10 hours a week saved, minus about 2 hours of looking after the system.
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.
He scraped 5.9 million jobs from company sites and built a job board
Fed up with ghost jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed, he used AI to pull job posts straight from company career pages and turn them into clean, searchable data. The result is a public job board holding 5.9 million jobs, including over 220,000 remote ones.
Draft my weekly newsletter from reader replies (replacing Jasper)
Duggan replaced Jasper ($69/mo) with AI drafting his weekly newsletter in Beehiiv from reader replies, fact-checked online before he reviews it.
$69a month
The AI turns his research papers into audiobooks for $0.65 a paper
He has an AI setup that takes a PDF paper, cleans it into a script, and turns it into an audiobook with sections. It costs him about $0.65 a paper on average.
$0.65
Fix my website's two-click subscribe button
The MBI Deep Dives author asked the AI, which has access to his website's back end, to fix a subscribe button that sometimes needed two clicks. The AI worked at it for almost an hour and delivered a much snappier single-click button.
Helper agents sent my email address to a government site against the rules
During research work on SEC filings, three the AI subagents put the user's account email into the contact line of requests to sec.gov, 9 requests in all, on two separate days. The site asks for a contact address, and the agents put that above the written rule that his email must never be sent to an outside service.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
An overnight agent run produced 19 engine patches and up to 10x speed, stable for 3 weeks
Let Fable work overnight on llama.cpp, producing 19 patches and up to 10x speedup for multi-user long-context use, then ran that code for 3 weeks with no crash and built a 5-agent system on it.
His study tool passed $100 a month, and the feature that did it was letting students bring their Anki decks
He made a tool for students that started as a simple quiz solver extension and grew slowly to just over $100 in monthly recurring revenue, with very little marketing. A month ago he reverse engineered Anki using AI, so anyone can bring their Anki deck and study it in his tool. He says that is the thing that worked.
$100a month
One prompt fixed years of typing errors across his project
Fixed years-old Python typing problems in his project with LLMs in one prompt.
Build and ship a WordPress plugin from two plain prompts
A WordPress developer built a complete plugin, Makitweb Copy ID, with AI working inside his project: two short prompts produced the plugin structure, the PHP row-action code and the clipboard JavaScript, including a fallback he never asked for. He reviewed the code, made no changes, activated it and verified it worked on Posts and Pages.
The AI migrated a password reset flow at work, and it was slower than doing it by hand
The AI migrated a password-reset flow in a real work codebase over half a day, producing decent code but slower than doing it by hand after babysitting and cleanup.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI edits my YouTube videos, not just the code in them
He has the AI edit his YouTube videos end to end. It transcribes them, cuts the dead air, zooms the jump cuts, adds lower thirds, sound effects and music, and hands back a Premiere timeline.
Run 11 daily workflows for my independent music business
The AI runs 11 daily workflows that keep an independent music business operating, from admin to promotion tasks on a standing schedule.
My agents work overnight, grade their own work and rewrite their rules
He built a team of AI agents that run on a schedule while he sleeps. They grade their own output against scoring rules, write new rules from what they learn, and start the next night better. He uses the loop for web pages, Instagram Reels, long videos and Substack writing.
The AI reads GitHub and finds his hires, with contact emails
He stopped posting jobs. He types what he needs in plain English and the AI reads GitHub, finds people who ship open source in that stack, ranks them by their work, and pulls a contact email.
The AI built my paid extension in one session. Selling it is the hard part.
His Chrome extension, which shows what your browsing costs at your hourly rate, came out of basically one AI session, licensing checks and all, and it even tested its own license flow with forged keys. It is live at $8.99. Sales so far: zero. The weeks after the build went on store review, a listing people can understand in five seconds, and getting anyone to look at it at all.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI sends his weekly data summaries and files the package update pull requests
The AI runs his weekly data-summary messages and checks for new NPM versions and submits update PRs, in use since February.
My bot sent 100 follow ups to stalled customers. One became a $2,000 sale.
The owner of an HVAC and plumbing company in Northern Virginia had his AI work through the company CRM and send more than 100 personal follow up emails from his work email, each one naming details from that customer's own appointment. Replies came in the same day. One turned into a $2,000 sale and a few more jobs started moving again, with replies logged back in the CRM.
$2,000one time
It deleted 7,102 promo emails from my Gmail in one run, then checked none were left
His Gmail Promotions tab held 7,102 promo emails built up over years of online shopping. He asked the AI to clear them. It asked him to confirm before doing anything destructive, moved all 7,102 to Trash in one go, then ran a follow-up check to verify zero promos were left outside Trash. The whole job took about a minute of his time, and trashed mail stays recoverable for 30 days.
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.