Shuffle again

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

Work

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

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.

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

Runs a scheduled 'Jalanlegal Threads Autopost' business task and loads 2,836 lead

Someone shared three the AI screenshots: a permission request to publish a scheduled Threads post for a cooperative-establishment services business (in Indonesian), a 'Filling spreadsheet' progress update (2,836 URLs loaded to a VPS across 13 categories, 0/3 bot test hits due to dead sites), and settings showing a Free plan at 22% weekly usage. It documents a real small-business automation pipeline with visible failure modes.

Run an $800k resale business with no CPA and the AI reading the ad data

The owner of a roughly $800k-a-year buy-and-resell business describes having almost none: no CPA, no accounting software - the entire P&L is done by hand in one January evening from bank and credit-card CSVs. The one analytic step is periodic: he pulls the ad campaign data, feeds it to the AI, and from its read decides which products to remove and where to increase or decrease spend.

Score my real-estate leads every morning and draft the follow-ups in my voice

A real-estate agent shows the follow-up system he runs on his own CRM: new leads are added to Follow Up Boss by pasting a text screenshot into AI, a lead-scoring skill grades each one A, B or C, and a daily 7 AM sweep of the CRM hands him his hot leads with personalized follow-up texts and emails already drafted in his voice. The video walks through the connector, the skill install and automating the daily drafts.

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.

He rebuilt his 70 year old mother's business website with AI and her revenue quadrupled

His mother has run a resume writing and career coaching business for almost 20 years, but bookings had been falling and her site sat on an old WordPress setup. He moved her to GitHub and Vercel, rebuilt the whole site with AI in a few hours, added online booking through Calendly, and moved the domain over. She now runs the site herself with AI's help, and her revenue has quadrupled in the last two months on better conversion and more bookings.

Audit my Etsy shop, launch a listing that sold 100+, and fix my ad spend

An Etsy seller ran AI with its Etsy plugin across her whole shop: it caught listing drift she had missed - a description still offering two options after she added a third, tags that no longer matched their listings from copy-pasting. It then built a new product listing, checked what competing sellers charged for the same item, and deliberately priced hers premium rather than lowest - over 100 sold in three weeks. The same workflow reallocated her ad spend (ROAS 3.5 to 6.5) and, from her uploaded Orders.csv plus shipping costs, showed her which products she was actually losing money on.

Make claude.ai three times faster in a two-week agent sprint

Reporting Anthropic's September 23 engineering post, this analysis describes the AI running a two-week performance sprint from a Slack channel: 150-plus threads, benchmarks built for each bottleneck, and more than 3,000 merged changes with no customer-facing incident. Time to a typeable page at the 75th percentile fell from 3.1 seconds to 0.55, with a human approving every pull request.

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.

Agents read their own session transcripts every Sunday and added 10 rules

Every Sunday the creator's AI agents read their own transcripts and tell him where it went wrong, and this week that covered 137 sessions and 635 messages from him, 27 of which were just 'done?' or 'update?'. The review produced 10 new rules, every one from a real mistake that week with the numbers attached, including taking the next step when it is known, putting a ceiling on every paid API, and looking for a free endpoint first.

13 bots filed 2,773 emails and processed 71 invoices in 11 days at my interiors company

An interiors company runs 13 the AI on 46 routines. In 11 days, from October 8 to 19, the bots filed 2,773 emails, deleted 892 junk ones, kept 59 active jobs on a bid board, routed 69 bid invitations, processed 71 invoices, checked and applied 75 timesheet edits, and wrote 10 forms, 10 templates and 27 standard procedures. She says every number comes from the bots' logs, and a daily summary reports what each bot handled.

The AI runs my wife's shop back office and replaced a $600 a month ads manager

For his wife's business, the AI reads hundreds of emails a day and prints her a short brief of what matters, files the rest, updates her website, runs her Square and her Google Ads, and prints a weekly report every Saturday night. It caught a licence expiry buried in the email, stays inside budget, and replaced a person who charged $600 a month to run the ads, with better results.

$600a month
WorkPartly worked

The AI produces his 9 AM AI news brief and a 90-second narrated video entirely on its cloud computer

A Chinese AI-tools blogger (Guizang, op7418) set the AI a scheduled task, live since Oct 9, 2026: every day at 9 AM it compiles yesterday's AI news from four sources (his new X bookmarks, found by diffing a daily bookmark-ID snapshot; a radar of his own posts ranked by likes + 2x comments + 2x saves, with substantive comments pulled in; his newsletters; AI news sites) into a 5 to 7 item brief under hard rules: every item links the original post, prices and benchmark numbers must be rechecked on official pages, rumors are labeled unverified, and an unreadable source is reported as 'not read', never merged with 'no update'. In the Oct 7 trial run (99 bookmarks filtered to 62 from that day, distilled to 7 storylines, about 6 minutes) the check caught a circulating price error: Nano Banana 2.1's 4K price was $0.113 on Google's pricing page, not the widely shared $0.076. The same pipeline produced a 90-second narrated video (TTS per sentence, React + GSAP scenes, Playwright frame capture, FFmpeg assembly, about 5 machine-minutes) entirely on the AI’s cloud VM; the video step is still a trial and not yet in the daily schedule. He published the full reusable prompt and his three open-source skills.

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

Prepare me for my call — from the right email thread, unprompted

In AI Agents Library's structured 10-task business test (Sept 27, 2026, free plan, real business material), Diana gave the AI almost nothing for meeting prep: it found the correct email thread among several plausible candidates, located the calendar invitation, and prepared questions — including some she had not thought of. The task scored 10/10, the best result of the test day.

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.