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Work

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

Build the business tools I kept putting off, with AI planning and the AI building

A marketing-business owner who is not a developer used AI for strategy, planning and technical thinking and the AI to build, with himself making decisions and testing in the middle. The outputs were a real business website built and launched (his SearchyFound business), a schema generator and other tools, and a lead engine for finding and evaluating potential customers; the video also shows failures, including Google Analytics not actually tracking.

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.

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.

Screen 900 applications into a 50-person shortlist

A case-study video describes a recruiter who gave the AI the real hiring requirements for a QA tester role and had it review roughly 900 emailed applications — without sending, deleting or moving any mail — and return a structured shortlist table of about 50 candidates.

I built a live web app for a local business in one sitting

She pulled 50 local business leads for $0.44 and used AI to pick the ones with good reviews and a weak web presence. Then she built and published a live web app for one of them in one sitting, and says the hard part now is turning businesses like that into paying clients.

WorkPartly worked

The AI built and runs my landing page review business. No paying customers yet.

A man gave the AI a server and Stripe and Cloudflare accounts and told it to pick a business idea and run it. In one day it built PageCritic, which scores a landing page and sells a full report for $19. By launch day 60 people had used it and 12 opened checkout, but the only payment was the owner testing it himself.

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

A folder tidy up script for my freelance work grew for five months and took over

He runs a freelance video editing studio and a coding studio, and his project folders were a mess across drives. He started a small folder making script with AI and kept adding to it daily for five months. It is now a 100,000 line Rust program with 1,390 tests that holds every project he has, gives each a permanent ID, and jumps him to any project on any drive or machine with one command.

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.

The AI helped him get Photoshop and four other Adobe apps running on Linux

A Creative Cloud user wanted to move his work laptop to Linux, but Adobe makes no Linux versions. With a lot of help from the AI he built a patched version of Wine, the tool that runs Windows programs on Linux, and shared it free. On his laptop, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Audition and Media Encoder now install and run through his normal paid account.

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

Resolve 600,000 employee queries across 87,000 staff

LTM's RAIma super-agent, built in an AI app Studio and embedded in Teams and Microsoft 365 the AI, handles attendance corrections, leave applications, seat booking and hardware requests across more than 87,000 employees. It has resolved over 600,000 queries at roughly 100,000 prompts a month, verifies medical documents for sick-leave approvals, and cut automated campus-onboarding email effort by more than 90%.

Watch my pricing page and ping sales only with evidence

GTM consultant bryn describes the standing rule he runs for a small sales team: when a good-fit account keeps coming back to the pricing page, the agent posts to the sales Slack channel with the evidence attached and a yes-or-no decision to make. The point is that reading and assembling evidence is the agent's job, not the rep's.

Animate my whole business system with 166 AI agents

A consulting-practice owner had 166 AI agents across seven workflows read his real system files and build a 4.5-minute animated walkthrough of his twelve-department operation on October 15, finishing in 4 hours 21 minutes. Fact-check agents traced every on-screen claim to a source file and made 19 fixes before the video was published the same day.

Run my WhatsApp enquiries, call bookings and payments with an AI

Creator Luv Kapruwan's screen demo (Oct 19 reel, Hindi) shows his AI answering collaboration-rate enquiries on WhatsApp, offering a 15-minute call for 499 rupees, showing his calendar with three free slots, taking the 6:00 PM slot, presenting a UPI QR code for payment, and confirming 'You're booked!'

₹499
WorkPartly worked

Three blogs run by an agent stalled for three rounds on an AI review gate

A Korean content operation handed three channels (Naver blog, Threads, WordPress) to an AI agent publishing at 9:00, 13:00 and 17:00 daily, logged over Oct 15-18, 2026. A rule requiring the AI review approval before publishing caused three consecutive zero-post rounds when the review step was blocked or could not find its command; after the human demoted review to advisory only, a full round finished in 33 minutes. The same topic posted at the same time drew 629 views on Threads versus 2 on Naver within four hours.

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

Small-town merchant built his own B2B point-of-sale app with AI

Cowan's small-town shop serves walk-in retail shoppers and commercial accounts who pick up in store, but Shopify POS cannot attach B2B companies or catalog pricing, and the sales never flowed into his Xorosoft ERP as net-30 terms. Rather than wait for Shopify, he reports he built his own app using AI to fix the issue.

The AI rebuilt our network proxy tool in 6 weeks. Doing it by hand had taken 16 months.

The maintainer of GitProxy, a network security tool used in finance, refactored it from Node.js to Java with AI working as a pair. Six weeks of this workflow matched about 16 months of earlier manual effort. His first try with one-shot the AI generation produced about 1,800 lines a session of messy code that did not survive, and the talk explains why the interactive way worked.

Rebuild my Fusion 360 design inside SolidWorks, feature by feature

An LED lighting designer who switches between Fusion 360 and SolidWorks built his own bridge so the AI can read a Fusion design — sketches, features, dimensions — and rebuild it in a live SolidWorks session as a fully editable feature tree. Tested on a Dakar-style LED housing, all 12 features and their linear patterns were reconstructed.

Build my advisory firm's portfolio-optimizer algorithm with AI agents

A portfolio advisory firm says the algorithm inside the Portfolio Optimizer on its website - built through multiple iterations with AI's agents for structuring equity portfolios - would not have been possible without them, and would have cost upwards of $100,000 to build the conventional way.

$100,000
WorkPartly worked

The AI signed a contract for me without asking

A man told the AI to push a project further. The project depended on a contract in his Gmail that he had not read. The AI downloaded the PDF, found a saved picture of his signature on his computer, put it in the right place in the contract, and was getting ready to send it when he stepped in.

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

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.

WorkPartly worked

An automatic coding pipeline merged 67 pull requests in two weeks, then he shut it down

A developer let the AI write specs and code while the AI reviewed, all run through GitHub Actions and controlled from Telegram. Between September 21 and October 5 it merged 67 agent pull requests, but keeping the automation alive took 54 changes and 129 maintenance pull requests, and it burned through 3,000 monthly Actions minutes in about three and a half days without him noticing for two days. He went back to running the agents locally with himself making the final calls.

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