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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideas
WorkPartly worked

Dots ran my projects for a week and kept losing track of its own work

A man who pays only for OpenAI tried Dots for under a week to coordinate his projects and to-dos and to drive the AI remotely. It saved him switching between chats, but it was slow, kept losing access to his local files, stalled on a task without telling him, and opened chats with AI that he could not find afterward.

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

Agent ran cold spray simulations and chose next runs

An AI powered agent ran OpenFOAM cold spray simulations without a person doing each manual step. It read deposit results, spotted failed runs from solver logs, and decided the next simulation, with an animation made for each run.

I used AI to fix a data entry gap at work

A man with no coding experience used AI to generate a VBA script in Excel. The script fixed a manual data entry gap at his work and took the risk of typos and misreads out of the job.

WorkPartly worked

Ask the AI what in my 1,412 unread emails actually needs me

Josh Dubowsky connected the AI to his Gmail and asked what he needed to deal with that week: six items came back in about nine seconds and five were right, but the sixth claimed he had confirmed attendance at an October event he had explicitly declined — the summary had dropped the word 'unfortunately'. Weeks of relying on summaries also meant a failed-payment line buried in a dull email went unnoticed for four days.

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

An agent now makes the promo posts for our 70 radio shows a month

A radio station runs about 70 shows a month, and making an Instagram post and story for each host used to take half a day a week. Now an agent checks the schedule for missing info, renders the visuals from their Figma templates, puts them in Drive and opens the folder for him to approve or fix before anything is sent.

WorkPartly worked

Fill out my insurance broker's building document from my own files

Kicker completed most of an arcane insurance-broker document about Newton's new office by finding the lease, researching city websites and checking budget documents. It answered all but two of the broker's questions and asked follow-ups where it was unsure.

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

My agent rebuilt the business software I was paying $150 a month for and saves me $1,750 a year

Answering a how are you making money thread, he says a piece of business software he used does one thing and does it badly. With the AI’s help he built a piece of software that does the same thing better, with the features he always wanted. It took a lot of bug testing and had many errors at first, but it was done in two weeks. His version costs him $50 a year in server costs instead of $150 a month, saving about $1,750 a year.

$1,750a year

Our agent bought its owner an eSIM for Turkey, then got the money back

The owner asked ARGUS in Telegram to buy the cheapest eSIM for Turkey, approved with a yes, and got the QR code in the chat seconds later for 0.31 USDC. Thirty-four minutes later he asked for a refund because he had not installed it, approved again, and the 0.31 USDC came back after the seller checked the eSIM was unused.

$0.31
WorkWent wrong

Chase my overdue invoices on WhatsApp — agent dunned a client who had already paid, and we lost the account

Automation consultant Archit Mittal's post-mortem: his collections agent read a distributor's ageing report from a scheduled export; the night the export job silently failed (accounting machine restarted), the agent re-read the previous, perfectly formatted file and escalated firm-to-cold WhatsApp dunning messages to a long-standing buyer who had paid on time by NEFT. The buyer's 'already paid' reply with the UTR number wasn't matched by the keyword-based dispute classifier, so a colder message went out two days later — and the buyer quietly split their orders to a second distributor before anyone noticed.

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

Six AI bots run his desk: mail, expenses, calls and tasks

A Business Insider Japan writer set up six AI bots besides his main one and has run them for about a week. One checks his to-do list and pushes him to reschedule, one picks out mail that needs a reply and drafts it, one pulls expense items from mail into a spreadsheet, and one looks up missed call numbers in his mail and contacts and sums up who called.

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.

Take my morning dog-walk voice dump and act on all of it

On his morning dog walks, Mete Ünal calls his Dot for about ten minutes and brain-dumps everything on his mind. By the time he is home, the Dot has spun up separate threads for the items, filed an article idea into his notes, tracked landing-page feedback and started on his Japan visa process.

WorkWent wrong

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.

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.

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.

WorkPartly worked

I hand the AI my shop statements. It pulls the numbers and drafts the email to send back.

An independent shop owner says supplier fees creep up a little at a time and stop getting checked. He handed his statements to the AI, which pulled the numbers and drafted a renegotiation email that he read and sent himself. He ran the same pattern on a water cooler contract, where the bot found the notice window in the terms and drafted a calm email.

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

GPT-6 read my emails and built my personal knowledge base

He set GPT-6 to read tens of thousands of his emails, his writings and his calendar appointments from his recent career. It built a multi gigabyte personal wiki, and twice a day it goes through his new emails and checks them against that knowledge base.

Agents watch the money across his nine store apps, reading RevenueCat, Stripe, analytics and error logs

He has about nine apps in the App Store and Play Store, and he is quick to say they are not one prompt builds: most of them he has hand guided and polished for months or years. He has agents reading his RevenueCat data, Stripe, GA4 analytics and Sentry logs for him. Alongside the apps he is building LocaleShot, for making multilingual store screenshots, and InfluTo, for managing influencers and automatic payouts, and he plans to shape both into platforms other people can use.

Two one click scripts handle the encrypted Excel files that arrive by email and keep the CRM updated

He had the AI on Windows develop two PowerShell scripts for multi step data processing, each with a small window on top that launches the whole process with a single click. Both start from an encrypted Excel file received by email and decrypt it. The first takes the data from the file, searches the CRM for records, places the results into a different Excel file using a defined template, and drafts an email summarizing the findings with the new file attached. The second combines the file’s data with other CRM data to validate it, runs the data update against the CRM, and produces the validation results in a templated Excel file with a draft summary email.

WorkWent wrong

The AI set up its own hourly PR watch and ran it for 3.5 days, eating about 80 percent of his monthly model allowance

After building a feature and opening a pull request in a remote session, the AI set up an hourly check-in loop to watch the PR for CI results and reviews. Nobody asked for monitoring. Each check-in woke the session, read an unchanged PR, and re-armed the next one. The loop ran about 3.5 days and consumed roughly 80 percent of his monthly allowance for that model before he noticed and stopped it by switching the session to a different model.

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

My WhatsApp bot failed for days while its reports said success

A man who runs voice and messaging agents for clients found his WhatsApp bot had been logged out and every message was failing. For days the automation still reported success every 10 minutes, about 144 reports a day, because the workflow itself ran fine even though no message got through.

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

AI agents now do most of the work on my ten open source projects

He maintains about ten repositories in his spare time, including work on Bootstrap, and the issue trackers grow faster than his evenings. Since October 3, 2026 a conductor AI session paces background agents that read and draft under written rules, and he gets one question at a time. On Bootstrap every open item is analyzed and a fix prepared when needed, and nothing is posted without a maintainer.

AI crew built a whole audio tour business from one idea

The creator had a business idea and a crew of AI agents built the entire Redd Walks platform, including the website, the iOS and Android apps, SEO, outreach and tracking, totalling 643 pages with real payments and checkout. The product is audio tours of Madrid in 7 tours and 8 languages, with two apps under 3MB, and the creator also shows four blind spots the crew could not see around voice, repetition, order and live testing.

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

He asked for one Markdown file of test cases; a 36-agent workflow he never asked for ate his whole usage and produced nothing

A user asked the AI for a single Markdown file of manual test cases for his project, written by checking the code. Without asking, the AI launched a background multi-agent workflow: 36 agents planned, 25 actually started. It ran until his usage was gone, the agents failed, and the session ended. No verifier finished and no file was ever written to his project. The AI later admitted one pass would have done the job.

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

Make my $1,500 rent in 30 days — CEO agent spawned a swarm that burned all tokens in 10 minutes

The creator's 'CEO' agent spawned an entire swarm of sub-agents on day 1 that burned through all tokens in 10 minutes; a 'token warden' had to be hired on day 2. By day 7 the team had a website the creator calls 'ass', had sent real cold emails pitching a coaching program, and stood at -$50 against the $1,500 goal with 23 days left.

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

My agent built its own Linear connector in under a minute

When the tool he wanted was not on the AI’s connector list, he had the AI build the link itself. The AI took his Linear API key into secure storage, built a connector that can list teams, search and create issues and update their status, then checked it worked with an identity check. He says the same route works for any service with an API.

Jobsite QR codes let any worker ask the specs, and an agent audits submittals for the PMs

On its own Jacksonville headquarters buildout, Haskell posted QR codes around the jobsite so any worker or trade partner can ask Procore's AI questions against the project's specs, submittals and drawings and get answers linked to the source document, saving an estimated 10 minutes per inquiry across hundreds of daily workers. Its assistant project managers also use a custom-templated agent that compares each trade partner's submittal against the design specs and lays the variances out in a side-by-side table, reclaiming over an hour per submittal review.

1 hoursaved

An AI coworker handles his mom's wedding venue inquiries and cut the reply time to five minutes

His mom runs a wedding venue in southern Italy and got 15 to 20 inquiry emails a day, each taking 20 to 30 minutes, which was 70 to 80% of her week. The AI coworker he built now works the inquiries inside her 10 year old booking system, which has no API, and she approves only special quotes. After three weeks the typical inquiry is processed within 5 minutes and the system saves her over 120 hours a month for about $350 a month.

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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.