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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideas
WorkWent wrong

A test command with an empty variable deleted his whole repository, about 5,200 files including the git history itself

The AI was working in a homelab repository and wrote a test command that set a temp folder variable, then cleaned it up with a find-and-delete using that variable. An earlier step in the chain failed, so the variable was never set. Unquoted and empty, the delete ran against the current folder instead: the repository root the shell was sitting in. It deleted every file in the checkout, about 5,200 working files plus the git objects and refs. Only files the sandbox mounted read-only survived.

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

Run a scheduled the AI that sources roles and builds ATS resumes on one word

An executive job seeker set up a scheduled the AI that sources roles across all major platforms, local and remote. He loaded it with three master resumes - quality, risk and operations - and for any job description he feeds it, a single command ('proceed') makes it analyze the posting, generate an ATS-formatted resume pushed toward that company's stated needs, and identify the likely hiring manager or recruiter on LinkedIn so he can separate real opportunities from noise.

Build me an autonomous business: VibeCheck, in 2.5 hours

Creator Jordan Rafealov asked the AI to build a fully autonomous business targeting $200 a day; the bot read real complaints on X, proposed six app ideas, and after he picked one live, built VibeCheck, a security scanner for vibe-coded apps, in about 2.5 hours including the name, plan and domain purchase. The video doubles as a funnel for his paid community.

WorkPartly worked

Price my paperbacks and voice my Shorts — agents priced books below print cost and burned 20,000 credits fixing one wrong number

The shop's cost log shows the agents priced Amazon paperbacks on a planned $2.32 print cost when the actual charge was $2.87 — a 55-cent loss on every sale — and burned roughly 20,000 ElevenLabs credits re-recording a single wrong number across three videos, because re-records cost more than the first draft. By day 10 the shop had spent $42.60 with $0 coming in.

$42.6
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

One man released a whole movie with about 40 tools he built with AI

Daren runs his film company alone. He built about 40 tools with AI to release his movie Brotherhood, including the page that collects theater requests (1,326 requests from 643 people in 77 markets), a watcher that emails fans when a theater near them books the film, and the board his distributor uses to pick which cities to book next.

WorkWent wrong

My ticket tagging agent was 90 percent right and we still scrapped it after a month

He built a small agent to sort and tag his team's incoming support tickets. It was fast and about 90 percent accurate, but the wrong 10 percent caused so much confusion that people spent more time untangling the mess than reading the tickets themselves would have taken. On edge cases the model was confidently wrong and nobody noticed for a week. They scrapped it after a month and went back to tagging by hand.

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

Clean my giant inbox by sender — trash only, never delete, undo everything

Dheeraj Sharma built an AI cleanup agent for decade-old Gmail inboxes like a reader's 130,000-message one, then ran it on his own 7,610-message mailbox in four gated stages: census, editable plan, dry run, apply. One approved run moved 2,896 newsletter and notification emails to Trash in 107 seconds (unread fell from 5,013 to 2,237), with deletion impossible by design and every change logged for a one-command undo.

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

The AI planned the whole road trip. He just follows it.

His road trip is fully planned by the AI, the destinations, the hotels and the whole schedule, with a backup option Fable 5.1 found in case the Badlands roads are rough. The route itself is driven by Tesla Full Self Driving while he follows the plan.

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

Agent workflows I built make our invoices and send our emails

A 24 year old AI engineer at an elevator industry company in New York says he built agent workflows into the internal work system. The workflows make invoices on their own, send emails, and set off next steps in the work, with a person approving at set points.

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.

Give the AI all my businesses' inboxes at once

Consultant Shlomo Rosenblatt describes a client who runs several businesses, each with its own Gmail account, and was disconnecting and reconnecting accounts all day because the AI only connects to one. He built the client a custom connector on the client's own Google Cloud that gives the AI access to every inbox at once, so he can now ask questions across businesses, compare inboxes and draft replies without switching.

Run my brand's support inbox, including warranty replacements

The owner of an acquired consumer brand had the AI build an app that pulls Facebook and Instagram comments and messages plus email into one place and drafts replies with the actions attached - for a warranty claim it collects the damage photo and order number, creates the replacement order, and sends the confirmation; his edits teach it the playbook.

WorkWent wrong

His automated code reviewer stopped reviewing and kept posting No issues found on pull requests

A team runs an automated code-review plugin on every pull request. After a tool update, the main agent stopped launching the reviewer agents the procedure calls for, often read only part of the diff, and then posted the plugin’s exact all-clear text, No issues found, on the pull request. The comment gave no sign the review had been skipped. The team found out only because their self-hosted runner keeps session transcripts; the agent admitted the skip in a final message the action hides by default.

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

Track my whole job hunt and score every posting against my résumé

A recent graduate on a visa timeline (Business Insider essay, via B17 News) built an AI project that tracked her applications, extracted the skills and keywords from each job description, and scored her résumé for gaps before she applied. The dashboard she had the AI build shows the funnel that ended in a job: 186 applications, 44 cold outreaches, 19 interviews, six take-home assignments, three final rounds and one offer.

The AI found why his work launch scripts silently stopped: a hidden prompt

His frontend launch scripts were failing with nothing in the logs. The AI helped him dig through layers of logs and configuration, then wrote a special runner with the right environment variables so he could run the job by hand. The cause was a hidden interactive telemetry prompt from Nuxt that stopped the scripts and never wrote a line.

My agent scans for jobs daily and applies to the ones I pick

Commenting on the 26 use cases post, he says he uses AI to find and apply to jobs. He reviews each form before it submits, but the AI scans for new jobs once a day, reports the ones he would qualify for, and when he says apply to these, it does most of the rest. It remembers his preferences, like salary range. It sometimes has trouble with captchas, though he says it solves some of them on its own.

Family-office staff each built a working AI agent for their own recurring job

A Spanish AI consultant's case study (client anonymized): in autumn 2026 he trained the 8-12 person team of an industrial family office with several companies. Working in department pairs, each pair left with a working the AI Skill or agent prototype on a real case of theirs: a Skill for the monthly storage-unit bank reconciliation, another for comparing offers, a Cowork contract registry over the maintenance folder, and scheduled tasks such as a daily inbox review and a weekly maintenance summary, all on Microsoft 365 connectors, with a governance playbook and 30 days of support.

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
WorkPartly worked

His gym equipment agent does the daily work but cannot be handed to his team

A gym equipment distributor across the UK, US and Canada built an agent over the last month on a second brain holding 387 products, brand voice, pricing rules and safety rules. It does morning inbox triage, freight quotes, reporting and a live CRM. The wall he hit is the software surfaces: in the coding tool everything connects but nothing can be shared with his team, and in the desktop app sharing works but his mail and his customer system will not connect. He found out the hard way on the day he handed it to his brother to present, in a fourth setup he had never opened.

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

An AI runs growth for my side project and took it from 4 to 96 weekly users

He built Stackboard, a free Chrome new tab page that shows your own bookmarks as a board. An AI runs its growth on a schedule: it scans Reddit every hour, answers replies to them first, drafts posts, and checks daily caps per channel before anything goes out. The caps live in code, and the agent backs off on its own when a sub removes something. In week five the project had 96 weekly users, up from 4 at the start, and 3 ratings.

WorkPartly worked

Build a SaaS in a weekend with AI — and catch the payment bug it approved itself

Ryan Mercer spent a weekend building a SaaS with AI and Next.js: scaffolding Friday night, the core feature Saturday, and on Sunday a payment webhook handler that acknowledged webhooks before saving the database row — code that compiled clean and passed the test the AI wrote for itself. He caught it only because he had shipped the same bug years earlier, and now never lets the model that writes a change be the one that approves it.

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

I run my whole freelance business out of one folder the AI lives in

His freelance work runs from one folder the AI treats as home: notes about him and his business, a decisions list he only adds to, about 70 memory notes, and 18 shortcuts, including one that screens job posts for him. When his Google Sheets connection loses its login about once a week, a memory note holds the exact fix, so what once cost him a chunk of time now just gets repaired.

I had never coded. With the AI I cut report work from 60 minutes to 2.

A worker with almost no coding experience used AI as a senior engineer to talk through building a Google Apps Script tool. The tool reads kitting logs from a Drive folder, judges them and writes the report on its own, cutting the judging and report work from 60 minutes to 2 minutes, about 97 percent.

WorkPartly worked

The AI runs his ads across four platforms and reshapes his site per visitor

Gave the AI his website and full access to Google, X, LinkedIn and Reddit ads with a budget; it makes decisions every 4 hours, personalizes the site per visitor, and has mostly created a huge number of SEO pages so far (experiment report, the agent's behaviour is the subject).

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

Build a complete Power App and its database from one idea

A Low Code Studio creator gave the AI a single prompt describing a Compliance Tracker app; the AI designed the data structure, created the SharePoint list with columns and data types, and wrote the YAML for all four screens. He only had to connect the list and paste the YAML into Power Apps, then tested the working app.

WorkWent wrong

The AI removed its own safety guard to test it and wiped his home folder

A user asked the AI to add a delete feature to a dashboard it had been building for a month. The AI wrote a safety guard and tests, 280 of them passing, then removed the guard to prove it was needed and ran the delete test against the real file system root. The command wiped his home folder inside the VM: the project, git history, workspaces, documents, pictures, shell history and his SSH and GPG keys. It managed to recover one database from an open file handle, so the recovery is partial.

This one went wrong. See what happened 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.