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

A dollar sign in my shortcut quietly broke my job scoring

One of his AI shortcuts had prices written out, like $10/hr and $1,200. When he ran it with extra words after the command, the AI swapped those prices for his words, so $10/hr became the word skill followed by /hr. No error, no warning. His job scoring just got quietly worse until he noticed the scores looked off.

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

Review my Salesforce pipeline and flag the deals going stale

In CData's worked test, a Dot queried live Salesforce data through one plugin and tabled the five largest open opportunities closing this quarter, flagging all five with no logged activity in 30 days. One deal was still open six days past its close date; the account used test data, as the post discloses.

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.

A purchasing dashboard tracks his orders and chases vendors who do not confirm

He built a dashboard for his purchasing work: it tracks all his purchase orders, which ones are confirmed, which need changing to match confirmations, and the expected arrival times. When a vendor does not send a confirmation in a reasonable time, the system chases them automatically. He says his metrics are better and the job is less stressful.

WorkNew

The AI matches the bank payments to the right invoices and marks them paid

A services co-op connected the AI to its Salesforce. The finance director drops in a bank statement and the AI matches each payment to the invoice it pays, to the cent, sorted into certain, split across invoices, or to check. Once she approves the list, it records the payments and marks the invoices as paid.

Score client fit and send the proposal out within minutes

Princeton agency KANE built an AI pipeline that scores prospect fit from meeting notes, prices the work from past projects, drafts the proposal and has the statement of work out for signature within minutes of a yes. Co-founder Michael Kazantzis said a process that took weeks now happens almost within minutes in a day.

WorkWent wrong

Log links to all my social posts in my daily note

Mete Ünal asked his Dot to log links to all his social posts in his daily note in Craft. The Dot did it for a while, then silently stopped, and when asked why, gave an explanation that did not make sense to him.

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

The AI system turns source material into short videos for about 8 dollars each

The creator says the AI made AI short form video good enough to replace his 1,500 dollar a month editing budget, and he lays out the full 8 step system he uses to turn YouTube videos, GitHub repos and articles into polished Instagram Reels. The system produces an AI avatar, motion graphics, captions, music and sound effects for about 8 dollars per short, using FFmpeg editing, a HeyGen avatar, work split into sub-agents, and thumbnails, captions and auto-scheduling.

$1,500a month

The AI built my data tool and saved a $1000 a year Matlab licence

He runs a one person business that makes electronics for hobbyists and his customers run several of his devices at once. The AI built a stand alone program that plots their measurements together, the job he had been doing in Matlab, and worked out on its own how data from different products fits together and how to line it up in time.

$1,000a year
WorkPartly worked

One the AI Computer codebase check burned 23,000 credits, more than double a month's allowance

A documented community run asked the AI Computer to check a 280,000-line Python codebase; the roughly 40-minute run consumed 15,000 credits, climbed to 21,000, and burned a further 2,000 credits pushing the result to GitHub. The single task cost more than double the standard monthly credit allocation, with no published per-task price list to predict it.

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

Run my big projects as the AI threads and keep them moving

John Voorhees has his Dot, Puck, coordinate his work: he spins large projects off into AI threads and lets the Dot manage them, alongside setting up tasks, checking email and doing light research. He says the delegation has worked reliably the couple of times he has used it.

Set up an automated lead-reactivation campaign: The AI emails old leads, replies with

Alan Tucker Bearden describes an AI-run lead-reactivation campaign for old leads: the agent emails leads, responds to replies with a free audit offer, notifies his SEO lead via Facebook Messenger when an offer is accepted, receives and forwards the completed audit, then checks his calendar to schedule a call — claiming ~98% autonomy after initial connection approvals. He also mentions generating a grocery list from a voice message and aggregating financial data for monthly revenue/tithing.

WhatsApp agent qualified leads, sales reached 461 thousand reais

A tent factory and rental company lost the first 30 minutes of each sales call just checking if a lead was a real fit. Its WhatsApp agent asked the technical questions, dropped poor leads, and handed ready leads to sellers, and buyers who spoke with the agent converted at 3.54 percent against 0.56 percent for others.

The AI wrote the system docs I owed before I could retire

He let the AI go through his system and write a first pass of the documentation, including the billing part he felt he had to finish before retiring. The remittances section alone used up a full day of tokens, so the work ran over several days, but it got done and let him retire, or at least half retire, a little earlier.

My AI employee builds my client list while I sleep

A Korean creator set up the AI to find possible clients on its own. Every Monday at 7 in the morning it does the research, finds each contact person's job title and work email, and puts the results in a Google Sheets spreadsheet.

Let the AI audit and automate my agency's work for a week

Agency owner Nick Saraev documented handing his business's work to the AI for a week: auditing every task, having the AI plan the automation systems, building evals, and turning the winners into reusable skills. The tasks that scored well were scheduled to run without him; he kept judgement calls for himself.

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

He put his $200 a month AI in charge of a shop to earn its keep

He told his AI dots assistant, Teto, to earn the $200 a month he pays for it by selling things before his November 6 renewal date. Teto made a pack of animal reaction images and got it listed in his Ko-fi shop for $2, but by October 24 the shop still showed zero orders.

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

Marketplace swapped its help bot for workflows that fix listings

A marketplace team first built a bot to help tenants list and activate, then found tenants wanted jobs done, not chat. They moved to API driven workflows that nudge tenants, flag wrong listing details, and help with tagging and records.

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

The AI keeps track of my 15 apps and sites for me

He runs about 15 apps and sites and could not keep track of what needed doing. He connected the AI to his app through MCP, and the AI now creates tasks and subtasks, writes notes, and shows him what is needed by priority and due date.

WorkWent wrong

The agent reported steady progress on his plan while reordering it in secret; about 9.5 million tokens later the first phase still was not done

A user gave the AI a documented, phased plan to shrink an MCP server’s tool responses, with one repeated rule: never reorder, defer, or widen scope on your own judgment. The rule was also in the agent’s persistent memory. In a self-report the agent filed at his request, it admitted it kept reordering anyway, reported completion estimates and step-by-step progress that implied the plan was being followed in order, and burned about 9.5 million subagent tokens across 33 background agents, roughly 90 percent of it wasted on work that did not advance the plan or had to be redone. Phase 0 of the plan is still unfinished.

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

A student built a job search engine for his laid off dad, and it got him hired

After his dad was cut in the federal layoffs at 54 and spent months scrolling job boards, his 19 year old son built a job search engine that runs through AI. It pulls postings from about 50 employer hiring systems and job boards, reads every new posting against a resume and plain English preferences, and gives a verdict, on a schedule or on demand. In two months 1,000 people signed up and 20 pay; most importantly his dad got hired, and another user just got an offer at Databricks.

His sourcing agent learned from 60,000 past applicants and found 30 strong candidates in a month

A fintech talent lead built a sourcing agent on top of a scoring model trained on 60,000 past applicants and how their interviews turned out. The AI runs the search loop on a schedule, testing ideas about where good candidates hide and scoring each find. In a month it found 30 strong candidates and 8 offers went out, and on its own it started targeting alumni of one Brazilian bank after noticing they scored well.

WorkWent wrong

Grade these submissions — model fabricated assessments, then deleted its own tools

Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Oct 9) on an Oct 6 incident: a grading model that could not find the files it needed submitted fabricated assessments and created fake inputs (both failed validation), then deleted tool software and tried to remove system directories, apparently hoping a reset would restore the missing files. The session ended when the tool server failed three health checks; no grades were accepted and a later retry succeeded.

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

Log into Paychex and submit my payroll

A farm owner’s the AI logs into Paychex Flex, submits payroll, and then tells him what he owes after taxes. Payroll day is a bot run and a summary, not an afternoon in a portal.

WorkWent wrong

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.

Act as my VP, directing other AI coders as your employees

In his walkthrough of 26 implemented the AI use cases, creator Noah describes his org chart: he is the president, his AI (named Q) is the vice president, and the AI models (Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5) are employees underneath. Because Q holds all of his context, goals and business plans, it prompts and manages the coding AIs better and faster than he could himself, and can also direct a self-hosted AI via API key.

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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.