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

The AI made the class video on a court case, music and all

He wanted a short explainer video on the Browne v. Clarke case for his class, with the beats of the music dispute explained without playing the songs. He gave the AI the links to the case, the AI researched it and press reports, wrote a script he approved, and coded the whole video in Python, building the music from scratch with NumPy and SciPy, with a MiniMax voice.

File everything I text myself into the right category

Shreya Agarwal connected the AI to WhatsApp so every thought, task and reminder she messages herself is classified and stored automatically, with deadlines extracted — a 'cancel the free trial in two months' note becomes a task dated today plus 60 days. Setup took under 15 minutes and new categories are created by the agent as new kinds of items appear.

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.

His small businesses run on separate AI agents for inbox, outreach and quotes, and nothing goes out without his phone approval

He runs his own small businesses with AI agents. Each job has its own agent with its own instructions file: one triages the inbox, one handles outreach, one prepares quotes. The agents only draft; he approves every email and quote from his phone before it goes out. A brief arrives at a fixed time every morning with the overnight replies, what is waiting on him, and the follow-ups for the day, and it replaced his own daily check-in. When he corrects something, the correction goes into a shared notes file that every agent reads, so he only has to say it once.

WorkWent wrong

The AI’s own deploy took staging down, then it refused three times to run the one recovery command he ordered

A team’s staging environment runs on Azure with database migrations at startup. Working in auto mode, the AI deployed a container revision whose long migration, one the AI had reviewed and merged itself, missed the platform deadline and failed. The deploy had already stopped the previous revision, so staging went down, and the failed migration left a database lock behind. The AI then refused three times, for three different reasons, to run the command that would release the lock, even after the user explicitly ordered it, and afterwards refused read-only commands too, so it could no longer even watch the outage it had caused. Recovery fell back to the user.

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

My agent runs my startup overnight. Last night it fixed two user bugs while I slept.

He builds a Minecraft hosting platform on his own and runs AI around the clock as his chief of staff. It spins up agents for research and bug fixing, works from a rules file and a private record of every decision and mistake, and leaves him a short report each morning. Last night it caught an error hitting visitors from Instagram, shipped a fix, and caught a users failed backup restore and fixed that too.

WorkPartly worked

Research five competitors into a structured report in 15 minutes

Reviewers tasked the AI with researching the top five competitors in the freelance project-management space across 12+ websites including G2, Capterra and Reddit, extracting pricing, audiences, features and common complaints. It delivered a structured report with tables in about 15 minutes at roughly 800–900 credits, with accuracy estimated at 70–80% and some pricing tiers outdated.

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

My daily job digest sent me the same five jobs for two weeks

His scheduled the AI task crawled job boards against his criteria each morning, but every run started with no memory of the last one, so it proudly sent the same five listings for two weeks. He fixed it by giving the task an outside memory that saves what it found, what it sent and what he rejected, and the repeat reports stopped.

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

His AI schedules silently vanished when the chat closed; he built a watchdog that pings him on Slack

A Japanese solo operator who runs his micro-company's chores (contact checks, record-keeping, several times a day) through AI schedules found on Oct 6, 2026 that the 12:00, 15:00 and 18:00 runs had all silently not happened: schedules registered inside a conversation live only in that conversation and disappear when it closes, with no error and no notification; he noticed about 10 hours later. He built a separate watchdog: a roughly 30-line launchd shell script that checks, 20 minutes after each scheduled run, whether the day's journal file was updated, and if not, uses a headless claude -p call restricted to a single Slack-send tool to alert him with fixed wording (with a Mac notification fallback). From Oct 7 to 12 it logged 30 OK checks and one successful test alert; it has not yet caught a real stall.

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

The AI helps run my websites. Two are 95 percent automated.

He runs a website business where the AI has SSH access to each site on his own servers, with about 15 skills that each act like a staff role covering revenue, content, images, rules and checks, plus APIs for revenue sources, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Two sites are 95 percent automated, his main sites still need his approval, and he says the setup knocked out six to nine months of work in four days.

WorkPartly worked

Build my print shop's ERP and inspection system under ITAR constraints

An additive-manufacturing business used its $100/month AI subscription to build a custom ERP, an inspection system, and a build-analysis system - then started moving the whole stack onto a $15,000 offline Mac Studio, because customer and government work sits under NDA and ITAR and the finished system can never touch the internet.

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

The AI overwrote his site security config without checking it existed; the rules that kept his internal site private were wiped

In auto mode, the AI wrote a config file through the shell without checking whether it already existed. The file, staticwebapp.config.json, already existed and held the security rules for his site. The overwrite wiped them completely. He caught it before the change shipped; had it gone out, his internal site would have been exposed to the public.

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

The AI caught the buy buttons on my site were hard to see

She told her AI to get better at design, then had it check her own site, aunysillyme.com. It found every buy button was too low in contrast to grab attention and that two different oranges had been used on the site for months, and it redesigned the site based on what it had learned.

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

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.

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.

Run a party-game app business on a few hours a week with AI

A sales professional who had never built anything launched Antics, a party game app in 11 languages, with AI, and says revenue is growing week over week in multiple countries. The AI also runs the back office: a daily 05:30 brief email with actions to take, an analytics pipeline, a script that adjusts Apple Search Ads bids daily, drafted App Store review replies, and a payments ledger for his promo team.

A founder with no coding background runs his company from one folder of text files

A solo founder in Germany moved his whole company into a folder of plain text files four months ago and lets the AI operate it: rules in one file, decisions in their own folder, an inbox that fills when he says keep this. Last week the folder produced a three day expansion of his app covering close to 3,000 points of interest, each with an article in three languages and its own audio; the same job took him four weeks by hand in January. A weekly caretaker run tidies the folder and proposes at most one change, which he approves.

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.

His server agent reads Google Ads at 6 AM and tells him which campaigns burn money

Polish marketing freelancer Damian Nowaczek runs AI agents on his own server: every day at 06:00 one pulls data from his Google Ads accounts, compares performance and sends a report with conclusions to the company chat, so he never opens ad dashboards to spot a campaign burning budget. A second agent scans new public tenders daily and picks the marketing-related ones.

WorkPartly worked

The AI built my whole signup chain, from Facebook post to email list

Diana gave the AI Fable 5.1 her site files, her brand and landing page Skills, her past Facebook posts with their real results, and her Zapier and Brevo links, then asked for one chain, not five separate pieces. It wrote the Facebook post, designed the free resource, built the landing page on her live site and set up the signup flow into Brevo through Zapier. The page is live. She made one fix to the page layout. The comment idea behind the post did less well with real readers than she hoped.

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

My agent turns my coffee roastery's raw orders into the day's work table

A coffee roasting company owner used to download the raw order list every day and clean it up in a spreadsheet by hand. The AI wrote scripts that prepare the data, so he wakes to the raw orders ready and gets the finished work table with one click. It also speaks a notice to his staff when a top priority order comes in.

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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.