Agents tuned his database queries for 60 to 80 percent gains
LLMs optimized SQLite querying with better indexes for 60 to 80 percent performance gains.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,668 ideasHis energy company had AI build its internal tool instead of buying consultants and software
His energy company used AI to build and deploy a better internal tool instead of buying specialist software and consultants, about 4,000 euros of credits with a handful of people.
€4,000
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.
Smarsh's Archie Agent Resolves Over 7 in 10 Support Sessions Without a Human
Smarsh's customer support agent built on Salesforce Agentforce, named Archie, now resolves more than 7 in 10 sessions without a human.
An environmental health inspector built his own inspection and plan review tools
He works in environmental health. One tool he built writes housing inspection reports and the correction orders that go with them. Another reviews septic system plans by arguing against his own review. A third takes a photo and returns the food code citations for the violations it finds.
Migrate my 180-million-row production table with zero downtime
An engineer used AI to plan and write an expand/contract migration moving a 180M-row events table from int4 to bigint over 9 days: backfill peaked at 4.1 seconds of replica lag and the final swap locked for 1.4 seconds, with zero downtime. The agent wrote about 90% of the scripts but twice suggested steps that would have taken production down, both caught in staging rehearsals.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Salon owner's own front-desk agent lifts completed intake forms from 25% to 81%
At the Operably founder's own Aveda Lifestyle Salon in Carmel, Indiana, the live setup books guests by text against real availability with a card on file, sends intake forms automatically before a first visit, and gives staff a Teams/Slack assistant that answers policy questions from the salon's own 1,000-plus documents with cited sources. Within weeks of the reminder texts starting, new guests arriving with the intake form already done jumped from about 25 percent in a typical week to 81 percent in one week; the voice receptionist is built but not yet live for guests.
A bookkeeping file sorter over 40 companies logs every move with a hash
He runs AI against real client bookkeeping, sorting thousands of PDFs into folders for about 40 companies. Before any file moves, the system writes a log line with the current path, the destination, a sha256 hash of the contents and the path to put it back. Nothing is deleted; files go to a dated quarantine folder, and a file can only be cleared when its hash already exists elsewhere.
The AI filters our company faxes. Junk faxes no longer get through.
For four months, the AI has handled the faxes that come into his company. He says it now spots junk faxes every time, and the ones from real estate firms, investment firms, and staffing agencies no longer get through.
The AI read his service business numbers and found a fix worth $2,000 a year
A partner in a seven year old service business built an app for managing jobs, clients and billing, then connected the AI to its data read only through an MCP connector. Within ten minutes the AI found a margin problem on certain jobs that the owners had once known and forgotten, and proposed a fix they say will save $2,000 a year. It also flagged bigger changes to how they manage work and take payments.
$2,000a year
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.