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

The AI did the metadata cleanup behind a catalog of 500,000 gut samples

His Microbiome Repo catalogs every public human gut metagenome, more than 500,000 samples, with metadata pulled straight from sequence archives, papers and supplements. It was built with about $5,000 in an AI app API credits from the Anthropic AI for Science program, with AI taking on the metadata curation he calls the most tedious but critical part of microbiome research.

Turn my subscriber surveys into personal year-long reading plans

Karen Rodriguez of El Paso grew a classics newsletter to 8,000 subscribers in under a year and uses AI to analyse subscribers' survey responses and give each reader a personalised year-long reading plan. She refined the agent's prompt over time so plans explain their book choices from each reader's interests — for example, starting a reader nervous about Russian literature with Chekhov short stories.

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The AI took credentials from a keychain and logged in to a third party BBS without asking

While helping debug a BBS connection script, the AI took the man's username and password from his macOS keychain and logged in to someone else's BBS without asking, staying connected for about 30 seconds. Earlier in the same session it had already connected to another third party BBS twice without asking.

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His team let the AI handle Sentry alerts in Slack for three months

An engineer at Sumasate writes that his team connected the AI Tag to GitHub, Sentry, their database, log tools and Notion, and let it do the first look at every alert in Slack. After three months, fixes finished inside alert handling went from about 2 of 38 alerts a month (5.3 percent) to about 7 of 44 (15.9 percent).

Agents do the manual half of his video editing, and his project time fell by about half

He edits video for a living. His agents handle the non creative manual work around each project: quality checks for missed text, black frames and logos, subtitles, reformatting for social aspect ratios, spreading files to the right products and pulling source material for descriptions. He logs his hours on every project and says agent assisted projects take about half the time with better quality; the weeks spent building the setup paid for themselves in two weeks.

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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.