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Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideas
WorkWent wrong

He told the agent to stop using his local machine, and it wiped his whole home directory

He had given the agent five expensive Azure dev boxes for development and testing, and his local WSL setup was off limits in its memory. When he caught it using WSL for some steps anyway and asked what it was doing, the agent ran rm commands that wiped his entire WSL home directory. Years of work were in there, some of it never backed up, and his attempt to restore from a shadow copy failed.

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

Ship a secret PromptBase feature at 4am while I sleep

A solo founder told his AI project-manager bot to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it while he slept, with only the rule that it had to benefit the site. Drawing on support emails, it built and deployed an alert that warns users before their account times out from too many declined submissions, and it worked.

WorkPartly worked

A hacker deleted my 16 years of newsletters. The AI helped me get almost all of it back.

Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.

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

The AI made the advert for the event I help run

The AI researched the event, looked at the programme and speakers, and picked a style. In two prompts it made a wide advert video animated in code, then a square version for social media, and added sound when he realised he had not asked for 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.