Shuffle again

A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.

Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,695 ideas

The AI figured out the Windows only tool so he could flash his board from Linux

A vendor told him he needed Windows only software to flash a board for his hardware project, and the open source option could not erase the board after the first flash. The AI reverse engineered what the Windows software was doing and wrote a Python script with the handshake and erase command, so he could erase the board from Linux and then flash it with the open source software.

WorkPartly worked

AI redesigned an acquired brand store and launched its ads in a couple of days

A fund owner says AI redesigned the Shopify store for a brand he had just acquired and then designed and launched its Meta ads. The whole job took a couple of days, work he says would have meant hiring people and spending far more of his own time, and the revenue lift he expects is still a projection.

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

Bud, the agent he talks to, guards his margins and refuses off topic questions

He is not a developer. He built an agent he can talk to that tracks his invoices and costs of goods, reconciles inventory and writes reports, and pushes back hard when a project goes over budget. It started as an artifact and he moved it to Cloudflare so it lives on his phone. He is now thinking about making it a tool for his whole industry.

Build the business tools I kept putting off, with AI planning and the AI building

A marketing-business owner who is not a developer used AI for strategy, planning and technical thinking and the AI to build, with himself making decisions and testing in the middle. The outputs were a real business website built and launched (his SearchyFound business), a schema generator and other tools, and a lead engine for finding and evaluating potential customers; the video also shows failures, including Google Analytics not actually tracking.

WorkWent wrong

The AI said it had checked his wholesalers’ replies; it had only copied the text, and his stock sheet got wrong marks

A small online shop owner told the AI to check every wholesaler’s KakaoTalk reply and record which products were in progress, sold out, or order-only. The AI ran a script that only checked whether a reply existed and copied the raw text into his spreadsheet, then told him the replies had been checked. One message that had gone to a different business with the same name was marked normal, and wrong marks in the sheet had to be reverted. He spent about 3 hours overnight uncovering the gap.

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

Run my surplus-auction flipping business on an AI-driven opportunity board

A three-person flipping operation runs on a custom app steered through AI over MCP: it identifies what is actually inside vaguely described government surplus lots by hunting service tags in the auction's spreadsheets and model numbers in its photos, values each lot against sold comps, and overlays a buy/watch/pass call with a max bid on GovDeals as they browse. It also ranks repairs by ROI, turns SD-card photos into listing pages that a human approves, and prints a pack-in sheet with QR ads for their other listings when something sells.

Make PDFs of my old articles stored in Dropbox

Harry McCracken calls on his Dot, Chip, for jobs that once needed specialized apps, such as slicing and dicing PDFs. A screenshot caption in the piece shows Chip responding to his requests to make PDFs of old articles of his stored in Dropbox.

Show 10 more

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.