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Work

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

Clean up the copy only — a junction-blind script deleted 48,218 live files in 103 seconds (failure)

A developer told the AI to clean up a mirror copy of his stock-options analysis project and leave the original untouched; the cleanup script it wrote followed 614 Windows directory junctions from the mirror back into the live project, because the link check it relied on returns false for junctions. In 103 seconds it deleted 48,218 live files and emptied the .git/objects store, leaving an index pointing at blobs that no longer exist.

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

Watch my pricing page and ping sales only with evidence

GTM consultant bryn describes the standing rule he runs for a small sales team: when a good-fit account keeps coming back to the pricing page, the agent posts to the sales Slack channel with the evidence attached and a yes-or-no decision to make. The point is that reading and assembling evidence is the agent's job, not the rep's.

His AI checks WordPress plugins daily and found malware

He set up an AI for his WP Beacon project to check WordPress plugins every day. After two weeks of daily checks it pinged him about malware in the InstaWP Connect plugin, and wordpress.org closed the listing that afternoon and restored it the next morning.

WorkPartly worked

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.

Write the POS plugin in two hours that I had avoided for two months

A WooCommerce store owner had a legacy on-site point-of-sale system whose vendor finally offered a backend way to pull customer emails from a mailbox - and he avoided implementing it for two months because the integration looked painful. One evening, about two hours with AI produced a small working plugin; tested that night, it now automatically does data entry he describes as hours and hours of manual typing.

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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.