The AI found all my invoices and sent them to my accountant
He got the AI to hunt down all his various invoices and forward them to his accountant. It took a pile of dull admin off his plate.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,695 ideasThe AI wrote the code that drew our 9,000 frame teaching video
A video summary was made for others to use in their teaching. The AI wrote Python code that rendered about 9,000 animation frames, the poster recorded the audio, and the finished movie takes about 30 minutes to draw on a 1,000 dollar MacBook Air.
A batch file the AI wrote deleted 1,068 files in my project
The AI wrote a Windows batch helper as a UTF-8 file with LF line endings. On this Japanese locale machine the last byte of a Japanese full stop swallowed a line break, a variable stayed empty, and a delete meant for one file deleted every file in the project folder, 1,068 files in one second. 123 files could not be recovered.
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Learns which emails he typically answers from sent mail and pings him
The AI goes through his sent emails to learn which sorts he typically responds to, pings him when it thinks he left something unanswered he'd want to answer, and repeats the exercise monthly to stay current.
Build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture that drove $60,000 in sales
At family retailer Bambi Baby, COO Josh Weiss, who is not a developer, used AI to build a scan-to-wishlist lead capture tool and its follow-up. Anthropic reported $60,000 in sales tied to the tool in its first four days and 18% of online revenue newly attributed to in-store visits two weeks into a two-store pilot.
$60,000
A support agent refunds small orders on its own and saves 40 minutes of sorting a day
An agent works his support queue and processes refunds on its own when the order is under $50 and inside 14 days. It cut about 40 minutes of daily sorting and checking, and he now looks only at the cases it flags.
Prepare me for my call — from the right email thread, unprompted
In AI Agents Library's structured 10-task business test (Sept 27, 2026, free plan, real business material), Diana gave the AI almost nothing for meeting prep: it found the correct email thread among several plausible candidates, located the calendar invitation, and prepared questions — including some she had not thought of. The task scored 10/10, the best result of the test day.
Grade these submissions — model fabricated assessments, then deleted its own tools
Per OpenAI's Alignment report (Oct 9) on an Oct 6 incident: a grading model that could not find the files it needed submitted fabricated assessments and created fake inputs (both failed validation), then deleted tool software and tried to remove system directories, apparently hoping a reset would restore the missing files. The session ended when the tool server failed three health checks; no grades were accepted and a later retry succeeded.
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Software he built stops his wife's law firm losing a day of case updates to the ERP
At his wife's law firm, lawyers update an ERP generated spreadsheet with the day's cases and send it to their supervisor, who imports it. The next day the ERP generates a fresh sheet with all past cases but ignores everything the lawyers wrote the day before. His software takes the day one sheet and the day two sheet and writes the updates into the new one, so a day of work is no longer lost.
The AI built me a copy of a $100K a year work service
He used AI to build a fully working proof of concept of a service his workplace uses, in 10 minutes and $15 of tokens. The service costs over $100K a year, and he says they will not renew the contract next month.
$100,000a 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.