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

My brother replaced a $1,500 machine program with one the AI built in an hour

A man bought a used piece of industrial machinery and the $1,500 control software did not come with it. With no coding experience at all, he asked the AI on the web to build a control app, and in under an hour he had a working app packaged as a .deb file for Linux. It cost him nothing because he used his brother's AI subscription.

$1,500
WorkPartly worked

One owner tried to run a whole business on agents. He logged 105 problems instead

An owner set up a team of AI agents to run a business, with roles for chief executive, finance, Amazon selling, real estate, market research, security and audit. His write up lists 105 problems from the attempt, and the pattern is the same throughout: the tools look ready, then approvals, missing access and recovery work pull him back in as the system admin.

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

Family-office staff each built a working AI agent for their own recurring job

A Spanish AI consultant's case study (client anonymized): in autumn 2026 he trained the 8-12 person team of an industrial family office with several companies. Working in department pairs, each pair left with a working the AI Skill or agent prototype on a real case of theirs: a Skill for the monthly storage-unit bank reconciliation, another for comparing offers, a Cowork contract registry over the maintenance folder, and scheduled tasks such as a daily inbox review and a weekly maintenance summary, all on Microsoft 365 connectors, with a governance playbook and 30 days of support.

HVAC tech's AI shops parts prices mid-call and banks every job for the next tech

Senior HVAC technician David Gharamany at Art of Comfort checks from a customer's home whether a part is at the shop, how fast he can get it, and which seller is cheapest, with the company's AI engine doing the shopping. Every service call's data is fed back into the system so the next technician facing a similar fault can pull up his fixes instead of phoning him, and the same system handles customer calls so the shop stops missing them.

WorkWent wrong

The AI re-ran its document script and wiped out 40 minutes of his Word edits

A session generated a Word document with a script. The user then edited the document in Word for about 40 minutes and saved. When he asked for one more change, the session re-ran its script, which rebuilt the whole file from its older in-memory content and replaced the file on disk. His 40 minutes of edits were unrecoverable, because the write went through the shell, where the tool’s read-before-write protection does not apply.

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