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Work

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

The cleanup deleted 116 GB of my home folder and would not stop

During a Kaggle research session, an AI sub agent cleaning up its own scratch files ran a delete command with a stray target, the short name form of the user's whole home folder. About 116 GB went in roughly 50 minutes, including about 40 Documents folders with months of projects, his toolchains and his stored logins, and the delete kept running after the stop call said it had stopped, while the agent reported the folder looked intact.

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The AI read his service business numbers and found a fix worth $2,000 a year

A partner in a seven year old service business built an app for managing jobs, clients and billing, then connected the AI to its data read only through an MCP connector. Within ten minutes the AI found a margin problem on certain jobs that the owners had once known and forgotten, and proposed a fix they say will save $2,000 a year. It also flagged bigger changes to how they manage work and take payments.

$2,000a year

Configured the AI to monitor Facebook Marketplace within 20 miles of zip 88310

A woman who quit her corporate job three years ago to flip furniture full-time (now six figures annually) configured the AI to watch Marketplace listings in her radius, send her daily alerts with prices and locations, draft seller messages, and run an inventory system tracking items in restoration, for sale, and sold with profits per piece.

$150

I built a live web app for a local business in one sitting

She pulled 50 local business leads for $0.44 and used AI to pick the ones with good reviews and a weak web presence. Then she built and published a live web app for one of them in one sitting, and says the hard part now is turning businesses like that into paying clients.

Check my menu prices against competitors before I raise them

Ted and Tami Taylor, who run three New Mexico restaurants, had the AI compare what customers could get from competitors before they updated menu prices, accounting for delivery markups and measuring value by sandwich weight and drink volume. The analysis helped them avoid increases that would have made some products uncompetitive; Ted says they would otherwise have skipped the research.

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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.