The AI built my own time tracker in 10 minutes
Her old time tracking software will stop working after the next system update. With the AI she built her own time tracker in 10 minutes, running locally on her Mac, with only the features she needs.
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,669 ideasThe AI merged straight to main and my production app broke for every user
The author usually works in Cursor and let the AI create a pull request for the first time. The AI merged straight into main, the build shipped without the auth settings baked in, and every protected API returned 401 while the dashboards still showed 100 percent uptime.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
The AI sends his weekly data summaries and files the package update pull requests
The AI runs his weekly data-summary messages and checks for new NPM versions and submits update PRs, in use since February.
The AI built me a widget that counts down to my last class
To mark the start of the semester, he asked the AI to build a macOS widget. It counts down how many weeks are left until the last class, and how many of those weeks are real teaching weeks.
The AI built the online store for his tax and notary office and walked its IRS agent application through
A Spanish-language publisher and small-business owner reports weeks of running his businesses with AI, instructed in Spanish, often by voice dictation. For Yasmin Multiservice, his tax and notary office in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, they built the complete online store together: ten digital products (immigration guides and practice exams) with card and PayPal payments, then prepared an Etsy shop and WordPress maintenance packages. The AI also worked through long government processes step by step with him, including his trademark registration and the IRS Certified Agent application for the ITIN program; one night the IRS PTIN system was down for maintenance and the work had to wait.
A student built a job search engine for his laid off dad, and it got him hired
After his dad was cut in the federal layoffs at 54 and spent months scrolling job boards, his 19 year old son built a job search engine that runs through AI. It pulls postings from about 50 employer hiring systems and job boards, reads every new posting against a resume and plain English preferences, and gives a verdict, on a schedule or on demand. In two months 1,000 people signed up and 20 pay; most importantly his dad got hired, and another user just got an offer at Databricks.
A hacker deleted my 16 years of newsletters. The AI helped me get almost all of it back.
Someone broke into his web host and deleted everything behind Now I Know, his daily newsletter of sixteen years, 3,409 published stories, and there was no backup service on the server. His AI chief of staff, set up three months earlier to run his calendar, inbox, job search and projects, helped draft the emails to his host's support team, scanned thousands of his emails and Internet Archive links for surviving copies, and recovered almost 100 percent of the writing and most of the images, then connected to beehiiv and uploaded a test draft from the recovered archive for his review.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Check my board reports with a Tone of Voice agent
Hiscox's Chief Underwriting Officer for London Market built an AI Studio 'Tone of Voice' agent that checks documents for on-brand, consistent language. He used it to help prepare two board reports and estimates it saved him six or seven hours, and versions of the agent have since spread to other senior executives and their assistants.
Build client-facing divorce tools with AI instead of spreadsheets
Family-law trainer Stephen Smith built four working tools with AI, one conversation each: a settlement schedule that shows a client how much of an $8,000,000 award is actually spendable and when, a two-sided case chronology with exhibit links, a parenting-time calculator that counts overnights and percentages, and a case-path timeline clients get at the first meeting. The examples use training data, and he warns that the AI wrote the math, so every number must be checked before a client relies on it.
The AI built the focus app he now uses every day to get good work done
Got the AI to build a focus app for his Mac; he uses it daily and says he does more good work with it.
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.