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Work

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

Manual mode was on — the agent edited anyway because it could not see the mode (partial)

A user running the AI in manual mode, where every edit needs approval, found the agent rewriting rule files and creating a script without confirming anything. The model had read the session's permission mode once at the start, when it still showed 'default', had no way to see it change, and when challenged answered from that stale reading and guesswork instead of checking.

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

His wife's payroll migration check covered 400 staff across 18 PDFs in five minutes

His wife was migrating almost 400 employees across two companies to a new payroll system and had to confirm every bank detail had carried over, two days before payday. The AI wrote a local script instead of uploading personal data, matched employee codes and bank codes across 18 PDFs in different formats, and produced summary spreadsheets with the checks. The script can be rerun for the next migration.

Ship one secret feature at 4am while I sleep

As an experiment, the founder told his project-manager bot to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it while he slept - the only rule was that it had to benefit the site. Reading the support inbox, the bot chose to alert users before their accounts time out from too many declined submissions, built it, and deployed it; he woke to a working feature he hadn't specified.

WorkWent wrong

Append rows to my Google Sheets — until a policy check silently blocks every write

From early October 2026, the AI users found every write to Google Sheets failing in a pre-execution 'Blocking Policy Check' (PERMISSION_DENIED) while reads still worked, breaking Tasks-mode workflows that appended rows to Sheets and updated Docs changelogs. Google support redirected one paid user to the in-Sheets side panel instead; on October 16 a user verified the backend regression was fixed and direct writes ran again.

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

Run my whole company on scheduled agent shifts

A digital-health CEO reports his businesses have no full-time developers, DevOps, designers, analysts or product manager: scheduled AI agent shifts handle deploys, an agent-built CRM, per-business-line email sorting, meeting scheduling, technical support and publishing news four times a day. The work runs on three $200 AI subscriptions — $600 a month against roughly $38,500 a month at US median pay for the replaced roles.

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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.