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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,693 ideas
WorkPartly worked

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.

I automated our hiring, I just reply yes and it books the interview

Job applications from a Google Form land in his spreadsheet on their own and each one is emailed to him to review. If he replies yes, the applicant gets his scheduling link; once they book they get joining instructions and a reminder an hour before. He runs the business next to a full time job and two kids in diapers, so every message it sends for him counts.

Run back office for my nail salon and yogurt store

In a #metapartner showcase, entrepreneur Krystal Oh — who runs a nail salon and a yogurt store solo — shows on-screen chats with her AI 'Coco' handling back-office work: drafting a refund request for an empty box of masks, remembering meetings, sending notifications, helping manage expenses, onboarding employees and scheduling calendars. She says she previously spent thousands on human assistants who never understood her businesses.

Three AIs raced to catalog 999+ Shopify themes; only the AI finished

Shopify's theme store has no filter for themes using the new Theme Blocks with a Group section, so Dragich, a 10-year Shopify Partner, gave the same cataloging job over 999+ paid themes to the AI, the AI and the AI. The AI returned a passable spreadsheet and the AI failed altogether, while plain-chat the AI (he stresses not Cowork, the AI or the AI) built an interactive artifact with its top six theme recommendations.

WorkPartly worked

Hands-free session deleted the whole C: drive; backups saved 98% (partial)

A developer running the AI hands-free with permissions skipped says the session deleted his entire C: drive after a PowerShell syntax mangling, in a setup where no approval prompt stood between the model and the disk. Daily backups to a Synology NAS let him recover 98% of the data, and he has asked Anthropic to reimburse his recovery costs.

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