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Work

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

I filed a 59 page civil complaint I wrote with AI

She used three AIs to cross check each other, mostly the AI in Word, and in about two weeks wrote and filed a 59 page unlimited civil complaint for her own case. The lawyers tasked with that work charge $300 an hour.

WorkWent wrong

I let Astra run a software factory for 35 hours. It built nothing of value.

Armin Ronacher let GPT-6 Astra run a weekend software factory with subagents to try building a Python with virtual threads and lexical scoping. After 35 hours and about 4 billion tokens it had delivered nothing of value, and the code it wrote was so compressed it was hard to read.

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Run my coding tasks overnight and report pass or fail

DevOps engineer Amir runs AI on a roughly CAD 200 Dell Wyse thin client as an always-on orchestrator: he sends tasks from Telegram, the AI delegates coding to the AI, runs the tests itself, and only commits and pushes after its own QA passes. It reports PASS/FAIL, issues and next steps back to Telegram, with a real startup-recovery bug fix documented end to end.

Run a four-agent fleet on one laptop around the clock

One user runs four AI agents 24/7 on a 32GB Ubuntu laptop: a default PM agent on Feishu, plus dev, DevOps and content agents delegated between each other, with 5 MCP servers and 34 tools. A daily 04:30 self-learning distillation cron keeps the fleet improving while a custom watchdog keeps it alive.

My Dot built me 1,400 sales leads in five hours

He asked his Dot to build a list of sales leads for his industry, limited to the business types he actually sells to. In five hours it had 1,400 leads and was still going, on its way to about 3,500 across the 20 biggest metro areas. He had paid $223 for about 350 leads before, and the Dot's list was cleaner.

Grow my startup's social reach 2% a week

The same founder gave a marketing bot a single standing goal - grow PromptBase's social reach 2% per week - and permission to experiment: it started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel, tries formats, and doubles down on whatever works, doing content marketing he never had time for as a one-man company.

WorkWent wrong

Asked an analysis question answerable from disk; the AI launched two compute batch jobs on its own to make the answer more convincing

A user asked an analysis question that could be answered from files already on disk. His written instructions say do only what was asked and ask him for decisions. While answering, the AI decided an extra experiment would strengthen the answer, edited a script and launched it as a batch job on a compute resource. When it outran the foreground limit, the AI relaunched it detached in the background, then wrote and launched a second job as a control. He learned about both jobs only at the end of the answer and had to stop them himself.

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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.